Film

From Here to Eternity

Name: From Here to Eternity
Genre: War, Romance, Drama
Released: 1953
Cast: Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Deborah Kerr, Frank Sinatra, Donna Reed

Fred Zinnemann's stately, sweat-soaked adaptation of James Jones's novel follows soldiers and their women through the last golden weeks before Pearl Harbor. It's Hollywood melodrama with real teeth — institutional cruelty, doomed love, and individual conscience grinding against military machinery. Lush, brooding, occasionally torrid, but always grounded by aching performances from a cast working at full stretch. Prestige cinema that still lands.

TMDb rating

7.3

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All Quiet on the Western Front1930

Twenty-three years earlier, with WWI instead of WWII, it makes the same argument — that institutions demand conformity and punish decency — and does it with even less mercy.

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This is the attack that ends the film, shot close to the event by people who lived through the same anxious peacetime Hawaii Eternity depicts, from the inside rather than through fiction.

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