Oh so sordid

Rating: 3/10 (22 July 2007)

I was acutely struck by how many similarities this movie shares with "The English Patient". Both are revolve around illicit affairs. Both take place in World War II. Both were critics' darlings and won a ridiculous amount of Academy Awards. And both are incredibly sordid.
But enough about "The English Patient"--let's move on to this movie.
"From Here to Eternity" is said to be the definitive movie on Pearl Harbor. Hmmm, maybe if you're talking about more than the battle, which only took up the last 10-15 minutes of the movie. But this movie is really more about the two sorry affairs taking place: the one between Sgt. Warden (Lancaster) and his captain's wife, Karen Holmes (Herr); and the other between Private Prewitt (Clift) and Lorene (Reed), a worker at a gentleman's-club-sort-of-place.
Maybe I was misled in my expectations, but I thought a movie from the '50s would be a lot more cheerful than this. I expected a rousing, well-made movie to watch with my parents, who only like upbeat productions of a rather brief length. This movie was the exact opposite. It was highly depressing, and when it comes to sordidness, only "The English Patient" passes it in my books. This movie was 118 minutes, but by the time my mom and I reached the end I felt like we were closing in on three hours instead of two. My dad left the room long before out of disinterest, and, though we rarely see eye-to-eye with the kinds of movies I watch, for once I couldn't blame him.
Take all the stigma attached to an Oscar-winning movie, then get rid of all the positive aspects associated with that stigma. What's left is a movie rather like "From Here to Eternity"--well-made in a purely technical sense, great acting, a good deal of nascent talent, but an overall depressing work that is quite downtrodden and never really elicits sympathy. And, after considering my comparisons between this movie and "The English Patient", you come to realize that this sort of story has been told a million times before. Really, if you've watched one movie about a sordid affair of illicit love, you've watched them all.