|
From Here to Eternity |  | Director: Fred Zinnemann
Actors: Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Deborah Kerr, Donna Reed, Frank Sinatra
Studio: Sony Pictures
Category: DVD
List Price: $14.94
Buy New: $5.88
as of 3/21/2010 22:02 EDT details
You Save: $9.06 (61%)
New (46) Used (26) Collectible (2) from $4.11
Seller: moviestore5
Rating:  94 reviews
Sales Rank: 3910
Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, DVD, NTSC
Language: English (Original Language)
Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Region: 99
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Number Of Discs: 1
Running Time: 118 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 5.3 x 0.6
MPN: COLD05319D
Model: 9531
ISBN: 0800178831
UPC: 043396053199
EAN: 9780800178833
ASIN: B00005JKF6
Theatrical Release Date: 1953
Release Date: October 23, 2001
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
| |
| Similar Items:
| |
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
AN AWARD-WINNING DRAMA ABOUT A CLOSE-KNIT ARMY CAMP IN HAWAII BEFORE THE ATTACK ON PEARL HARBOR.SUPERB CAST AND PERFORMANCESBY ALL, NETTING 8 OSCARS INCLUDING BEST PICTURE.
Amazon.com essential video
Here's a model for adapting a novel into a movie. The bestseller by James Jones, a frank and hard-hitting look at military life, could not possibly be made into a film in 1953 without considerably altering its length and bold subject matter. Yet screenwriter Daniel Taradash and director Fred Zinnemann (both of whom won Oscars for their work) pared it down and cleaned it up, without losing the essential texture of Jones's tapestry. The setting is an army base in Hawaii in 1941. Montgomery Clift, in a superb performance, plays a bugler who refuses to fight for the company boxing team; he has reasons for giving up the sport. His refusal results in harsh treatment from the company commander, whose bored wife (Deborah Kerr) is having an affair with the tough-but-fair sergeant (Burt Lancaster). You remember--the scene with the two of them embracing on the beach, as the surf crashes in. The supporting players are as good as the leads: Frank Sinatra and Donna Reed won Oscars (and Sinatra revitalized his entire career), and Ernest Borgnine entered the gallery of all-time movie villains, as the stockade sergeant who makes Sinatra miserable. Zinnemann's work is efficient but also evocative, capturing the time and place beautifully, the tropical breezes as well as the lazy prewar indulgence. This one is deservedly a classic. --Robert Horton
|
| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 94
 Dated, overly sudsy Best Picture winner March 9, 2010
One-Line Film Reviews (Easton, MD)
The Bottom Line:
Somehow adapted from a novel which was considered rather anti-establishment, From Here to Eternity is a hopelessly-square movie, with lifeless performances by its leads, an overabundance of melodramatic moments and sequences, and a concluding sequence involving the Pearl Harbor attack which feels ridiculously tacked-on; half a century this film may have been deemed 1953's best film, but time has not been kind to it.
2/4
GOOD MOVIE - NOT GREAT March 3, 2010
C. Chandler (Whitesboro, Texas USA)
.....I know my review will be in the minority but I think this is an overrated movie more famous as the "movie" that saved Frank Sinatra's career than for it's dramatic content.
.....The only acting performances that deserved to be praised were turned in by Burt Lancaster and Debra Kerr but in typical perverse Hollywood tradition Sinatra and Reed walked away with Oscars.
.....This was Sinatra's first big dramatic part and it showed. Although, in time, he learned to act and to develop an on-screen personna, in this movie he was just plain awful, as bad as another non-actor, Elvis Presely was in his first movie Love Me Tender. Sinatra got the part due to the clout of his paramour Ava Gardner and was, at that time, at the nadir of his career, deserted by his fans for divorcing his childhood sweetheart for Gardner. Fans were still sensitive to such things in those days. Hollywood, anxious to restore Sinatra to box office dynamite rewarded him with an Oscar for his deer-in-the-headlights on screen mugging.
.....Donna Reed (Mary Bailey in Wonderful Life and star of the Donna Reed Show) sacrificed her good girl image to play a cynical hard bitten prostitute and was totally unbelievable in the part. But Hollywod has a habit of giving Oscars to actresses who are willing to debase themselves with unsavory parts (Shirley Jones in Elmer Gantry) and so Reed joined the club.
.....Montgomery Cliff, who always seemed to be a watered down version of Marlon Brando in his mumbling performances was suited for this role but was hard to believe as a boxing champion in the worn out theme of a boxer who quits the ring because he killed an opponent with his fists. Cliff looked much too slight, more like a lightweight than a middleweight to have such a lethal punch. John Wayne was much more believable in "The Quiet Man". Montgomery Cliffs popularity was hard to fathom because with the exception of this movie and his role with Elizabeth Taylor in "A Place in the Sun", he seemed miscast in most of his roles, especially with John Wayne in "Red River", a part that much more suited for Jack Beutel of "Outlaw" fame.
.....Ernest Borgnine turned in a fine performance as the sadistic Stockade guard.
.....This movie was not shown on Military Bases when it was released because the Military did not like to show how its disciplined structure could be corrupted and used to persecute men by their superior officers. The theme was too close to the reality for the Brass.
.....This is a good movie but not as great as its hype. If you like good acting, it is worth the price for the performances of Lancaster and Kerr.
 Involving Military Soap Opera Elevated by Sturdy Performances from an Offbeat Cast August 17, 2009
Ed Uyeshima (San Francisco, CA USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
In hindsight, this 1953 classic doesn't seem as much a military drama as it does a highly charged soap opera, which shouldn't come as a surprise given that master filmmaker Fred Zinnemann (The Nun's Story) was at the helm. The veteran director upended the western genre just a year earlier with the Gary Cooper classic High Noon, and he places the same incendiary focus of character over action here, that is, until the inevitable climax which uses the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as a catharsis for the characters' dilemmas now dwarfed by the coming world war.
Based on James Jones' epic novel, screenwriter Daniel Taradash manages to reduce the complexity of the book's themes without trivializing them, and then-offbeat casting enhances the movie immeasurably. Set on a U.S. Army base in Hawaii in the months leading up to the attack, the focus is on two men, both dedicated to the military with no aspirations to become the officers they have grown to detest. One is Private Robert E. Prewitt, a talented boxer (and bugler) who refuses to fight on his regiment's team since blinding a sparring partner. The other is First Sergeant Milton Warden, a take-charge, professional soldier who earns the trust of his men even as he kowtows to his weak-willed commanding officer.
Life in the barracks is fraught with adversarial personalities, chief among them Private Angelo Maggio, Prewitt's loudmouthed best friend, and Staff Sergeant "Fatso" Judson, the sadistic stockade warden. Both Prewitt and Warden meet women who seek to change their lives. Prewitt finds cynical nightclub "hostess" Lorene at a brothel masquerading as a social club, while Warden embarks on a passionate affair with his commanding officer's wayward wife Karen. Burt Lancaster is well cast as Warden, and he brings surprising nuance to his character's clandestine encounters with Karen. However, it's Montgomery Clift - despite looking too slight to be genuinely believable as a boxer - who transcends his loner role by playing off his innately sensitive nature to portray a man who will never sacrifice his honor despite how dire the consequences. Well within his comfort zone, Frank Sinatra's turn as Maggio is small but impactful.
Still two years away from Marty, Ernest Borgnine makes Judson's malevolence palpable in just a few scenes. Deborah Kerr submerges her Scottish accent and previous lady-like demeanor to reveal the embittered, sexually assertive side of Karen without sacrificing any of the character's vulnerability. The legendary, much-parodied beach scene with Lancaster still sizzles after all these years. Similarly, Donna Reed foregoes her good-girl image (epitomized by her memorable turn as Mary Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life) to play the sultry, delusional Lorene. The 2003 DVD comes with a small set of extras - a three-minute making-of retrospective short, a nine-minute collection of on-set footage and interviews from a documentary entitled "Fred Zinnemann: As I See It", and the original theatrical trailer. The best extra is the commentary track from Tim Zinnemann (the director's son) and screenwriter Alvin Sargent (Spider-Man 2), who had a small role in the movie.
Gazing at stars July 4, 2009
H. Schneider (window seat)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I am spending some time on July 4th with American movie classics. Fred Zinnemann's film version of James Jones' novel about the last days before Pearl Harbour in an army outfit in a Hawaii barracks is great Hollywood.
But really, Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr are not doing their stuff in the surf while the bombs are falling, as the DVD cover seems to suggest by mounting the surf tumble together with the bomber squad. That's annoying.
Apart from the stupid DVD cover I have not much to complain about.
Well, maybe one might observe that Frank Sinatra's part and his acting are not really all that great. As everyone knows from the Godfather, Sinatra got his part through connections... of course Puzo didn't really prove his claim, but it does sound plausible.
The rest is bright shining honest star-based professional cinema. Clift, Lancaster, and the 2 girls Kerr and Reed are just too true to be good. Marvellous show. And Borgnine as the evil one.
Hollywood rarely got much better.
(The star deduction is for the DVD cover photo and for Sinatra's make believe performance.)
Pearl Harbor Background for Human Destinies May 4, 2009
Antonio Robert (Slovakia, Europe)
Sweeping Oscars in 1953, this war drama becomes truly war at the very end, when the two main characters - brave soldiers played by Burt Lancaster and Montgomery Clift - are along with their female darlings caught in the fire of 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. One of the first US movies to deal with this blow dealt by Japan, "From Here to Eternity" nevertheless pushed forward the boundaries for various topics in film, having come not ahead of its time, but right at the nick of it. Frankness in intimate relationships, violence and army abuse are tackled with realism unheard-of before. The film has somehow got dated with time, but it still is carried on broad shoulders of Burt Lancaster, whose steaming beach encounter with Deborah Kerr (wife of his superior) remains among the most memorable love scenes ever put on the screen. Another main character, Robert E.Lee Prewitt (then bright young star Clift), is the centerpiece of the story. The talented boxer and bugle-man, who nevertheless has his own code of conduct, becomes an outcast of the army machinery despite his very desirable soldier qualities. The role of his friend Maggio brought a Best Supporting Oscar to Frank Sinatra, who allegedly got the role thanks to his underworld connections. Donna Reed (It's A Wonderful Life) won her Oscar for supporting actress as Prewitt's flame Alma, a luxurious prostitute whose only dream is to return home with the money and live a "decent" life. The film also got six more Academy Awards (total eight of 13 noms), including Best Picture and Best Director for Fred Zinnemann (High Noon, A Man for All Seasons).
Showing reviews 1-5 of 94
|
|
|
CERTAIN CONTENT THAT APPEARS ON THIS SITE COMES FROM AMAZON SERVICES LLC. THIS CONTENT IS PROVIDED ‘AS IS’ AND IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE OR REMOVAL AT ANY TIME.
Proud member of the Celebrity Pro Network. Make sure you check out these other great CelebrityPro network sites:
Lyrics Database
Celebrity Blog
Celebrity Thing
Celebrity PC
Latest Celebrity Photos
Portal
Travel Photos
Quotes
Flash Games
|
Is there a better
price available?
Find out:
|
|
|
|
