"Re-Enlistment Blues": From Here to Eternity, the Movie and the DVD

By Nicholas Stix
Saturday, February 28, 2009
The Critical Critic


Got paid out on Monday,
Not a dog soljer no more,
They gimme all that money,
So much my pockets is sore,
More dough than I can use,
Re-enlistment Blues.

Fred Zinnemann’s 1953 masterpiece, which won eight Oscars and deserved even more, may seem tame by today’s standards, but it was hot stuff at the time. (And if it seems tame, that is a negative reflection on today’s movies.) FHTE, with a marvelous screenplay by Daniel Taradash, based on James Jones’ sprawling, "unfilmable,” epic 1951 novel set in pre-WWII Pearl Harbor, tells the story of two soldiers and the women who fall in love with them. (With all due respect to winner Bill Holden, who was excellent in Stalag 17, the picture should also have won the Oscar for best actor, but since the two best performances of the year were given in FHTE by Montgomery Clift and Burt Lancaster, respectively, and both were nominated, each knocked the other out of the running.)

Took my ghelt to town on Tuesday,
Got a room and a big double bed,
Find a job tomorrow,
Tonight you may be dead,
Aint no time to lose,
Re-enlistment blues.

First Sgt. Milton Warden (Lancaster) and Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt (Clift) each, in his own way, exemplifies the best of this man’s Army. And this man’s rotten, stinking Army may appreciate Worden, to a point, but it certainly does not appreciate Prewitt, whose credo is, “A man’s got to go his own way, or he’s nothing.”

Hit the bars on Wednesday,
My friends put me up on a throne,
Found a hapa-Chinee baby,
Swore she never would leave me alone,
Did I give her a bruise?
Re-enlistment blues!

The women who fall in love with these men are, each in her own way, forbidden. Warden’s lover, Karen Holmes (Deborah Kerr), is the commander’s wife; Alma (Donna Reed), Prewitt’s girl, is a prostitute, though in a nod to the censors, the movie turned her into a hostess.

Woke up sick on Thursday,
Feelin like my head took a dare,
Looked down at my trousers,
All my pockets was bare,
That gal had blown my fuse,
Re-enlistment Blues.

The men’s corrupt, commanding officer, Capt. Dana “Dynamite” Holmes (Philip Ober), wants Prewitt to box for the company. Prewitt, an excellent middleweight who accidentally blinded a friend, refuses. And so, Holmes tries to break him with “The Treatment,” as carried out by his cowardly boxer-sergeants. Warden admires Prewitt, and is cordial to him, but there is little he can do on his behalf – beyond counseling him to box. Prewitt, the “thirty-year man” with a touch of Spinoza, is one of the great tragic heroes of American fiction. As he says of the Army, “Just because you love something, doesn’t mean it has to love you back.”

Went back around on Friday,
Asked for a free glass of beer,
My friends had disappeared,
Barman say, “Take off, you queer!”
What I done then aint news,
Re-enlistment Blues.

Among a brilliant cast, Clift and Lancaster shine the brightest, with each giving the performance of a lifetime, while Frank Sinatra steals almost every scene he’s in as Prewitt’s best friend, the combative, proud Pvt. Angelo Maggio.

That jail was cold all Sa’day,
Standin up on a bench lookin down,
Through them bars I watched the people,
All happy and out on the town,
Looked like time for me to choose,
Them Re-enlistment Blues.

In this indictment of the corruption, casual cruelty, and class politics of the pre-WWII U.S. Army, the dialogue is excellent for the men, but melodramatic for the women. And yet at the time, women and men of certain strata thought like these characters, most of whom are tortured and miserable.

Slep in the park that Sunday,
Seen all the folks goin to church,
Your belly feels so empty,
When you’re left in the lurch,
Dog soljers don’t own pews,
Re-enlistment Blues.

If you have a contemporary sensibility, you may hoot at the screen. So much the worse for you. But if you can appreciate the honor of fighting men, and the time and the place, this story, one of the masterpieces to come out of the war, will break your heart.

So I re-uped on Monday,
A little sad and sick at my heart,
All my fine plans was with my money,
In the poke of a scheming tart,
Guy always seems to lose,
Re-enlistment Blues.

So you short-timers, let me tell you,
Don’t get yourself throwed in the can,
You might as well be dead,
Or a Thirty-Year-Man,
Recruiting Crews give me the blues,
Old Re-enlistment Blues.

(“Re-enlistment Blues” ©1951 by James Jones.)

Thoughts on the 2001 DVD.

From Here to Eternity (1953): DVD

(Contains Spoilers!)
By Nicholas Stix
Men’s News Daily/Nicholas Stix
June 6, 2005

The From Here to Eternity DVD, released in 2001, has a clean print and clear audio for the picture that, when I was 16 or 17, I considered the third greatest ever made, after Mister Roberts (1955) and High Noon (1952). However, the “extra” which has late director Fred Zinnemann’s son, Tim, and Alvin Sargent, who played a bit part in the picture (and would become a two-time Oscar-winning screenwriter, including for his collaboration with the elder Zinnemann on Julia (1977)), commenting on the movie, is pathetic. That is not the fault of Sargent, who unpretentiously contributes what he can to the commentary, but of Tim Zinnemann – and of the folks at Columbia Tristar who were in charge of the commentary piece.

The commentary apparently worked like this: Zinnemann and Sargent sat down in a sound studio, and watched the movie while making random remarks. At the end of two hours, they took their paychecks and left.

Sargent’s participation was apparently because he was virtually the only cast member who was still alive and well (Deborah Kerr had already for years suffered from a debilitating illness), and worked with Fred Zinnemann years later on Julia (and with the son one year later on the bomb Straight Time), and thus had insights into the director and a connection to the family. Tim Zinnemann’s participation was because he was the director’s son. Unfortunately, while posing as an expert on the movie, Zinnemann was a fount of misinformation. It quickly became clear that he had not so much as looked at the movie again, in preparation for the commentary.

Early on, I was irritated by a small gaffe on Zinnemann’s part. He remarked on how striking it was that Ernest Borgnine, who plays the sadistic stockade Sgt. “Fatso” Judson, could go from starring in Marty (1955) to playing Fatso. You don’t have to be a movie historian to know that Marty came two years after From Here to Eternity. Besides, Borgnine was a character actor; to be able to play now a heavy, and now a nice guy, was his job.

There was also a bit of pomposity that foreshadowed the egregious dishonesty to come. Zinnemann interpreted the opening scene in which Montgomery Clift’s “Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt” crosses in front of a marching company at Pearl Harbor’s Schofield Barracks, to show already Prewitt’s marginalization from the other soldiers. The man is reporting for duty at a new company, for cryin’ out loud! What did Zinnemann think, that G.I.s never traveled in less than a battalion?!

This is a case in which the typical man watching FHTE in 1953, who would have served in uniform, knew more about the picture than the “expert.”

But those were just foretastes of things to come. Zinnemann expounds at length on Frank Sinatra, who won his Best Supporting Actor Oscar as “Angelo Maggio.” He says that in the big scene in which (spoiler coming) Maggio is arrested by MPs, the script called for Maggio to get up and fight the MPs, but that the Army insisted on Zinnemann and screenwriter Daniel Taradash changing the scene, so that Maggio passively sits and lets the MPs take him in. (The movie was made with the priceless cooperation of the U.S. Army, which insisted on some moderate changes to the script, particularly in changing the fate of the corrupt commanding officer. In James Jones’ 1951 novel, the abusive captain gets a promotion, but in the movie, the Army forces him to resign.)

Now, I hadn’t seen the picture in twenty years, but I could still remember, clear as a bell, that Zinnemann was full of crap. But he had barely started. He continued, in his insider mode, to tell us that Sinatra considered his father a wimp for giving in to the Army on that scene, and thereafter never respected him.

And so, Tim Zinnemann misrepresented not only an important scene in the picture, but invented an entire post-production story involving Frank Sinatra and his father that could not possibly have happened.

No sooner has Zinnemann finished with his little lecture, than Sinatra’s Maggio sees the MPs coming, jumps off the bench, and runs at them, swinging. Zinnemann says nothing.

Zinnemann has some interesting stories to tell about the movie, most notably about Montgomery Clift, but considering his credibility problems, I wouldn’t trust the stories unless I could find independent corroboration for them.

Tim Zinnemann was able to parlay his family name and connections into assistant director jobs on a series of quality pictures, including Bullitt and The Cowboys. That work led to producing jobs, with mixed results. His last producing credit is for The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), a production that was reportedly destroyed by the juvenile antics of Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer.

The DVD also contains a worthless quickie, “The Making of From Here to Eternity.”

Tim Zinnemann did partially redeem himself, however, in producing a nine-minute extra entitled, “Excerpts from ‘Fred Zinnemann: As I See It.’” This lovingly made, if brief documentary, cut by Walter Murch, one of the best technical men in the business (and who worked with the elder Zinnemann on Julia), cuts back and forth between scenes in From Here to Eternity, Fred Zinnemann’s own home movies of directing the picture, two BBC interviews with the director, where he appears to be roughly 65 and 80 years old, respectively, and a picture of the withered but dignified master not long before his 1997 death, which occurred several weeks before his ninetieth birthday.

(Note, however, that I could not locate any reference to a complete documentary, entitled, Fred Zinnemann: As I See It.)

In one interview, the director tells the famous story of his meeting with Columbia Pictures mogul, the tyrannical Harry Cohn, who did not want to cast Montgomery Clift as Prewitt. The actor whom Cohn planned to cast in the role, and whom the tactful Zinnemann refrains from naming, was Aldo Ray. The interview shows Zinnemann recounting how Cohn argued that Clift had no military background, and didn’t know how to box. Left out, whether out of pc censorship or Fred Zinnemann’s good manners, was Cohn’s coup de grace, “And he’s probably a homosexual!” (Which, indeed, Clift was.)

[Postscript, 2020: Knowing Cohn’s vulgar style, he probably said something a bit more colorful than “homosexual!,” but that’s the word that was used by someone I heard recount the story years ago.]

The short seamlessly, movingly interweaves the life of Fred Zinnemann and the story of From Here to Eternity.

Whatever Tim Zinnemann’s faults, he certainly loved and admired his father.