The New Pictures

From Here to Eternity (Columbia). Making novels into movies—turning the rambling equations of a story into the compact formula of drama—is a task perhaps fitter for some electronic calculating monster than for any human talent. That may explain why Hollywood, whose talent is all too human, has never developed a sure touch in these translations. Columbia's success in bringing James Jones's bestselling novel to the screen may be due partly to the fact that it was hardly a novel at all; it was an obscene, extravagant blot of ink, pressed between covers into something like a literary Rorschach sample. Every reader saw in it something different, but most agreed that it contained a tremendously vivid and exciting picture of men in the mass, and added, up to as powerful an expression of love-hate for the U.S. Army as had ever been published.

Scriptwriter Daniel Taradash rescued, if not quite a gem, then at least a high-grade industrial diamond from this rough original; and Director Fred Zinnemann, whose hand showed its great skill in High Noon, has polished the diamond till it cuts. In the refinement, it is true, something has been lost: the bloody but beautiful amateur standing of it all. There are touches of slick sentimentality that do not seem to come from the book; and many readers of the novel will miss some of the original's honest and barbed-wiry vignettes that had to be shorn away. But no one will miss the book's wealth of pointless profanity. Through its chill professional eye, the camera sees the persons of the drama more clearly than Jones did, and still does not wear too yellow a filter when it looks—far less bitterly than the book—at the "Pineapple Army" of 1941.

The screenplay focuses more sharply than the novel did on Private Robert E. Lee ("Prew") Prewitt, the "hardhead" who can "soldier with any man," the 30-year man who cannot play it smart because he is cursed with a piece of ultimate wisdom. As he puts it, "If a man don't go his own way, he's nothin'."

Transferred into Company G at Schofield Barracks in Honolulu, Prew is instantly informed by Captain Dana ("Dynamite") Holmes that he cannot go his own way. Captain Holmes, a boxing fanatic who wants his company to win the regimental championship, knows that Prew is a first-class middleweight, and insists that he box for his new outfit. Prew, who quit fighting after he blinded a friend with a "no more'n ordinary right cross," refuses. Furious, Holmes orders his non-coms—all of whom are on the boxing team—to give Prew "the treatment."

Prew takes it without a word for months on end. They trip him in bayonet drill, cheat him in rifle inspection, and for every fault they find, Prew has to pay with K.P., extra laps around the track under full pack, or hours of digging enormous holes in the ground so that jeering noncoms can bury a single newspaper. (In the movie, Captain Holmes is forced to resign for his actions; in the book, he was promoted.)