The New Pictures

From Here to Eternity (Columbia). Making novels into movies--turning the rambling equations of a story into the compact formula of drama--is a task perhaps fitter for some electronic calculating monster than for any human talent. That may explain why Hollywood, whose talent is all too human, has never developed a sure touch in these translations. Columbia's success in bringing James Jones's bestselling novel to the screen may be due partly to the fact that it was hardly a novel at all; it was an obscene, extravagant blot of ink, pressed between covers into something like a literary Rorschach sample. Every reader saw in it something different, but most agreed that it contained a tremendously vivid and exciting picture of men in the mass, and added, up to as powerful an expression of love-hate for the U.S. Army as had ever been published.

Scriptwriter Daniel Taradash rescued, if not quite a gem, then at least a high-grade industrial diamond from this rough original; and Director Fred Zinnemann, whose hand showed its great skill in High Noon, has polished the diamond till it cuts. In the refinement, it is true, something has been lost: the bloody but beautiful amateur standing of it all. There are touches of slick sentimentality that do not seem to come from the book; and many readers of the novel will miss some of the original's honest and barbed-wiry vignettes that had to be shorn away. But no one will miss the book's wealth of pointless profanity. Through its chill professional eye, the camera sees the persons of the drama more clearly than Jones did, and still does not wear too yellow a filter when it looks--far less bitterly than the book--at the "Pineapple Army" of 1941.

The screenplay focuses more sharply than the novel did on Private Robert E. Lee ("Prew") Prewitt, the "hardhead" who can "soldier with any man," the 30-year man who cannot play it smart because he is cursed with a piece of ultimate wisdom. As he puts it, "If a man don't go his own way, he's nothin'."

Transferred into Company G at Schofield Barracks in Honolulu, Prew is instantly informed by Captain Dana ("Dynamite") Holmes that he cannot go his own way. Captain Holmes, a boxing fanatic who wants his company to win the regimental championship, knows that Prew is a first-class middleweight, and insists that he box for his new outfit. Prew, who quit fighting after he blinded a friend with a "no more'n ordinary right cross," refuses. Furious, Holmes orders his non-coms--all of whom are on the boxing team--to give Prew "the treatment."

Prew takes it without a word for months on end. They trip him in bayonet drill, cheat him in rifle inspection, and for every fault they find, Prew has to pay with K.P., extra laps around the track under full pack, or hours of digging enormous holes in the ground so that jeering noncoms can bury a single newspaper. (In the movie, Captain Holmes is forced to resign for his actions; in the book, he was promoted.)

But other threads come in to liven the black field of one man's struggle. There is the rowdy good comedy of the soldiers' night out at the "New Congress Club." There is the sweet-sad story of Frew's love for a warmhearted doxy with visions of respectability. (Where the book bluntly called the girl a whore, the film manages to make the point by including her in some of the most realistic brothel scenes ever splattered on the face of the screen.) There is by contrast the fierce meeting of First Sergeant Warden and the captain's wife, two people who think they know what they need and almost make life give it to them. And fatally, there is the story of Private Maggio, Prew's friend, who is beaten to death in the "stockade" by Fatso, the brutal captain of the guard, and of Prew's tragic revenge. Dec. 7, 1941, for all its horror, breaks like a pest bomb over this roach pit of human misery.

The three male leads in the film turn in the finest performances of their careers. Montgomery Clift displays a marvelous, snail-like capacity to contract his feeling and intelligence into the close little shell of Prew's personality, and yet he also manages to convey that within this very limited man blazes a large spirit.

Burt Lancaster as Sergeant Warden is the model of a man among men, absolutely convincing in an instinctive awareness of the subtle, elaborate structure of force and honor on which a male society is based. His big love scene with the captain's wife will shake a lot of teeth loose during the next few months.

Frank Sinatra does Private Maggio like nothing he has ever done before. His face wears the calm of a man who is completely sure of what he is doing as he plays it straight from Little Italy. And Ernest Borgnine is a Fatso hard to forget. He can smile and smile and be a villain, in a way to make the audience realize that it is in the presence of that perhaps not rarest of humankind, the perfectly normal monster.

As to the women, Donna Reed as the doxy is quite adequate, and Deborah Kerr, for once required to be not demure but abandoned, is attractive and convincing as the captain's sexy wife.

The performers have that curious and captivating air which Director Zinnemann calls "behaving rather than acting," an artless-seeming form of art that he followed in such notable films as The Search, The Men, The Member of the Wedding. At 46 one of Hollywood's top directors, Vienna-born Fred Zinnemann, a former cameraman, uses the camera with easy familiarity, and with a cool simplicity that seems astonished by nothing but shows compassion for everything. Honolulu's Schofield Barracks (where much of the picture was actually filmed) becomes a large, stark frame for some memorable scenes, such as the rite of taps for Private Maggio, with the notes of martial mourning groping their way from stone to stone and from face to shadowy face.

This is what Hollywood calls "a big picture," loaded with "production values." And yet, From Here to Eternity also tries to be something more. It tries to tell a truth about life, about the inviolability of the human spirit, and in some measure it fails. Yet the picture does succeed, perhaps without quite intending to, in saying something important about America. It says that many Americans, in a way that is often confused and sometimes forgotten, care deeply, care to the quick about a man's right to "go his own way," though all the world and the times be contrary.

A Blueprint for Murder (20th Century-Fox) is one of those titles that have nothing whatever to do with the picture --unless it refers to the old Hollywood blueprint for doing violence to whatever talent Actor Joseph Gotten may have.

When Gotten first went west with Orson Welles's Mercury Theater troupe, the moguls were so astonished to see an actor with wrinkles in his wardrobe, and even a few lines in his face, that they almost reverently decided he must be great. He wasn't, but a lot of moviegoers took his fumbling as a sign of moral earnestness and his hesitation as a symptom of bashful charm. Gotten was typed as a sort of rising young vestryman--safe, but just possibly sexy too.

In A Blueprint for Murder, Actor Cotten pushes his mannerism to the point where he seems to undergo a paroxysm of Angst every time he decides to put one foot in front of another. To some extent, Cotten's anxiety is understandable: he has reason to believe that his brother and his niece were murdered by his brother's second wife (Jean Peters), but he cannot prove anything, and neither can the police. , In a desperate attempt to keep the woman from poisoning his brother's other child, Gotten poisons her first--with a tablet of strychnine he found in her own aspirin bottle. Unfortunately, Actor Gotten looks so earnest and bashful at the climax that the audience is apt to wonder whether, after all, he is involved in a matter of life & death or whether he is simply expressing a mortal longing to know the shortest way to the taffrail.

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