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“Robert E. Lee Prewitt,” says Lorene (Donna Reed) as “From Here to Eternity” draws to a close. “Isn’t that a silly old name?” She is referring to the chief character of the 1953 winner for Best Picture, and though the name is, indeed, sort of silly, it is also revealing. Derived from Middle English and Old French, the surname Prewitt means brave, which is how America’s national anthem summarizes its general population, while the character’s given name Robert E. Lee encapsulates this country’s contradictions and complications, truth and lies, the story it tells about itself and how that story is constantly being revised. The making of the movie adaptation of James Jones’s celebrated 1951 novel of military life on Oahu leading up to Pearl Harbor encapsulated those contradictions too as director Fred Zinneman, writer Daniel Taradash, and producer Buddy Adler softened the book’s coarse language and less politically correct details even while painting itself in enough shades of grey to anger the U.S. Military for not being complimentary enough. The immortal essayist Joan Didion loved Jones’s novel and wrote about how in visiting America’s geographical end to Manifest Destiny, the Hawaiian Islands, in 1977 that she was less taken by visiting its beaches than Schofield Barracks, the army base where “From Here to Eternity” is set. In speaking with then-current service members, Didion came away thinking that much had changed and not much had changed at all, and that “the Army was nothing more or less than life itself.”
Robert E. Lee Prewitt (Montgomery Clift) is the proof. Zinneman’s approach might have been overly polished, and occasionally too literal (the turning of a calendar to December 7, 1941) but in truth, his camera did not really need anything other than Montgomery Clift’s visage to evince “From Here to Eternity’s” myriad dimensions; virtually smoldering in close-ups, Clift wears defiance and vulnerability at once. A hard-headed individualist, Prewitt arrives at Schofield Barracks as the movie opens having taken a buck to private when he is replaced as company bugler in his previous outfit by what he views as an inferior musician. His new company commander, Dana “Dynamite” Holmes (Philip Ober), only wants him for the boxing team, which he refuses to join on account of having previously blinded a man in the ring, given the so-called treatment by his fellow soldiers as brutal, callous incentivization to get in the ring but refusing to waver. “A man loves a thing,” this individualist explains of his devotion to the collectivist Army, “that don’t mean it’s gotta love him back,” which may as well encapsulate a great many Americans and their relationship to this nation. In a sense, Prewitt reflects both his First Seargent Milton Warden (Burt Lancaster), a career soldier who both is and is not content at putting out everyone else’s fires, and his best pal, fellow private Maggio (Frank Sinatra), a hothead who walks off duty when his weekend pass is revoked.
It is through Maggio that Prewitt meets Lorene. In the book, she’s a prostitute, in the movie, she’s a hostess, though that delineation is thinly veiled, and I suspect it is why both then and now that despite winning an Oscar for her performance, Reed is often cited as being miscast. Donna Reed became a certain American housewife archetype while the real Donna Muellenberger, as she was born, was something else altogether, and those dueling notions and the more complex sense of self that Reed nee Muellenberger possessed are why she was, in fact, perfectly cast. Why, Lorene is not even Lorene, she’s Alma Burke, and she works at the New Congress Club to save up enough money to go back to the mainland and lead she what deems a proper life: a proper marriage to the proper man with the proper children with a membership at the country club. The monologue in which she explains this is Reed’s best moment – you can virtually see her putting on a mask in real time, a mask of the person that American society expects her to be.
Lorene’s hope that Prewitt will be the one to help her fulfill the American Dream is undone, however, when Maggio is killed in the brig by the sadistic stockade Sergeant Fatso Judson (Ernest Borgnine) and Prewitt avenges his friend by killing Fatso, leaving him wounded and on the lam, friendship and honor bleeding into standard-issue American masculine idiocy. Lorene hides him at home, and Warden protects him during roll call, holding out hope he might return, demonstrating his own unexpected complications just as his affair with his commanding officer’s wife (Deborah Kerr) does too. Ah, but the problems of one, two, three, four, five people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world and that proves true when the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor and “From Here to Eternity” proves that nothing galvanizes like war by unironically and ironically bringing to life Mr. X’s observation from JFK that the “organizing principle of any society, Mr. Garrison, is for war.” Even Prewitt is galvanized, in a manner of speaking, inverting the notion of dying for your country by dying for his country in the dumbest way possible by trying to sneak back to the barracks against all logic and getting shot and killed by his own men. That, however, is not how “From Here to Eternity” ends. No, it ends with Lorene telling a make-believe story reframing Prewitt’s idiotic death as an act of genuine valor and reminding us that if you tell a story about who or what something is enough times, you might just start to believe it.
