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 As the events of December 7, 1941 draw near, "passion and tragedy collide on a
military base." There's the soldier who used to be a boxer and is being
"manipulated by his superior and peers." His buddy is Frank Sinatra and he
gets into his own jams. Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr have an affair. "Each
of their lives will be changed forever when their stories culminate in the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor." They note that this won a bunch of Oscars
including the Supporting awards for Frank Sinatra and Donna Reed. 1953, 118 minutes, DVD
This is the towering tale about what trouble servicemen can get themselves into
when they're stationed in Hawaii and it's still before December 7, 1941. If
this story idea sounds vaguely familiar, it's because this is the same premise
they used to make Pearl Harbor last year. It just goes to show you that there is no such thing as a bad
idea, just poor execution. Of course, there's a little more involved here than
the bare bones idea of bored soldiers drinking, humping, and fighting amongst
themselves. You've got to have a decent script, good actors, and a director
that has the ability to frame a shot so that it tells a story, not so that it
looks like an Arrowsmith video. I'm not always the biggest fan of Oscar (tends
to reward mediocre crowd-pleasers and dull do-gooder message movies over
memorable cinema), but I think they hit it on the nose when they awardedFrom Here To Eternity eight Academy Awards back in 1953. I assume that
Montgomery Clift and Burt Lancaster split the votes when it came to Best Actor
(the gay and straight vote that is) though it's hard to argue with winner
William Holden's performance as the crabby lone wolf in Stalag 17 either. Clift was the heart of the picture, batting his doe-like eyes to and
fro, refusing to break under all the pressure heaped on him by a
boxing-obsessed captain, while Lancaster was the libido of the film,
testosterone practically oozing from every pore as he eyed the Captain's wife
in a way that only someone like Lancaster could get away with. Where Clift was
sensitive and tormented, Lancaster was unyielding and always sure of himself
and his place. They ended up as friends because each of them knew the other
was a soldier's soldier. And even though they were the best soldier the other
had ever seen, you can see that one of them is probably a little too sensitive,
a little too thoughtful, and a little too stubborn to survive. You either bend
to the army's way or it breaks you in half. It's a theme this movie repeats
first with Frank Sinatra's character, then finally with Clift's. The survivors
are the ones that are willing to put everything behind the army, even love, as
Lancaster's Sgt. Warden ultimately does. It's a fairly heavy message and
everyone knows that any movie that finishes up on December 7, 1941 isn't going
to have a happy ending, but there's enough carousing, beat downs, and scandals
in between that the movie remains ferociously entertaining and deserving of its
reputation as one of the great melodramas of all time.  Robert E. Lee Prewitt (Clift, reminding one of a slightly more grown up James
Dean) arrives at his new army base in Hawaii. He has just transferred out of
his old outfit, because some crony of the captain there became first bugler
over him, even though he is the best damn bugler in the army! He even played
taps at Arlington in front of the President and carries the mouthpiece around
with him in his pocket. The reason he ended up here is that his new captain,
Dynamite Holmes, is a fanatic about boxing and this Prew kid is the top
middleweight in the army. Dynamite wants desperately to win the boxing finals
this year and all he needs to fill out his roster to assure himself of that is
a good middleweight and Prew is the man to do it. Boxers in this outfit have
it easy, earning their sergeant's stripes for doing nothing other than knocking
out whatever palooka the other army base can put in the ring against Dynamite's
boys. As I was watching this, I figured that our intelligence back then must
have been that Hitler and Tojo were overrunning Europe and the Pacific one
boxing ring at a time. Prew has it made, right? Uh, no. See, Prew is one of
those smoldering young guys that just has to do things his own way. All he has
to do is beat a few guys up and he's down at the local whorehouse banging
native girls or whatever soldiers do in their downtime on the eve of war. But
Prew refuses to box. It seems that he and his best friend were sparring one
day down at the gym and Prew caught him with a right cross and the next thing
you know the best friend is in the hospital blinded for life. Prew swore he'd
never fight again, which is interesting because he seems to get into an awful
lot of fights on the island. One time I drank a whole bunch of coffee and it
made my bowels act up so bad that I swore I would never drink coffee again and
I haven't. I can sort of see where this Prew character is coming from. It's
about standing up for what you believe in. This doesn't sit too well with
Dynamite and the boys decide that they're going to give Prew the treatment
until he quits acting like a sissy and goes back to beating up people for a
living. Dynamite's right hand man is the very efficient and serious Sgt.
Warden. He's a no-nonsense, tough talking, bull of a man that spends most of
his time trying to get all efficient with the Captain's icy blonde wife, Karen.
Karen is ripe for the picking because the Captain spends most of his days when
he's not watching sweaty guys in boxing trunks beat each other up, off with his
girlfriends.  You know how Prew has his tragic back-story? Well, Karen has one of her own.
It involves her being preggers and the baby coming too soon and she calls her
husband to come and take her to the hospital, but he's out getting wasted with
one of his tramps and when he finally comes home, he passes out, she has the
baby, it's born dead and by the time she finally gets to the hospital, they
have to operate and she can't have kids anymore. I did say this was a
melodrama, right? She lays all of this on Warden during their big beach scene
that is portrayed on all the posters and whatnot. Talk about good
conversation! Before they hook up on the beach though, Warden comes over to
her place on a rainy night when Dynamite is out going fifteen rounds with some
foxy boxer. The sparks fly as the rain falls, Karen drinks and cries
about her lot in life and Lancaster just affixes her with his steely glare and
remains completely unaffected by her emotional outbursts. There's lots of good
stuff here for you aspiring tough guys that need to know how to handle your
lady when she gets out of line (let me know how it works out). So Karen and
Warden begin an affair that is surely doomed (Emotionally distraught women
trapped in crap marriage with emotionally repressed hardhead trapped in his own
position as an enlisted man? Do you see this going anywhere but to court?).
While Warden is filling in for the captain's log, Prew is getting the business
from those whacky guys in his company or platoon or frat or whatever it's
called. They trip him, make him run laps, assign him to dig really big holes,
and dump bloody water all over the floor of the gym he's trying to clean (I
just waxed this! Hellll-oo!). The only guy on his side is Angelo Maggio -
Frank
Sinatra in a performance that shows quite a bit of depth (he has a great death
scene that probably won him the Oscar) and was his come back role. Maggio is a
fun loving guy who doesn't like to see Prew get pushed around so they hang out
together at one of the social clubs in town and that's where Prew meets Donna
Reed. She's a working girl there and for some reason Prew falls for her. They
become an item though things hit a rough patch when Donna reveals herself to be
something of a shallow gal when she says she just wants to earn enough money to
go back home and get into the country club so that she can marry a proper guy
instead of a soldier (it's okay though, because she'll be good and sorry when
Prew is dead!). 
In addition to all these things happening, the movie is such a sprawling effort
that Sinatra's Maggio even has time to become involved in a feud with Ernest
Borgnine (I like a movie with ambition). Borgnine is the racist dude in charge
of the stockade and never fails to miss an opportunity to run down Maggio's
heritage. This results in some barroom incidents that Warden has to break up.
When Borgnine (his nickname is Fatso) tells Maggio that sooner or later he'll
be in the stockade and then they'll settle up, you start measuring poor old
Angelo for a body bag. No sooner is that threat laid down then does Angelo go
AWOL from guard duty so that he can go to town and get wasted. He gets caught
and gets a six month hitch in the stockade. The movie is able to keep this
story line going without taking time away from the two main protagonists by
having people keep us and Prew updated periodically on how Angelo is making out
(Yep, still getting beat up on a regular basis.). Maggio gets word out to Prew
that he is going to escape and he does, finding Warden and Prew really wasted
and bonding in the middle of a road. Angelo croaks from a combination of the
beatings and falling out of his escape truck (amateur!) and Prew goes looking
for Borgnine. This is okay, because earlier, Prew had gotten back into the
pit-fighting biz when he and some punk soldier went toe to toe after the guy
just pushed Prew to the limit (and beat him senseless for about five minutes).
Now I know that you're probably wondering if there isn't some war right around
the corner here and there is, but it hasn't kicked off and these dudes are
obviously way pent up and are keeping a keen edge by engaging in training
exercises like having a knife fight with Ernest Borgnine! Fatso and Prew hook
up for a knife fight (Is this some more proto-Jimmy Dean?) in an alley. They
both get it in the gut and Fatso croaks, while Prew stumbles back to Donna
Reed's house. He goes AWOL and Warden realizing that in spite of his penchant
for killing superior officers, this is one good kid, so he covers for him.
Meanwhile Dynamite Holmes has been booted out of the service for being treating
Prew like a dog and Karen wants Warden to sign up for officer's school (is this Melrose Place?). When we see Lancaster leaning against a wall and the calendar says December 6,
we all kind of do a real big gulp and wait for the next scene. Finally the
Japanese attack, causing the boxing finals to be cancelled and making
everyone's problems seem a lot less important. The movie ends tragically for
Prew and we see that Lancaster survives because he allows himself only a moment
of grief and then moves on. The plot outline of the movie doesn't really do
the end result any justice. When you break down all these story elements, it
sounds like an overripe potboiler that Aaron Spelling would have produced, but
the intensity and sincerity of the acting of everyone involved makes all these
problems these characters have important not only to them but to us as well.
These are grown ups with grown up problems. The military and the impending war
are merely the backdrop for them to try and find their way through all their
conflicting emotions. Lancaster isn't much for communicating to Karen, but he
sums it all up pretty succinctly when he says something like "I hate that I
love you so much." All these characters are people that want to love and to
find love, but are incapable of overcoming their own emotional baggage even at
the expense of their own happiness. Karen's self-loathing, Donna Reed's desire
to be accepted by society, and Warden's refusal to change his life and take a
chance (he's really too scared to go to officer's school). In fact, only Prew
is pure in the love he had for the people in his life. When they killed his
friend Maggio, without hesitation he knew that they only retribution acceptable
was death. He didn't have any illusions about what he was, telling Donna's
character that he was a "thirty year man", just a soldier. I guess it wasn't so
much that he never compromised what he was all about, it was that he was always
true to what he was. A good soldier, a good friend, and a good lover. There
was nothing to compromise for Prew, because those qualities weren't just
constructs that he had built up to survive in the world. They were who he was
and he could no more change those things than a bird could get rid of its wings
and expect to survive. The problem with people like that is that the real
world
necessitates compromise to survive. You adapt or die. That's why the world is
full of self-centered jerks (no matter how cool) like Warden and the graveyards
are full of idealistic dreamers. The movie with its old-time Hollywood star
power is thrilling to watch, the emotions up on screen so raw that you can
practically taste the desperation these people are feeling as they try and
fight to hold on to love in spite of themselves. And yes, that is Claude
Atkins,
Jack Warden, and George Reeves periodically wandering in and out of scenes.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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