That would have set the cat among the pigeons in 1951. But the book had started out even stronger and, according to Jones's daughter Kaylie, was shorn of extensive original references to soldiers sucking off Honolulu businessmen for beer money. Not only was Kerr – virginal and Englishly uptight as she seemed to me back then – playing a bored, randy wife with an eye on Lancaster's muscled physique, but the most mousey and (to me) sexless American TV star of the 1950s, Donna Reed, was playing a prostitute.Īged 12, this felt like strong stuff, and we're not talking about the raw brutality meted out by Ernest Borgnine to Frank Sinatra in the movie's stockade scenes (let alone the "horse's head in Harry Cohn's bed" legend about how Sinatra got his role).
I was conscious that I was watching, for the first time, something intended for adults. I remember when I first saw the movie as a pre-teen in the mid-70s. However, the thrill of adultery still feels fabulously dirty today. That scene was about as bold as the movie could get, given the stolid, conservative sexual mores of 1953 and Hollywood's archaic censorship laws.
Its famous sex scene, with macho Burt Lancaster, his trunks' waistband riding ridiculously high above the navel, and demure little Deborah Kerr rolling in the thundering surf has become an image for the ages (it's all rather gruntier in the book), satirised by everyone from the makers of Airplane! to Benny Hill.
Its subsequent success at the 1954 Oscars, where it won eight Academy Awards, including best picture, director, screenplay, camerawork and both supporting actor awards, was a sweep not seen since It Happened One Night in 1935 or repeated until One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest in 1976. That's not altogether surprising, given the success of Jones's novel, which required extensive bowdlerisation by screenwriter Daniel Taradash before it could be filmed at all. "T he boldest book of our time … honestly, fearlessly on the screen!" That was how the movie posters for From Here To Eternity touted Fred Zinnemann's adaptation of James Jones's bestselling novel dealing with army life in Hawaii before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941.įrom Here to Eternity still stands up very well.
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