This is the best book ever written about life as an enlisted man in the Regular Army, but you'd never know it from the sanitized version put on screen. James Jones's novel was both romantically cynical about the Army and deeply misogynistic. In the early 1950s it couldn't be filmed as written, for both moral and political reasons. In the book, of course, Mrs. Kipfer runs a whorehouse, not a social club, and Lorene is a whore with an eye for the main chance, not a hostess. In the book, military authority is both arbitrary and corrupt. Holmes gets away with his abuse of Prewitt, winning promotion by sucking up to his superior's superior. In the book, Maggio succeeds in getting a Section 8 psychiatric discharge. In the book, the underpaid privates are willing to flirt with wealthy homosexuals, and there is a mass "queer investigation." In the book, Prewitt is impressed by Jack Molloy, the working class radical he meets in the stockade. In the book, Warden rejects both a proffered commission and Karen Holmes because he would rather stay an enlisted man and amuse himself with whores than be trapped in respectable middle class domesticity. In the book, Prewitt's desire for Lorene and Warden's for Karen make them weak, stupid and vulnerable -- Warden saves himself but Prewitt does not. In the book, Lorene goes back to the mainland with the money she's saved, to get a respectable job and pass herself off as the fiancée of Lieutenant Prewitt, of the Virginia Prewitts, killed at Pearl Harbor. None of these things make it into the movie. The book ends with Warden enthusiastically getting to know a new shipment of girls at Mrs. Kipfer's. The movie ends with a tacked on coda in which Holmes is duly punished for Prewitt's suffering. The 1979 miniseries came a bit closer to what Jones was trying to accomplish. Maybe one day HBO will give us a six or eight hour From Here To Eternity as it was meant to be.
Review of From Here to Eternity
