First thing's first: what counts as a romance? To avoid having to answer this question or make any actual decisions, I decided to just look at the American Film Institute's "100 Films. . . 100 Passions" list. I had seen the majority of the films on the list, classics like CASABLANCA and GONE WITH THE WIND, but I was still able to come up with 28 that I either hadn't seen yet, or had only seen parts of. This way I get a variety -- comedies, dramas, old ones, new ones.
So here we go:
FROM HERE TO ETERNITY
Everyone's seen the most famous scene in this movie. It's the one where Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr are making out on the beach when the waves splash over them. Probably one of the most famous images in the history of film. I was surprised the scene came early in the film and wasn't as epic as dramatic as I had assumed it would be. But, hey, when you actually watch stuff from beginning to end, you get something that's missing in highlight reels -- context.
The film takes place in Hawaii in the days leading up to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, with the December 7th attack acting as the climax of the story. It's mostly about the romantic affairs of two military men -- Lancaster plays Sgt. Warden, a stern but fair man forced to work for a lazy and corrupt officer, Capt. Holmes (Philip Ober). Montgomery Clift plays Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt ("Prew"), a hard-headed soldier known for boxing skills he refuses to put on display for Capt. Holmes, no matter how hard Holmes makes his life on the base.
Deborah Kerr is Karen, the wife of Capt. Holmes, one half of a loveless marriage in which Holmes shamelessly cheats on her and they sleep in separate bedrooms. Rumors go around among the officers and soldiers about Karen -- either she's an ice queen or a harlot who has slept with half the army, no one's quite sure. She catches Sgt. Warden's eye and they enter into an affair.
Meanwhile, Prew goes out on the town with his new buddy, Pvt. Maggio (Frank Sinatra) and falls in love with a girl working in a club, Lorene (Donna Reed). She's basically a prostitute and the club is basically a brothel, but since the movie is from 1953 and about the U.S. Army, we'll agree that she merely dances with and talks to the soldiers.
As Holmes tortures Prew with manual labor and encourages the other soldiers to gang up on him in an effort to break his will, a respect starts to grow between Prew and Warden. Not only do they have their love affairs in common, but they both have a healthy disdain for authority and an unbending moral code they each stick by. Meanwhile, Maggio is similarly bullied by another soldier known as Fatso (Ernest Borgnine).
Ironically, given that this is known as a famous romance, the best relationship in the film is between Lancaster as Warden and Clift as Prew. Their slow to build, reluctant friendship is the aspect of the movie that worked best for me, and although Lancaster and Kerr are known as a pretty steamy cinematic couple, I thought they lacked chemistry. Clift and Reed seemed to work better together, but their romance still seemed a little flat, to me. No, the real love story here is a platonic one between Warden and Prew, and the best scene is the one where they both get drunk and sit in the middle of the road, discussing their relationships and ultimately the meaning of life as they wait for the inevitable jeep to come by and run them over, putting them out of their misery.
Of course the metaphorical jeep that comes along and runs them over ends up being the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which snaps everything into perspective with a cold dose of reality and tragedy. The attack actually is effective, even after sitting through an hour and a half of a soap opera -- albeit, a good soap opera. The planes on the horizon and the bombs dropping really do send chills down your spine. There's a point of view shot looking down from a Japanese plane on the main square of the base as the soldiers scatter like ants below under barrages of bullets. It's effective because you feel like you know those guys as individuals. It really hammers home the destruction when you consider the fact that a literal bomb could suddenly drop into someone's life at any moment, without warning.
Ultimately, the movie is about humankind's desire to be true to him or herself. How do you enter into a relationship, whether it's with another person or with an organization like the military, without giving away part of yourself? Is it okay to compromise, sometimes?
Prew says, "A man don't go his own way, he's nothing."
Warden replies, "Maybe back in the days of the pioneers a man could go his own way, but today you got to play ball."
These are similar themes to the ones explored in Fred Zinnemann's other classic, HIGH NOON. But, each man reverses his position a couple times as they search for a connection in the world. If humankind has to be true to his or herself, it also has to be true to other humans.
"Nobody ever lies about being lonely."
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