From Here to Eternity

After I watched this, I read some reviews here on Letterboxd, as I always do, just to see what others thought as my own opinions coalesce. One thing I kept seeing in a lot of reviews was people saying some variation of "I finally saw the movie with that beach kissing scene". It is an iconic scene, Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr laying on a secluded beach, entwined and kissing deeply and passionately. It is also a sign that From Here To Eternity suffers from Up Syndrome, where a movie is remembered for one scene or one sequence and people remember very little around it. Because nobody ever talks about how everything after the prologue of Up is boring as all hell, just as nobody talks about the movie around that kiss. Or even the 90 seconds after it. Because if they did, they'd see an encapsulation of From Here To Eternity's scattershot style of storytelling and pinball pacing. Immediately after the kiss, Lancaster's character -- who is having an affair with Kerr, who is the wife of Lancaster's CO at an Army base in Hawai'i -- proceeds to slut-shame her, they fight, she leaves, stops, drops to her knees, then somehow but not quite ties her promiscuity to having a medically-necessary hysterectomy from a miscarriage years before. I guess the idea is the marriage fell apart after that, and he was cheating anyway, so she went and got hers without the fear of getting pregnant, but given it's 1953, the movie can't outright say that. This radical shifting of tones and pacing in this scene is a microcosm of the entire movie. It juggles multiple storylines with differing tones, but it all feels start-stop. At one point, the Lancaster/Kerr relationship disappears for over a half an hour, so we can follow Montgomery Clift get mistreated by his platoon for refusing to join the squad's boxing team, and then fall in love with a "hostess" at a "club" who engages in "gentlemanly relaxation" (the movie's words, not mine), played by Donna Reed. He mopes that she won't be exclusive, and he mopes about being bullied by the squad. Lancaster mopes about the circumstances of his fling. Kerr mopes about her marriage, loving Lancaster, and wanting to move on, but only under very specific conditions. Reed mopes about being torn between her life plan and her growing feelings. The only one not moping is Frank Sinatra, whose character spends too much time drunk to mope, when he's not in a pissing contest with Ernest Borgnine's character, the warden of the base's stockade. So that's four storylines. Most movies don't bother with more than two, and here's From Here To Eternity trying to be Days Of Our Lives, and it just doesn't have time to adequately juggle all of this. And then the third act happens, which is the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and the tone shifts radically and permanently to a war movie. So, five stories, total. It was just too much for me. Not that it was hard to follow, but that the movie couldn't keep all the plates spinning. There's no complaints about the acting, not with this cast, and the characters are surprisingly complex. But it wasn't enough for me to save this from being a slog to get through. That kiss scene is iconic, but like Up, what's outside of it won't leave an impact in my mind, other than the memory of being mostly bored.