Guys and Dolls (1955), directed by Joseph L Mankiewicz, was adapted from the smash-hit Broadway musical, itself based on two short stories by Damon Runyon. We will be screening it on Saturday 17th October.
All the hot gamblers are in town and they're depending on Nathan Detroit (Frank Sinatra) to set up this week’s incarnation of “The Oldest Established Permanent Floating Crap Game in New York.” The only problem is, he needs $1,000 to get the place. Throw in Sarah Brown (Jean Simons), who’s short on sinners at the mission she runs; Sky Masterson (Marlon Brando), who accepts Nathan’s $1,000 bet that he can’t get Sarah Brown to go with him to Havana; Miss Adelaide (Vivian Blaine), who wants Nathan to marry her; Police Lieutenant Brannigan (Robert Keith), who always seems to turn up at the wrong time and the music and lyrics of Frank Loesser, and you’ve got quite a musical.
From Here to Eternity (1953), directed by Fred Zinnemann, was adapted from the best-selling novel by James Jones. We will be screening it on Saturday 14th of November.
The scene is Schofield Army Barracks in Honolulu, in the languid days before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Sergeant Milt Warden (Burt Lancaster) starts an affair with Karen (Deborah Kerr), the wife of his commanding officer. Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt (Montgomery Clift) is a loner who lives by his own code of ethics and communicates better with his bugle than he does with words. Prewitt’s best friend is wisecracking Maggio (Frank Sinatra, in an Oscar-winning performance), who has been targeted for persecution by sadistic stockade sergeant Fatso Judson (Ernest Borgnine). Rounding out the principals is Alma Lorene (Donna Reed), a “hostess” at the euphemistically named whorehouse The New Congress Club. All these melodramatic joys and sufferings are swept away by the Japanese attack on the morning of 7th December 1941. No words can do justice to the film’s most famous scene: the nocturnal romantic rendezvous on the beach, with Burt Lancaster’s and Deborah Kerr’s bodies intertwining as the waves crash over them.
I see this film is as a dramatization of the classical American struggle of individualism versus conformity. It’s a struggle that characterises, for example, the Western. In this case, the conformist authority of the Army is portrayed as both real and actual and as an analogy of American society as a whole. If you accept this view, the important contrast is between the Sinatra and the Clift characters. The two actors give stunning performances, and fittingly it’s these two characters that we first meet as the film opens,
The Sinatra character is the only one that deeply and consistently defies institutional authority and in doing so, loses his life. Though he does in the end succeed in instilling defiance into Prewitt, who thereby avenges his death by killing Fatso, the film maintains the ascendency of the system by having Holmes’ resign rather than face a court martial (in the book he is actually promoted…) and it has Prewitt killed by Americans from the organisation he so admires (and which will require his continuing passivity) as he tries to return to his unit.
The film anticipates the argument of The Organisation Man (1956) in the way it pits the individualism of Maggio against the conformity of the other characters. The captain’s ethos is of advancement through conformity, which attitude is disrupted by Prewitt’s defiance. Prewitt however is a ’30 year’ man who is devoted to the army, in a way that his girlfriend cannot understand, and she too wants to become part of the very system she despises. Maggio however defies authority and indeed is punished for his defiance by torture and death. Maggio has no respect for institutional authority and insists on his self-worth as he confronts the negative stereotype of the Italian American
From Here to Eternity won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and supporting awards to Sinatra and Reed.
