From Here to Eternity (1953) DVD:

(Contains Spoilers!) By Nicholas Stix The From Here to Eternity DVD, released in 2001, has a clean print and clear audio for the picture that, when I was 18, 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 pay checks 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 redeeem himself, however, in producing a nine-minute extra entitled, “Excerpts from ‘Fred Zinnemann: As I See It.’” This lovingly made, if brief (only nine minutes in length) 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.) 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.