From Here to Eternity

I don't think it would be possible to make this film today.  We have talented enough actors, writers, and cinematographers.  All of those elements of the film, while executed with a marksmanlike honesty and clarity, could be reproduced today by drawing on the wide pool of talent that exists in filmmaking today.  But what we also have today are a set of expectations for our movies, books and television shows from which this film was either free, or willing to break free.  Modern audiences, writers, and executives expect, for one thing, at least somebody to be happy at the end of the story.  If for some reason the whole point of the movie is to be as bleak and desperate as possible, it is incumbent upon the film to announce itself as art, through stylistic choices if nothing else.  And even those media which end badly for all involved cater to our collective cathartic sentiment by making sure the road to despair was littered with bad choices or character flaws.

But such was not the case for Eternity.  It is said of Burt Lancaster's character at one point that he's a man who will "draw himself a line he thinks fair, and he won't come over it."  This is equally true of all the five main characters in the movie.  They are suffused with very American virtues:grit, fortitude, determination, and unbreakable will.  They face their relationships and circumstances with grave honor, but without the fanfare that would normally accompany such.  And they all suffer for it.

These two elements, the unashamededness and the matter-of-factness of the movie remind one of a Hemingway novel.  The movie did not hesitate to place the audience in the arms of adulterers, but neither did it congratulate itself for this choice.  It simply invited us to watch the simple, universal sadnesses of these five, and in doing so to remember our own.