The Temper of Steel

Rating: Null/10 (1 November 2014)

"Everybody talks about freedom, but they don't really want it. Every man who declares himself free to his friends has to make a slave out of his wife and employees to keep up the illusion and prove it; and the wife to be free in front of her bridge club has to command her Help, Husband and Heirs. It resolves itself into a battle; whoever wins, the other one loses. For every general in this world there has to be 6,000 privates." - James Jones ("From Here to Eternity")
"You and me might change the world. It wouldn't show up until a hundred years after we're dead. We'd never see it. But it'd be there." - James Jones ("From Here to Eternity")
Based on a 1951 novel by James Jones, Fred Zinnemann's "From Here to Eternity" (1953) stars Montgomery Clift as Robert Prewitt, a private stationed at a US Army barracks in Oahu, Hawaii. As he refuses to fight in an upcoming, regimental boxing match, Prewitt is subjected to abuse by his fellow soldiers. Prewitt is wise to their motives, but accepts this abuse with cynical indifference.
Jones' novel was preoccupied with characters who refuse to betray their ideals and convictions. Prewitt's a bit of a pacifist – a "hard head" as his superiors call him - and so refuses to fight. First Sergeant Milton Warden (Burt Lancaster) likewise refuses to pursue a promotion, much to the chagrin of his lover, Karen (Deborah Kerr). Karen is herself torn between fidelity to her husband, Captain Dana Holmes (Philip Ober), and her own personal happiness. Encapsulating their dilemmas is Private Maggio (Frank Sinatra), who refuses to break when put in solitary confinement. All are seeking freedom from confinement and control.
These are themes typical of Jones, whose best novels ("From Here to Eternity", "Some Came Running", "The Thin Red Line") find characters rebelling against systems, tradition and assigned roles. The marriage, the army, the corporation, the workplace, the church, the school...Jones' heroes are often outcasts who rebel against venerated American institutions. They resist conformity and compliance – both inside and outside the military – a resistance which always leads to marginalization and then self-destruction.
How to reconcile "freedom and individualism" with "authority and patriotism" was the obsession of many great post-war novels. Prewitt and Maggio themselves anticipate the heroes of "Cool Hand Luke" and other anti-establishment films/novels of the era ("The Sand Pebbles", "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", "A Thousand Clowns" etc). They're hard-headed, they're rebels, they refuse to budge. But like Karen, whose promiscuity is a reaction against her imposed domestic lifestyle as an Army wife, they can't really articulate why; they unconsciously lash out.
"From Here to Eternity" was made with the support of the United States Army, and Fred Zinnemann's always been a bit of a sell-out anyway, so the film never really tackles Jones' themes. Jones was anti-military, anti-war, anti-establishment, whilst Zinneman's busy sucking on the teats of the Production Code. For Zinnemann, all bad military behaviour is a result of "bad eggs" (who are "weeded out and punished"), all brutal men get their comeuppance, bad captains resign, bad boxers are demoted and the death of Maggio is "his own fault anyway" (he falls off a truck). Jones' cynical portrayal of soldiers (always knee deep in booze, sex, violence and bad language) and officers (ruthless careerists who toy with lives) is also toned down.
"This country's Army is why I hate this country," Maggio says in Jones' novel. "What did this country ever do for me? Give me a right to vote for men I cant elect? You can have it. Give me a right to work at a job I hate? You can have that too! They say I'm a citizen of the greatest, richest country on earth, that if I don't believe it I should look at Park Avenue. Carnival prizes! All carnival prizes! They shouldn't teach their immigrants' kids all about democracy unless they mean to let them have a little bit of it! Me and the United States is dissociating our alliance as of right now, until the United States can find time to read its own textbooks a little!" It's rage like this which Zinnemann's film goes to lengths to avoid.
Still, Zinnemann gets some things right. Jones, whose war trilogy moved from WW2's prelude to aftermath ("Eternity", "Line", "Whistle"), had no time for jingoism, contrived heroism, and his grunts were always consigned to a drudgery at sharp contrast with the high adventure promised by recruiting posters. Zinnemann captures all this well. He also coaxes fine performances from Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Deborah Kerr and Donna Reed, the latter two floating about like noirish femme fatales. Zinnemann's cutting, sense of place, time and compositions are also a head above most melodramas from the era.
7.9/10 - See Vincente Minnelli's "Some Came Running", a marginally better James Jones adaptation from the 1950s. See too Jones' excellent Hawaii-set short story, "The Way it Is" (1949).