The 1953 Best Picture winner, seen in the present day, comes across as a cheesy love story whose dialogue (Daniel Taradash’s screenplay based on the novel by James Jones) from the leading man (Montgomery Clift, a convincing he-man as the stubborn Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt) overflows with simple wisdom:
“Man loves a thing, that doesn’t mean it’s got to love him back.” “Nobody ever lies about being lonely.” “A man should do what he can do.” Words to live by indeed.
Set in Hawaii just prior to the Pearl Harbour attack, director Fred Zinnemann (along with the deft, close-up-rich cinematography of Burnett Guffey and Floyd Crosby) is too obvious by half with a calendar shot (December 6), direction sign (“Pearl Harbor 8 mi.”) and a large clock in the mess (7:50 a.m.). Given that just 12 years had elapsed since the horrific attack, it’s doubtful anyone in those first audiences would need any of these visual cues. Working in some actual footage is far more effective in demonstrating the destruction and loss of life than any special effect¾then or now¾could create.
Before the carnage begins, the film centres on a pair of doomed love stories. Karen Holmes (radiantly portrayed by Deborah Kerr) is trapped in a loveless marriage with the perennially unfaithful commander of G Company (Philip Ober is right at home portraying the self-centred Captain Dana Holmes whose only real goal in life is a promotion to major, so long as he doesn’t have to work for it himself). In timeless dramatic fashion, Karen is soon head over gleaming heels for the G Company’s second in command, Sergeant Milton Warden. Burt Lancaster (as do several of the buff men in the cast) provides many moments of titillating beefcake and¾mostly¾is quite credible as the tough-love leader who is truly more married to the army than even a superb “catch” such as Karen. This somewhat jingoistic devotion to service of country also flows through Prewitt’s veins to deadly effect. Both men, along with Frank Sinatra’s breakthrough performance¾Best Supporting Actor¾as the comic-relief character, Angelo Maggio, (until his Italian hard-headedness becomes no match for Ernest Borgnine’s sinister take as Sergeant “Fatso” Judson) turn to binge drinking when life gives them a bum steer. Prewitt is very understandable as the “kid” goes through hell on earth as self-punishment for inflicting blindness on a sparring pal; Maggio slips into intoxicating drink with the false courage of those who feel hard done by; yet Warden’s sit-in-the-middle-of-the-road-and-get-pissed scene belies his character’s craving for all things military: sure, he knows how to manipulate the system, but wouldn’t be caught dead embarrassing his uniform (always perfectly clean and starched, like everyone else) or flag.
During and after the attack, it seems like another short film has begun and the first “real” ending was left somewhere on the cutting room floor. The two women are thrust together, hoping to find the right words and gestures (including the local myth of dropping leis into the water when steaming away from paradise) to leave the audience satisfied on all fronts. Their degree of success must, necessarily, be in the eye of the beholder. JWR