Line #1 YMMV/FromHereToEternity


1	* AdaptationDisplacement: While the book is respected, James Jones is more remembered for ''Literature/TheThinRedLine'' - so the film version of ''From Here to Eternity'' usually comes to mind first. The beach scene probably has something to do with it...
2	* AlternativeCharacterInterpretation:
3	** Lorene's speech at the end - is she lying or is she only repeating a lie that Warden told her? She mentions speaking to Prew's mother (and he implies his parents are dead earlier in the film), suggesting it's the former. There's also the possibility that Warden lied to her but she knew it was a lie and is still choosing to go along with it. And further on from that, does she refer to Prew as her fiance because her offer to marry him was genuine and she wants to think of them as that? Or did she realise the potential for her cover story in that she had been seen with him many times and even let him into her house, and figured it would help to say they were engaged?
4	** How in love with Warden is Karen really? She outright says she's had multiple affairs before. Maybe she's had many steamy beach rendezvous with other men (as Warden suspects initially) - and still just wants the perks of being the wife of an officer. Or she could genuinely love him but be so depressed that she assumes he doesn't love her the same way. It's also left open as to [[spoiler: whether or not she's going back to the States with or without her husband at the end. She seems somewhat hopeful that she might return to the island one day, hinting that she may go back to try again with Warden one day]]. It's also plausible she realised exactly why Warden wouldn't want to become an officer, and broke things off knowing those circumstances would force them apart anyway.
5	** There's also an interpretation that makes Karen's character even sadder. What if Warden is not the first soldier she's tried to get to marry her so she can divorce Holmes? Maybe all the soldiers who joke about her were people she really did love or hoped to, and they just ended up using her for sex or whatever? Thus her reputation for [[ReallyGetsAround sleeping with loads of men]] is a result of her trying to get out of her marriage and finding the wrong partners? Some of her dialogue however does suggest she was just having affairs to cope with the depression after her miscarriage. And indeed, she specifically went after soldiers rather than civilians, meaning they stood to suffer more consequences than her if the affairs were discovered. So it's somewhat understandable that Stark in particular might be a little sore about risking career ruin (or possibly worse, given how corrupt Holmes is) for what ended up just being a fling.
6	** Did Lorene/Alma come to love Prew for real? Is it just a fling as she suggests early on - to keep herself from getting lonely? Or was she genuine when she offered to marry him? After offering to marry him, she then says she's worried she'll never see him again, suggesting she had reconsidered. But that even could just be something that she hoped would make him stay behind.
7	** Prew getting into a boxing fight with Sgt Galovitch. Is it just the last straw for him, and he's had so many punishments he no longer cares what comes next? Or is it actually more pragmatic? Note that while he makes it clear he wants to get into a fight, he lets Galovitch make all the first moves and doesn't fight back for a long time. So was he hoping for a spectacle that even the higher ups couldn't ignore to finally end 'the treatment'?
8	* AwardSnub:
9	** Deborah Kerr went ferociously against her EnglishRose typecasting here, nailing an American accent and displaying all the riveting depth and subtlety of performance that Hollywood hadn't allowed her to show before. Unfortunately, she was competing with Audrey Hepburn's StarMakingRole in ''Film/RomanHoliday'', and this was the second of ''six'' Oscars she'd miss out on.
10	** Montgomery Clift was regarded as the real workhorse of the film, throwing himself into MethodActing to prepare, and WordOfGod saying he encouraged every other actor to do better too. He and Burt Lancaster were both nominated for Best Actor, meaning they cancelled each other out. Creator/WilliamHolden ended up winning.
11	* BestKnownForTheFanservice: While it's a respected war movie, by far the most memorable scene is the steamy kiss on the beach between Creator/BurtLancaster and Creator/DeborahKerr. Deborah lampshaded this in later years.
12	--> "I've played so many different roles in so many different locales...and yet all they ever talk about is that roll in the sand."
13	* CommonKnowledge: The rumor that Creator/FrankSinatra only got his role due to his Mafia connections, cemented in popular culture by ''Film/TheGodfather'', has never been substantiated. Everyone involved in the movie denied it, including Creator/EliWallach, the original choice to play Maggio; Wallach had been cast in Creator/TennesseeWilliams' play ''Camino Real'' and preferred that role to the film, leaving the door for Sinatra to take the part.[[note]]For his part, Sinatra was extremely grateful to Wallach, though he would always needle him by saying, "Hello, you crazy actor!" whenever they'd meet publicly.[[/note]] Understandably this issue became a lifelong BerserkButton for Sinatra, who frequently threatened to sue newspapers and magazines repeating the story, and once publicly confronted Mario Puzo after ''The Godfather'''s publication. The reason he was cast is that Creator/AvaGardner was shooting a film for Columbia and suggested him. Studio head Harry Cohn signed him on because his stock was low and that meant he wasn't likely to charge much (indeed he was only paid $8000 for it).
14	* EnsembleDarkhorse: Both Maggio and Karen are the most remembered characters in the film. The former for the fact that Frank Sinatra really showed his range, and the latter for the shocking {{Fanservice}} she provided.
15	* FairForItsDay: The original manuscript contained passages revealing that Maggio would sometimes prostitute himself to rich gay men. Prewitt doesn't judge him for it, merely saying he's not interested in sleeping with men. Maggio admits "it's nothing like a woman, but it's something". James Jones was against cutting the sequences from the book, having witnessed plenty of same sex relations during his time in the army, and viewing it as a perfectly natural thing. While he viewed it as SituationalSexuality, he still affirmed that being gay or bi in no way affected a soldier's competency.
16	* HarsherInHindsight:
17	** Montgomery Clift playing an excellent soldier who gets an injury, is seen [[DrowningMySorrows drinking heavily afterwards]] and [[spoiler: gets killed through his own stupidity]]. The whole thing seems oddly prophetic of what would happen to him three years later; a near-fatal car crash that led to extreme substance abuse, derailing his promising career and his death at the age of forty-six. It was even that incident which led to a nasty falling out with Frank Sinatra, with whom he had become good friends while making this film.
18	** Deborah Kerr trapped in a loveless marriage and considering getting a divorce. Her own marriage would fall apart before the decade was over, and her husband had even been a decorated war veteran too.
19	* SugarWiki/HeReallyCanAct:
20	** This was Music/FrankSinatra’s first foray into serious acting after plenty of musicals.
21	** After numerous films of, as she put it "poker up the arse parts", Creator/DeborahKerr showed Hollywood her range. English audiences had known she was more versatile anyway.
22	* HilariousInHindsight:
23	** Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr would reunite later in ''Film/TheGypsyMoths'', as an obvious nod to their roles here; complete with a love scene that goes even raunchier, featuring the only nudity of the latter's career, and this time it's her who's reluctant to commit to the affair.
24	** Deborah Kerr would also play an adulteress in ''Film/TeaAndSympathy'', and in that her character was previously married to a soldier.
25	* HoYay:
26	** There's rather a lot of it between Prewitt and Maggio, especially in [[spoiler: the latter's death scene]]. Given that there was plenty of homosexuality in the book (and it had to be censored for the Hays Code), this is probably intentional.
27	** Not to mention that Prewitt and Warden actually share more scenes together than they do with their respective women (this one is justified, mind you, since they're in the same unit and can only see the women on weekends). The scene in which Warden sneakily gives Prewitt a weekend pass is dripping with it. Montgomery Clift was rumored to be bisexual in real life.
28	* IronWoobie: Prewitt is an orphan who was going nowhere in life until he joined the army. He was recently dropped from first bugler entirely due to politics, and had to give up boxing because he couldn't cope with the guilt of accidentally blinding a friend. And when he transfers, the entire unit bullies and mistreats him because he won't start boxing again. Despite this, he's actually the ''least'' angsty character in the movie!
29	* JerkassWoobie: Karen may be cheating on her husband but she's depressed and trapped in an unhappy life. The fact that she had to suffer a miscarriage because her husband was too drunk to call a doctor for her pretty much sums it up.
30	* MemeticMutation: Every movie or TV show that has featured an oceanside love scene has been assumed to be paying {{Homage}} to this film.
31	* MoralEventHorizon: Staff Sgt. Judson [[spoiler:beating Maggio to death.]]
32	* {{Narm}}: The InsistentTerminology that Lorene is a 'nightclub hostess' and not a prostitute can be hilarious to watch. The club is clearly a censored brothel, and it's obvious the filmmakers had no intention of hiding it.
33	* NarmCharm: Deborah Kerr slips out of her accent for the line "I never thought it could be like this; nobody ever kissed me the way you do" (which is a somewhat Narmy line on its own) and it sounds rather goofy. But the passion of the scene is still very much intact.
34	* NeverLiveItDown:
35	** An urban legend has since arisen that Sinatra got his Oscar-winning part thanks to his mob connections. That hasn’t been proven, but it did inspire the Johnny Fontane storyline in ''Film/TheGodfather''.
36	** A similar urban legend is that George Reeves had his part cut down after test audiences kept going "there's Superman" - which has been denied by everyone who worked on the film, and no extra scenes for him are in the shooting script. Didn't stop the movie ''{{Film/Hollywoodland}}'' from saying it was true.
37	** Creator/ErnestBorgnine, while filming ''Film/{{Marty}}'', went into the Bronx to get into character for the role. While there, just walking around, he was harassed badly by some local toughs who were enraged that Borgnine's character in ''From Here to Eternity'', Sgt. Judson, had [[spoiler: killed Frank Sinatra's character.]] He was only able to calm them down by explaining that in reality, he was [[spoiler: good friends with Sinatra, as well as being a fellow Italian-American.]]
38	* OneSceneWonder: The DeadpanSnarker girl who welcomes Prewitt on his first night in the club. She sees him eyeing Lorene and then snarkily says she's going to talk to someone else "because I can see I'll be of no further use to you."
39	* ParodyDisplacement: The BeachKiss between Creator/BurtLancaster's and Creator/DeborahKerr's characters [[TropeCodifier which everyone has mimicked or spoofed]] was actually an allusion to a similar scene between Creator/JeanSimmons' and Creator/DonaldHouston's characters in ''Film/TheBlueLagoon1949'', which was released four years earlier.
40	* SignatureScene: The kiss on the beach. By 1980 it was so famous that the creators of ''Film/{{Airplane}}'' included a scene parodying it, while having ''no idea'' what it was actually from.
41	* StrangledByTheRedString: Prewitt and Lorene/Alma meet once, have an admittedly lengthy heart to heart in the night, and by their next meeting six weeks later he's already expecting her to drop work and meet him for drinks. It is possible that Prew, who's an orphan and still recovering from the trauma of blinding someone in the ring, latched onto the first girl he met who would listen to him and put her on a pedestal too much to cope with the abuse he was getting. She later outright says she views their relationship as a temporary affair that'll end when she moves back the next year.
42	* ValuesDissonance:
43	** When Karen tries to leave after the BeachKiss (specifically, ''after'' Warden has insulted her), he forcibly grabs her by the wrist. This is from the man presented as a better alternative to her careless husband.
44	** Warden also makes a sleazy joke to a waitress at the bar that pretty much says he's EatingTheEyeCandy - and the woman looks visibly uncomfortable. Again, this seems odd when the remainder of the scene goes out of its way to sell that he's not as much of a meathead as the others.
45	* ValuesResonance: Waden's initial disdain of Karen's sexual history enables him to have a HeelRealization. The narrative goes out of its way to show that Karen has very sympathetic reasons for cheating on her husband, and her having multiple partners is never questioned again. And even then, Warden's doubts about the affair are implied to be because of the high stakes involved with sleeping with his superior's wife and he'd prefer not to be used for sex. Karen also gets a moment where she calls out her husband for the DoubleStandard of him being annoyed that she wants a divorce to marry a new man she's fallen in love with, while she was supposed to just put up with him having affairs for years.

Context YMMV / FromHereToEternity