Systemic Heartbreak in From Here to Eternity

                     For a program that’s had less and less viewership with every passing year, we still put a lot of stock into the annual Academy Awards Ceremony and its designation of Best Picture of the Year. The exact criteria for this award change throughout time, but the constant has always been an incentive to honor whatever film captures the cultural subconscious for any given year. For the voters from last month’s ceremony, the listless tourism of Chloe Zhang’s Nomadland apparently really hit home for a world that had been in lockdown for a year.

    So what was the Academy thinking in 1954 when they selected the movie that killed Frank Sinatra?

Released in 1953 and directed by Fred Zinneman, From Here to Eternity is a romantic melodrama set against the backdrop of impending war. Based on the book by James Jones, the film follows the inner lives of soldiers and civilians in Hawaii 1941 as they search for love and meaning in a world devoid of either, all with the world-shattering attack on Pearl Harbor looming just out of sight.

            Critic Michael J. Haiberstam proclaimed “The movie so quickly captures the viewer that his reactions are purely sensory,” with William Brogden deeming it, “. . . in many instances a much better motion picture than the novel was a book.” The film took home the 1954 Best Picture Oscar and seven other trophies including awards for supporting actors Frank Sinatra and Donna Reed.

The film’s final scene has our two female leads returning to the mainland on a boat and taking one last look at the island, an island where they found love and paradise, as it fades into the distance knowing full well that they are never coming back. The image of these two characters capturing one final glance at paradise disappearing as war pulls them away certainly captured how America felt as the impending war drew their own islands out of sight. Writer David Thomson said it best when, using Donna Reed’s character as a microcosm, he described the film as “. . . a wreck and a true portrait from life as well as the film’s best forecast of what was going to happen to honor and decency in America when this necessary war was over.”

From Here to Eternity is tragic in ways I appreciate only after multiple viewings over the span of many years. Neither of the main couples last, two principal characters die, and the film ends with the country marching straight into the maw of the most devastating war in history. It’s hard to reconcile the majesty of the film’s craft with the denseness of its subject material.

    But graciously, the film doesn’t really ask you to. The film works so well because it understands that love and frustration sit next to each other. Turns out that the intersection between love and frustration is rich ground for enlightenment and that you can love a thing that brings you pain.

If You Haven't Seen the Movie

From Here to Eternity follows the lives of individuals stranded in the paradise of Waikiki, Hawaii in the weeks leading up to Pearl Harbor. Two parallel and intermingling stories emerge.

         The first follows Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt, a soldier who transfers to Schofield Barracks at the start of the story under the jurisdiction of Captain Dana Holmes. Holmes is a man of ambition and expects Prewitt to enlist in the station’s intercompany boxing tournament hoping it will boost his chances of earning a promotion. But despite his boxing prowess, Prewitt has given up the sport after accidentally blinding an opponent. Undeterred, Holmes tries to coerce Prewitt into participating through ritual and relentless torment. 

During this time, Prewitt is caught in a love affair with “Lorene,” an entertainer at a private social club (a literal prostitute in the novel). Though they find genuine companionship with one another, Lorene insists they could never have a future together because she could never marry a soldier.

         The second plotline follows Lieutenant Milton Warden, Holmes’ second in command who begins an affair with Holmes’ neglected wife, Karen. They both enter the affair for a casual dalliance but soon find themselves revealing something much deeper than simple sex. They imagine a future together where Karen can leave Dana for him, but this can’t happen unless Warden applies to become an officer, and Warden’s seen what too much authority can do to a man in the army.

As Holmes’ campaign to beat Prewitt into submission reaches a boiling point, Prewitt’s friend, a private named “Maggio,” is interned in the stockade under the jurisdiction of the sadistic “Fatso Judson,” where Maggio endures brutal torment for his noncompliance. While escaping the stockade, Maggio is fatally wounded and dies in Prewitt’s arms. Prewitt takes his vengeance out on Judson and stabs him to death in an alleyway before hiding out with Lorene.

It is after Prewitt goes AWOL that the fateful attack on Pearl Harbor hits Schofield Barracks. Warden rises to the occasion and manages to defend the base against the attack. Meanwhile, the bombing reinvigorates Prewitt with a renewed sense of devotion for his country, and he insists he return to his company, despite Lorene begging him not to go back to the army that has brought him nothing but agony. On his way back to the barracks, the men of his company mistake him for an enemy soldier and shoot Prewitt on sight. Warden identifies his body, reporting him as a hardhead, but a good soldier. “He loved the army more than any soldier I ever knew.”

    Combing through the plot, it's easy to see why it would appeal to a filmmaker hungry for some awards. The book is high melodrama set against the backdrop of an impending war. There are lovers and martyrs, and it all ends in tears. There’s a recurring motif within the story where the characters are imprisoned as much by their own pride as they are by rules and regiment. Any of these couples would be happy together if they weren’t so hung up over status or pride. Warden won’t become an officer despite being a perfect fit for the job, and Lorene would never deign to marry someone as lowly as a soldier despite her own station. They’re frustrated in their loneliness, but even as they taste love and freedom, their inhibitions keep them chained. The characters are united in their solitude, like a chain of islands drifting in the middle of the Pacific.

                Then there's Prewitt. In an institution designed to train men for war and killing, he abstains from recreational violence. And unlike the majority of the soldier boys just in it for the perks, Prewitt believes in the mission of the army. But this army returns by humiliating, abusing, and eventually killing him. Prewitt always wanted to give his life to the army, and in the most twisted brand of irony, he gets his wish in the end. And yet, he more than any other character seems to have his act together. As he lays dying, there's a hint of a smile on his face, like the peace that comes with knowing that his actions are finally aligned with his beliefs, and that makes everything else okay.

    The mystery of Prewitt provides a revealing glimpse into the psyche of an author whose own feelings for the army were not easily defined.

James Jones, The Military, The Book

    James Jones enlisted in the army in 1939, and he was first stationed in Hawaii. where he would witness firsthand the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. His time in the army would influence his writing with all three of his novels highlighting the grueling realities of soldier life within the military. The first of these was From Here to Eternity, published in 1951.

There’s a lot of transgressive behavior within the book. Soldiers in this book talk the way soldiers actually talk. Both of the film’s romantic arcs hit cultural nerves with prostitution on one side of the coin and an extra-marital affair on the other. Several enlisted men, including Maggio, earn extra cash by performing oral sex on wealthy landlords on the island. (This was during a time when homosexuality resulted in discharge from the army.) But the movie’s biggest punch was how ruthlessly it portrayed the armed forces.

    From Here to Eternity was especially notable for offsetting the image of the American soldier romanticized from recruitment ads during the war. The soldiers in From Here to Eternity aren’t apostles of valor or sacrifice. Most of them don’t join up because they care about defending their country. Rather, they join up because they don’t feel like their lives are worth anything anyway, so they might as well throw themselves into the gunfire. In his book "WWII: A Chronicle of Soldiering" Jones revealed, “I think that when all the nationalistic or ideological and patriotic slogans are put aside, all the straining to convince a soldier that he is dying for something, it is the individual soldier's final full acceptance of the fact that his name is already written down in the rolls of the already dead.”

Moreover, the main plotline revolves around the infrastructure of the army using intimidation and force to try coercing a good and noble soldier into compliance. This conflict extends into the company’s violent and cruel punishments as seen in the stockade where disobedient soldiers are interned.

That the centerpiece of this conflict is a boxing tournament only highlights how petty the campaign is. Captain Holmes tries to break Prewitt not in the service of his country but so that he can earn an easy promotion and flex his power and authority. This also shows the other end of the stick—the soldiers that don’t enlist out of apathy enlist in pursuit of power.

James Jones

    Though his writing was critical of the institution, it doesn’t quite add up to assume that Jones hated the army. Jones apparently cared enough for the military to put in an honest effort—he was awarded both the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star during his service. It would seem there are things about the army that he hated, but he couldn't help but respect it just the same, and the result is a complex examination of a complex institution. This is one of the reasons why the film is infinitely more satisfying than a film like American Beauty which holds nothing but disdain for the institution it’s critiquing. But for more on that, see my rant on that movie.

The object of Jones’ hate wasn’t so much the army itself, but rather war. The New York Times’ obituary for James Jones detailed,

                    “[Jones] maintained that any accurate account of war had to show ‘the regimentation of souls, the systemized reduction of men to animal level, the horrors of pointless death, the exhaustion of living in constant fear.’

“Moreover, he said that a true antiwar work revealed that ‘modern war destroys human character.’ Mr. Jones said that the dehumanizing institutions of war symbolized the corrupting tendency of contemporary institutions.”

         Enlightening though it is, the book is anything but a breezy read. At nearly 900 pages, there’s a lot of stuffing between the book’s narrative turn-points. The good news is that means very few plotlines needed to be dropped when adapting the book into film, fewer I’d say than your standard Harry Potter book. The book has some extra background for Prewitt, some third-tier characters whose contributions are easily truncated or dropped, Prewitt does a stint in the stockade, but otherwise the story itself makes the jump to film with impressive retention. Some of the dialogue even translates word-for-word.

         The biggest obstacle this movie faced in adaptation was not the length of the book on which it was based. Not by a longshot.

An Unadaptable Book

         It’s hard to appreciate from this end just how boldly this film rebelled simply by virtue of existing when it did. The book was volatile not only for its content (explicit language, transgressive sexuality, etc.) but for the ruthlessness with which it examines the military. In order to grace the silver screen, any adaptation would have to face two main obstacles.

         Barrier one, the Hays Code.

    For the first fifty or sixty years of film, there was a lot of anxiety over the media’s influence over the masses. “What should happen if my impressionable 8-year-old should see ‘Scarface’ shooting policemen on screen? Might my impressionable 8-year-old also start shooting policemen because he saw it in the movies?” As a precaution, The Hays Code was instituted to govern what could and couldn’t be displayed within film. Among the prohibited content were onscreen nudity, harsh violence, and profanity. Good and evil had to be clearly labeled as such within the text, and the bad guy always had to receive his comeuppance--if Scarface is going to shoot up the cops, the cops have to gun him down in the end. (And yeah, it’s kind of fun to roast the 1950s for being so paranoid about media poisoning children, but also ask yourself how the internet handles something like the dating life of an animated Princess.)

    Films adapted from other mediums were often faced with extra hurdles when it came to making their stories suitable for the requirements of film, even if making the necessary changes left scars on the adapted text. In Alfred Hitchcock's adaptation of Rebecca, for example, the death of the title character had to be recast as an accident so that the main characters wouldn't be complicit in a murder that they would get away with. Elia Kazan's adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire outright changed the stage play's ending so that Stella leaves her abusive husband. When producer Buddy Adler approached the head of Columbia Pictures asking to adapt From Here to Eternity into a movie, there was naturally some concern because the book had wall-to-wall taboo content. Jones’ novel features f-words and other expletives as well as overt references to prostitution. Meanwhile, films still weren’t allowed to say the word “pregnant” onscreen.

         Barrier two, the military itself.

         The United States military recognized early on that film can be a powerful recruitment tool, and it did not pass up on an opportunity to reward films that made military service look like the noblest profession an able-bodied young man could pursue. Films that the military likes can be made in cooperation with the armed forces. Not only does the military subsidize the film’s budget, but it can also lend its resources to the production of the film itself. (This is a relationship that persists to this day, and which films get a bonus can vary even within even individual franchises. From the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Captain Marvel got the thumbs-up while The Avengers did not.) For this movie, that meant letting the crew film on Schofield Barracks where the book is set and allowing them to use actual footage of the Pearl Harbor bombings. Attaining this support was essential for director Fred Zinneman, who desperately wanted to film on Schofield Barracks. Without it, the film “would have been a caricature.” 

                    To recap, the filmmakers wanted to adapt a book with explicit adultery, prostitution, profanity, and systemic brutality without offending the censors, all to make an exposé of military corruption that the military itself would feel comfortable sponsoring.

How did they do it?

Compromises

         The first draft of the script heavily reworked the novel’s plot in order to not step on the toes of the army or the Hays Code. Prewitt was killed not by the incompetent soldiers of his own company but by enemy Japanese soldiers, and Karen was made into Holmes’ sister as opposed to his wife to sidestep the extra-marital affair.

    And you might be wondering, what Hollywood scavenger would change the writing on such a foundational level? What executive vulture had so little respect for Jones that he would neuter his book just to appease the men in suits? 

Actually, it was none other than James Jones himself.

         Jones saw the opportunity for a film adaptation as a chance to boost his street cred, and so he resolved to get the book converted to screen at any cost. He really didn’t care how much of his book was changed so long as everyone knew it was based on his book. Quoth Jones, “I don’t give a damn what they do to the movie; the book will stand by itself long after the movie is forgotten.”

         The push to make the film as edgy as possible actually came from the film’s creative team who were really excited about the prospect of creating something so cutting-edge and raw. So they fired Jones from adapting his own book and hired screenwriter Daniel Taradash to make something boundary-pushing. They would get their wish, for the most part, but not before making some adjustments.

        The most foundational change was Lorene’s change in career. In the book, she is unquestionably a prostitute working in a whorehouse, but Hays Code Lorene is merely a hostess at a private social club for gentlemen. Similarly, the movie altered the story behind Karen’s hysterectomy. In the book she receives gonorrhea from her husband through one of his many affairs. In the film she receives the procedure after complications from a miscarriage, skipping the talk about STDs altogether. The only thorny elements to be dropped altogether were the locker-room language and the homosexual content, neither of which film was ready to tackle at the time.

Exposing corruption within the army would be a trickier game. The army’s targeted hazing imposed on Prewitt is the film’s main source of conflict and can’t exactly be excised. But there are tricks you can use to display abusive behavior within a system without making the system itself look abusive. 

The easiest of these is the “bad-apple” model—the argument that an otherwise wholesome establishment can be spoiled if rotten individuals sneak into the batch. But never fear, chuck out the bad ones, and suddenly the establishment is good again. In the book Captain Holmes is actually promoted, his brutality left unchecked, but the military insisted that Holmes’ actions look like an abnormality that of course the army would not stand for! So a scene was added, at Zinneman’s behest, where Captain Holmes is not only fired from his position but also strictly reprimanded for his behavior by his army superiors--the good guys. “The first thing I learned in the army was that an officer takes care of his men,” they chastise righteously. “It seems to be the first thing you forgot.”

      The movie also turns down the flames by diffusing the responsibility of the abuse. In the film, Maggio dies after he falls out the back of the truck on which he escapes from the stockade. The brutality he endured under Fatso isn’t ultimately the thing that kills him. In the book it’s another one of Prewitt’s friends who dies from the stockade while Maggio exits offscreen, but this character’s death is exclusively on the shoulders of the ruthless treatment he endures under the stockade. While Maggio in the film endures relentless cruelty from the army (offscreen) for his nonconformity, his death is chopped up to an unfortunate accident that can’t technically be blamed on military practices. It then becomes the fault of Holmes or Fatso, not the institution of the army enabling them, that people like Prewitt are abused. The occasional pruning of bad apples renders structural reform unnecessary.

   To be clear, the army isn’t entirely unique in that regard. Film generally cops to this logic with whatever machine it is critiquing. The 2019 Judy Garland biopic does a very similar thing where it blames Judy’s mistreatment on the specific managers who told her she was fat as opposed to a marketing strategy that commodifies a person’s existence for public consumption. But for more on that, see my entire essay on Judy Garland. Hollywood, itself a system, isn’t as interested in boat-rocking as it would have you believe.

         Yet for all this film did to tame the original novel, the finished product was still a boundary-pushing film.

         The movie’s most famous scene has Karen and Warden lying on the beach in each other’s embrace as the waves crash over their half-naked bodies in bursts of natural, elemental passion. Reportedly it was Burt Lancaster’s idea in the moment to have them kiss lying on the beach as the waves washed over them, adding a sexual charge to the scene that would make the censors blush. And because the code didn't explicitly say this was against the rules, they couldn't veto it. Remember also that this scene shows a 1940s housewife willfully rebelling against her loveless marriage. Though this scene would not even register on today’s scale, posters for the initial theatrical release thought the moment was too scandalous to be advertised. History would select this moment as the film’s most iconic scene, and it features on basically every poster for the movie in the years since.

         The army put pressure on the filmmakers to soften the deaths and grievances of both Prewitt and Maggio by making the characters seem incompetent and even whiney. If it was clear that Prewitt and Maggio were only so critical of the army because they knew they just couldn’t keep up with the real soldiers, then the army might come out of this looking like the ideal. The army did not get their wish; Prewitt and Maggio are the most sympathetic characters in the film. And even if the film is a little coy on the subject, the audience still remembers how the characters who best exemplify the army’s virtues are killed by this very army.

According to “Guts and Glory: The Making of the American Military Image on Film,”

“After looking at a rough cut of From Here to Eternity, however, the Pentagon only made one objection to the movie. It wanted the studio to trim the scene in which Sergeant Warden appears acting excessively drunk, staggering around, and stumbling off a porch. In discussing the scene with Buddy Adler, the Pentagon pointed out that Warden had been presented as an outstanding representative of the Army up to that point and that emphasizing his drunkenness would shock audiences. Nevertheless, the Army did not put its request very strongly (‘as much as possible should be trimmed,’) and Columbia left the scene as shot since Warden’s drunken condition became a dramatic necessity to subsequent events.” 

Taradash and Addler would remember many instances in which the army pushed them to cut more, critique nicer, make the army seem somehow less complicit in the atrocities on screen. In such conversations, they recalled doing a lot of smiling and nodding, “but we never intended to do it.”

         From Here to Today

         Cinematic depictions of the military in years after varied. On the one end of the spectrum is Apocalypse Now with Saving Private Ryan on the other. The former turns the military hierarchy into a petri dish for megalomania, while the latter honors soldiers as godsends. Systematic critique in general remains a balancing act for Hollywood, who always wants to offend as few ticket-buyers as possible, but From Here to Eternity emboldened filmmakers to use the medium to generate discussion.

         The surgical circumventing of The Hays Code in this film represents some of the earliest efforts to dismantle the code altogether. The 1950s and 60s continued to push back against the code with boundary-pushing films such as Some Like it Hot and Psycho, and by the end of the 1960s the code started to dissipate entirely. 

         In the wake of the Hays Code’s reign, we saw a few more attempts to revisit Jones’ text with a little more veracity.

    The book was adapted into a TV Miniseries in 1979, two years after the death of James Jones. This adaptation is most notable for casting Hollywood star Natalie Wood in the role of Karen. The miniseries displayed more of the corruption within the army than the film was willing to. (I swear at least half of the expanded runtime is spent just on Prewitt’s stint in the stockade.) Just so, the series still shifts some of the responsibility from the military. The series still has Maggio die after falling off the back of a truck as opposed to simply from the injuries he incurred from the stockade.

         The book was also adapted into a stage musical in 2013 with the music supplied by musical extraordinaire, Tim Rice. The show received mixed reviews and faded into obscurity after its short run of seven months. I find this unfortunate because, while I’d concede the show never quite reached its potential, there is a lot to love with it including some story flourishes that accent some of the characters’ arcs. This is the only version, for example, where we see Captain Holmes confront his right-hand man for sleeping with his wife. All around, I do wish it at least registered on the scale of Mean Girls: The Musical.

         Unlike the film, the musical actually says the word “whore,” among many other words, and even features some of the omitted homosexual content, including the soldier who commits suicide after suspecting he might be queer. The show also makes it clear that Maggio’s death was exclusively the result of his treatment within the stockade. This adaptation has had the most freedom to present the army in all its brutality, likely the way Jones would have intended it. 

Even so, this is also somehow the iteration that shows the most reverence toward the army. The musical overlays the bombing scene with a lament titled “The Boys of ‘41.” The song, which also features during the show’s opening and closing numbers, marks the moment when a bunch of listless army boys are suddenly forced to become heroes. For how candidly it displays the systemic abuse within the army, the show ends on an oddly reverential note. Again, we return to this odd dynamic where our respect for the army rises with our awareness of its shortcomings.

         The army’s own reception toward the movie was reportedly mixed. Despite sponsoring the movie and greenlighting the script, they apparently still found its portrait of the army too eviscerating once they actually saw it onscreen. Meanwhile, Addler and Taradash are laughing from beyond the grave.

Schofield Barracks

        A 1978 retrospective for the New York Times had the Jones estate examining the movie’s legacy within Schofield Barracks nearly 30 years after the book and the film. Maj. Gen. Herbert E. Wolff, the commander of the Army Support Command, commented that, “It's simply no longer applicable to present the Army as an institution of unnecessary harshness, where there's disrespect for human dignity, where there's a double standard in how people lived and morals and rights and privileges. It may have been pertinent at the time. I don't know. It's not the case now.”

         “No longer applicable” seems a generous pronouncement given that the army’s rape statistics are what they are. Over 20,000 service members were sexually assaulted or raped in 2018 alone, with the army's history of handling such matters extending much further back. Did the movie push the army too hard?

"Nobody Ever Lies About Being Lonely"

Like Prewitt, each of us are certainly part of a system that we love that has somehow hurt us. Maybe, like Prewitt, that system played an immeasurable role in your development. Maybe trying to instigate meaningful change feels like replaying a movie that, even seventy years later, still ends the same way no matter how badly you want things to work out for our characters. And it begs the question of why we keep returning to these stories, or why we continue to endorse the endless cycles of frustration through our participation in them.

The first several times I watched the movie, I couldn't really describe why I responded to it so deeply. But after finally reading Jones’ novel, I was able to better articulate my feelings.

There’s a passage in the book that isn’t exactly verbatim translated into the film, but it very much describes why we even bother watching (and rewatching) not only this movie but any movie that ends with a gut punch, or why a bunch of film executives would even bother jumping through all these hoops just to get this story onto the big screen.

It comes at the closing end of Prewitt and Warden’s little heart-to-heart where they both share their mutual frustrations with love and the military. The book describes two drunks who “both fatuously drunkenly imagined that once in a dream, sometime, somewhere, someplace, they had managed for a moment to touch a human soul and understand it.” 

    There’s an odd parallel between the characters and the systems in which they are trapped. The army that James Jones wrote about was broken, and may well still be. But all that time he devoted to the army seemed to have gotten the better of him. He can’t help but love the army through its cracks, and we see that reflected in the film’s cast of characters, all of them frustratingly broken--Why can’t they just get their act together? But something happens as we spend 2 hours (or 900 pages) watching their hopes and dreams continually crash like ocean waves against the shoals of war, of systemic corruption, of human failing. We don't resent them as much as we want better for them. In their turmoil, we see the reflection of a world that we want to heal.

I’ll confess I don’t have an easy answer to how to repair all the world's brokenness. But I might propose that we learn from our experience with a film like From Here to Eternity. Because we the viewers of this story have something to gain from this ritual over those living it on screen because our story doesn't end at the last reel. We have the agency to address our own character shortcomings and improve not only ourselves but the systems in which we live. As recently as this month, we're seeing the army make major structural changes to how they handle reports of sexual assault within their ranks, suggesting that maybe with enough persistence the deep-rooted change we desire is attainable.

It's a bit of a mystery why Prewitt would give himself so completely to an army that never deserved him, but isn't it also worth wondering how the world would be if every soldier was a "hardhead" like him?

    --The Professor