Sunday, August 13, 2017

Best Picture of 1953: Front Here to Eternity

December 7, 1941 "A day the will life in infamy". December 7, 1941 was the day that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. What happened to the month leading up to the fateful day in American History? The Best Picture winner of 1953, From Here to Eternity, tells a story of a few young men finding trying to figure out what they want out of life, and the military, in the few months before history changes forever.

Robert E. Lee Prewitt is a bugler who transferred into a rifle unit in Hawaii in mid 1941. He runs into an old friend of his Angelo Maggio on his way to check in with Captain Holmes. Maggio tells him that the Captain is a stickler he finally goes in to meet him. When he finds out that the Captain only got him transferred to his unit because he heard that Prewitt is great boxer. When Prewitt refuses to box, due to an accident he had early in the year, the Captain makes it his mission to make his life miserable in the army until he boxes for the unit. While the Captain is making a point to make Prewitt's life a wreck he doesn't realize what a wreck her personal life has gotten. His wife, who has slowly started to fall out of life with him, starts secretly seeing First Sergeant Warden, who is the Captain right hand man. All the stories come in an exploding conclusion at the same time the bombs are dropped on Peal Harbor.

From Here to Eternity was nominated for 13 Academy Awards that year. It won eight. Besides Best Picture the most notable award that the picture received would have to be the Best Supporting Actor Award which went to the one and only Frank Sinatra. Sinatra had not done many films by this point in his career, and some of the one that he did do did not turn out as well as he had hoped. Around the time when this film started his singing career was on the rocks, and was about to fade out into obscurity. However, he read the book From Here to Eternity, and he really connected to the character Maggio and from then on started his own campaign for him to get that part in the film. The way he started was he wrote letters to the book's author saying he would be the perfect Maggio, and even signed the letters as Maggio instead of Frank Sinatra. Eventually, the campaign worked and he won the role, and ultimately the award. This film did have competition for Best Picture that year. Columbia did a great job taking From Here to Eternity and beating out Paramount's Roman Holiday and Shane; MGM's Julius Caesar; and 20th Century Fox's The Robe. Not only did this film win the award but it has went down in history as a classic film. So much so that in 2002 From Here to Eternity was selected for preservation by the National Film Registry.

I originally got into this film because of Frank Sinatra. I am a huge Sinatra fan and a film that he won an Academy Award in is a film that I just had to see, and had to own. This, however, was a film that I did not enjoy very much when I first watched it. I really thought it was a long and boring film and really had no need to want to watch it ever again. Thankfully it grew on me and I found a new appreciation for it at time went on. I knew that this is one of the best performances that I would see Frank Sinatra in and I kept giving it a chance every once in a while. I am glad that I did. This film is so much more rewarding every time it's viewed because you find out new things about what happened that day, and you find yourself seeing how life is like through each character as time goes on because you grow and know more. This film is one of those films that you can't just watch it and know everything there is to know about it right then. You have to come back to it and love it again with new eyes. A film is shot and permanently set into place never to be changed again but when watching a great film you can never watch the same film twice because it keep begging you to

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