FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (Fred Zinnemann, 1953)

The 1950s spawned three dreadful films that won best picture Oscars—and two despicable ones: Fred Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity and Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront. It appals that anyone should think that Zinnemann’s film is other than vicious or stupid and, in either case, evil.
     The film’s source indicts the military and its mindset; scenarist Daniel Taradash and Zinnemann cheaply, dishonestly and with breathtaking arrogance turned the intent of James Jones’s novel inside out. This was the outcome of a series of alterations to the text. One example: Captain Holmes at Schofield Barracks, Honolulu, who organizes the campaign of persecution against Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt when the latter refuses to box for the company, is promoted in the novel; in the film, however, he is forced to resign, thus ending the military career that Holmes had hoped Prewitt’s boxing would advance. The implication is that the U.S. Army operates benignly to weed out unfairness, corruption, and abuse of authority. Oh: the U.S. Army assisted Zinnemann during the shoot!
     The drama is set in 1941; the Japanese bombing which brought the U.S. into World War II is part of the action, along with two romantic relationships, and various internal conflicts and one interior one. During the Korean War, Zinnemann lacked the courage to make an anti-war film as John Huston—what a great spirit!—had done two years earlier with The Red Badge of Courage.
     The film alternates among mostly short scenes belonging to different plot-lines, with the musical score sometimes forging a continuity.
     Montgomery Clift, as Prewitt, and Deborah Kerr, as Holmes’s wife and Company First Sgt. Warden’s mistress, are both very good. Frank Sinatra gives a breezy musical-comedy performance as Pvt. Maggio, with an unconvincing death scene as coda.

CLEAR SKY (Grigori Chukhrai, 1961)

Yevgeni Urbansky, who (in a small role) strikingly played the embittered soldier in Grigori Chukhrai’s estimable, moving Ballad of a Soldier (1959), has a harder time making sense of his character, Aleksei, in Chistoe nebo, the same filmmaker’s cold, bumpy, pointlessly gorgeous color-photographed saga of Russian wartime romance and lives monkey-wrenched by Stalin’s postwar bureaucracy.
     Khrushchev’s deStalinization film is in three parts. The first is the swooning romance of Sasha and pilot Aleksei, who scrupulously determines that Sasha has graduated school before succumbing to her aggressive pursuit of him. Chukhrai establishes a strenuous camera style, consisting of swooping movement punctuated by tight closeups, which he carries over to the second part, the couple’s wartime separation. (The couple by fiat consider themselves married—a nice anti-bureaucratic touch.) One passage, where Sasha hopes to catch a glimpse of her father in a troop train passing through, is visually hysterical due to this “style.” Word arrives that Aleksei’s plane has been shot down; the nation proclaims him a dead hero. Sasha bears Aleksei’s son and still hopes her beloved will return. The war ends, and he does. Part Three is narratively elliptical and, visually, mostly subdued—a different style; a different film, given the narrative through-line. Stripped of his “posthumous” medal, as well as his Communist Party membership, Aleksei turns to drink; his crime is that he survived, from which cowardice or even collaboration with the enemy can be deduced. (Apparently Aleksei was unconscious when he was caught and imprisoned by Germans.) Aleksei keeps petitioning for Party reinstatement, but after confronting a statue of Stalin even he loses confidence in his cause! Stalin dies, and everything is set right. Aleksei looks on with pride as the son who disdained him lands a plane from the now clear sky!