My (Sudden) Eternal Love for "From Here to Eternity"

Last week I was watching a screening of Fred Zinneman’s “From Here to Eternity” for a class. Halfway through, I started to think to myself, “This is it. This is the one,” and subsequently added it to my back pocket of favorite movies.

With the backdrop of 1941 Hawaii, a sense of darkness and melancholy emanates over the whole movie as the audience anticipates Pearl Harbor. “From Here to Eternity” feels doomed from the very beginning in all ways – the characters, the conflict, and especially (ESPECIALLY!) the relationships.

Maybe I’m a sucker for a doomed love story. Actually, there’s no maybe – I am. I was particularly affected by the storyline between Sergeant Warden (Burt Lancaster) and Karen (Deborah Kerr). The iconic beach scene is breathtaking and tragic, and I could watch it forever. There’s something about islands and World War Two and Hollywood stars that creates the perfect movie recipe – I’m thinking of South Pacific and a slew of other movies I used to watch with my grandmothers. Kerr and Lancaster’s characters will realistically never be together, and the audience is aware of this from the get-go. It makes you root for them more and makes you even sadder by the film’s end.

Honestly, the whole movie kills me. Frank Sinatra’s beautiful performance as Maggio is as darkly comedic as it is depressing. His death is one of the films darkest moments. And no matter the movie, Montgomery Clift always makes me weirdly sad – I think from the dark turn his life took towards the end. In class, we looked at this film through the genre of “male melodrama,” which really brings it together nicely if simply. The three men are doomed by their circumstances and circumstances out of their control – the war, the perceived role of men, the hierarchy of power in the army…By the time Deborah Kerr and Donna Reed (who I am just now realizing was in “It’s a Wonderful Life”) are on the boat, meeting for the first time, you feel like you’ve been punched in the gut.

“There’s a legend…if they [the leis] float in towards shore, you’ll come back some day. If they float out to sea, you won’t.” 

“I won’t come back.”