I could be blogging about the crappy state of things in the US right now, but lots of people are doing that and I don’t think I can add anything helpful. What I can do is keep writing about what I want to write about. And this time it’s old movies.

I finally got around to watching a classic film that has lingered on my radar for years: From Here To Eternity. I grew up in the 60’s and 70’s, amid homage and parody references to the film, but I had never seen it. Last week I sat down with my wife to see what all the fuss was about. Two hours later, my initial reaction was “Huh? Really?” Mind you, the acting was great and the film was full of stars, but the story felt weak and disjointed. It left me wondering what on earth could have made it so famous. A younger me would have dismissed the film as overrated, but I’m old enough now to suspect that I might have missed something. For what it’s worth, here’s what I came up with.

Eternity came out early in the Cold War, when the US was actively fighting in Korea and sorta-maybe helping the French in Vietnam. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and defector Igor Gouzenko were still fresh in American minds. The USSR had set off their first nukes, and the US had just executed the Rosenbergs for helping them do it. The HUAC was on their dim-witted witch-hunt, pushing Hollywood to blacklist artists. White America was terrified of the nascent Civil Rights movement and watching helplessly as their children danced down the slippery slope of Rock ‘n’ Roll. The Hays Code was enforcing wholesome Catholic morality on the big screen, suppressing homosexuality and demanding respect for authority figures and the clergy. (That’s funny. Instead of writing about the crappy state of things today, I ended up writing about the crappy state of things 75 years ago.)

The country had been worn out by the Depression, the War, the post-war housing shortage, and the growing threat of atom bombs. It needed rest, and Hollywood whipped up rose-tinted celluloid to show a comforting fantasy world where the line between the black hats and the white hats was clear. Then into that exhausted, terrified world dropped a novel of homosexuality, of abusive favoritism, of bad military officers, of philandering husbands and their burned-out wives, of prostitution, of brutal NCOs, and of an Army plagued by men who’d lost touch with the mission.

The film version of Eternity glossed over some things (alas, not even a gunsel), but the rest of the story was right there–ugly, tragic, and all too familiar to survivors of the war. Bill Mauldin had put hints in his ‘Willie and Joe’ cartoons (and drawn the ire of more than one general), but a lot of people were still keeping silent about their wartime experience. Slaughterhouse-Five and Catch-22 were still in the future. And it would be decades before the retired physician next door told me that one-fourth of the casualties coming off the line were psychological trauma and the Army didn’t have enough psychiatrists to handle them all.

[Aside: Looking back on that era, I now see the controlling father in Dead Poet’s Society as the brittle and self-loathing remnant of a man who had collapsed in combat and never made peace with it. If the doctor I knew was right, there must have been a lot of fathers like him in the 1950s, unable to seek help in a world where fictional John Wayne characters were the sole definition of masculinity and courage.]

So I get it. I’m sure that six film critics could cite another dozen reasons, but for me it was enough to realize that Eternity was a timely poke-in-the-eye to the moralizing jingoists who were pretending that America was something that it wasn’t.

I also saw Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but I’m not even gonna try to write about that.