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Fred Zinnemann’s sturdy adaptation of James Jones’s army melodrama remains an underrated slice of homoerotic, bittersweet war-is-hell film-making
Seventy years ago, in the midst of mass critical adulation and storming box office for From Here to Eternity, the Guardian published one of the film’s few tepid reviews. “No doubt no army in a free country was at its best in pre-war years,” wrote the paper’s unnamed film critic, “but surely no unit of the American Army was quite so corrupt as this account would have us believe.” The acting and directing were “first-class”, the critic acknowledged; the film itself “[defied] credibility”.
Viewed in 2023, Fred Zinnemann’s big, muscular melodrama of Hawaiian barracks life in the months leading up to the bombing of Pearl Harbor has inevitably dated a bit – though perhaps not as much as the Guardian’s concern that it did the US army a bit dirty. Adapted from a sprawling, near-900-page bestseller by James Jones – the soldier turned author who witnessed the bombing first-hand – the somewhat streamlined film cleaned up Jones’s more damning portrait of corruption and abuse in army ranks. That was in large part so as to secure the army’s cooperation while filming on location at Schofield Barracks, and to gain access to the archival military footage of the attack that makes the film’s finale so jolting. The novel itself, meanwhile, had been censored by its publisher before going to press: in particular, multiple passages detailing homosexual activity and even sex work among soldiers were scrapped, restored only in a revised digital edition in 2011.
