Sam (00:14)
Welcome back to Rosie the Reviewer. This week we’re talking about the film From Here to Eternity, which came out in 1953. It was directed by Fred Zinnemann and written by Daniel Taradash. It’s based on the 1951 novel of the same name by James Jones, and it depicts the experiences of a small group of men stationed on Hawaii as part of the US peacetime army in the months leading up to Pearl Harbor. It won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

The two lead actors, Montgomery Clift and Burt Lancaster, were both nominated for Best Actor, which instead went to Friend of the Pod William Holden for Stalag 17 As with the thin red line, Jones borrowed the title for this one from a Rudyard Kipling poem. It’s from a part of a poem called Gentleman Rankers that goes, Gentleman Rankers out on the spree, damned from here to eternity. What did you think of this movie?

Maartje (01:09)
I enjoyed this one. I thought it was a very old Hollywood, but in a good way, like it felt very classic. It is in black and white. It also has Frank Sinatra in it, which I was not expecting. there’s a song in it called The Re-enlistment Blues that I quite enjoyed. And I don’t know, I I liked the acting, the acting was quite good. It wasn’t as slow as I thought it was going to be, so

You know me, I enjoy when movies are decently faced. I don’t know, I thought it was interesting it had women in in it. The women were subject to the man’s comings and goings I guess as usual. But it is nineteen fifty three, so I did enjoy that they had dialogue. They had some agency as well, which I liked. So overall I enjoyed this one a lot. How about you?

Sam (01:58)
I think it’s super well acted. I would say that it maintains the spirit of the book as an adaptation, but the book is 850 pages, or my copy of it was. And so fitting all of that into a two hour movie, just by necessity, you’re gonna lose a lot of stuff. And the way that Jones writes is so introspective for all of the characters that I think it’s just tough to depict it

On screen because you’re not getting the interior lives of you know these dozen guys that he’s talking about throughout the book. and I found with the book, similar to the Thin Red Line, which Jones also wrote, it was a little hard to get into at first, and then I got into it and I was really hooked by the end.

And I think it’s because he describes a guy going through his daily activities and his regular interactions in so much detail that I get impatient at first. And I think it’s because I’m used to reading nonfiction where I’m like, a thing happens and then a thing happens and then a thing happens, like cause and effect. But with Jones, you have to stop waiting for something to happen because the details are the happening. Like learning about these guys, their ins and outs and their daily life, that like that’s

those those are the events of the book. And he gets you so deep down inside a character so thoroughly that by the end you really relish those details and the characters stick with you. And because of that, no matter how good the adaptation is, it’s almost like looking at a tapestry through a keyhole. So you’re only getting like a little bit of the whole bigger picture. but yeah I think they they did their best. I think that I find the movies quite sanitized.

From the book, and that is just a result of the era in which it was made, you know, 1953, and they have to contend with the Hays Code and that kind of stuff. but I do think it maintains the anti-war, anti-military sentiment of Jones’s book, where he really tries to be honest about what the army was like. his main character, Pruitt, says that he loves the army, but the army doesn’t love him, you know.

And these guys do have these really unique personalities and thoughts and sensibilities, they try to compartmentalize it, but it comes leaking out eventually, you know, in the way that we see Warden having a an ill-advised affair with his commanding officer’s wife, for example, or Pruittt getting into fights and getting sent to the stockade.

Men are designed to be uniform and I feel like the movie does get that idea across pretty well, barring a few changes that they were forced to make, which we definitely will talk about later. But yeah, by and large, I think it’s a classic for a reason. Like I did enjoy the movie as well on its own merits.

Maartje (04:32)
I wonder if Prewitt’s reluctance to box in this movie is kind of ⁓ symbolic for just the anti war sentiment that is in there as well. Like is boxing the equivalent of the war in this movie? Maybe?

Sam (04:51)
Could be, yeah, you could interpret it that way.

Maartje (04:53)
I guess I did, yeah.

Sam (04:54)
And Jones is an interesting guy in his own right. As we mentioned in our Thin Red Line episode, he served in World War Two. Much of his work is semi-autobiographical. He joined the Air Corps in nineteen thirty nine and he wasn’t allowed to be a pilot because he had bad eyesight. So he transferred to the infantry, stationed at Schofield Barracks, which is where the movie takes place and where it was filmed. and he was there when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. So

He has a very extraordinary and interesting first person experience there that he really he really puts a lot of it into his work. And it was actually while playing football at Schofield Barracks that he obtained the ankle injury that would later get him invalided home from the war. And he has this three book trilogy about the war. So there’s From Here to Eternity, then there’s the Thin Red Line, and the last one is called Whisper, I believe. And Whisper is about

primarily his time in the hospital when he is sent home from the army. So yeah, Schofield Barracks is a major central part of his army experience. And this is what we’re seeing in this movie and what you read about in the book. From Here to Eternity was his first published novel. Many of the most raw passages in the book stem from experiences that he himself lived through, including like his father’s suicide, for example.

He was super lonely in the army. We have all these letters that he was writing home to his brother, who seemed to be kind of his confidant. And he was a really smart guy. He seemed all too aware of the nature of the institution in which he served. And he later explained it to his editor at Scribner’s, which ended up publishing the book. I have always wanted to do a novel of the peacetime army, something I don’t remember having seen. It will depict.

The small man standing on the edge of the ocean shaking his fist. And when he completed his trilogy, he explained it as it says just about everything I have ever had to say or will ever have to say on the human condition of war and what it means to us as against what we claim it means to us.

Maartje (06:49)
Interesting, Crowd. What we claim it means to us is very settling.

Sam (06:54)
Yeah, definitely.

Maartje (06:55)
I need to read this book because I just I just wished they were shorter. I felt like I would struggle.

Sam (07:01)
They are very sprawling I often feel that novels that exceed like four hundred and fifty pages don’t necessarily need to be that long. But I mean I you know, it’s just it depends on the book, I guess. I did, like I said, I did ha kind of have a hard time getting into it, and then you get used to it and you kind of it ends up flying by, you know.

Maartje (07:19)
Yeah. I guess I need to just hunker down one afternoon and just start one and then see how I feel about it.

Sam (07:26)
With Jones I really think you have to sit down and read the first, I don’t know, like solid like seventy or eighty pages in one go. Like you need to really like commit and invest yourself and once that happens, you’ll just be like ready to go to read the rest.

Maartje (07:40)
Okay, maybe I will try, she says, as she has many times before.

Sam (07:46)
Ha ha ha.

Maartje (07:47)
With that, let’s get into the movie.

The movie opens on Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, nineteen forty one. We meet Private Robert E. Lee Pruittt, played by Montgomery Clift, our main character, as he arrives at the headquarters for his new company. He’s been transferred out of the Bugle Court and now his new company CO, Captain Dana Dynamite Holmes, played by Philip Ober,

Once him on the regimental boxing team We also meet Private Angelo Maggio played Sinatra, who is Pruittt’s friend and a company first sergeant Milt Warden played by Burt Lancaster.

Sam (08:33)
Yeah, so Frank Sinatra at this point his career had kind of taken a slump and he really wanted to be in this movie. He’s like, There’s a tiny angry Italian man, I gotta do it. And the producers were so like meh about the idea that they made him pay to fly himself back for the screen test.

Maartje (08:52)
⁓

Sam (08:54)
And then when he did the movie, he had to take a pay cut. he really wanted to play this character. And I think that he made the right call. I think he’s great in this. And this kind of re-invigorated his career in many ways. He went on to record many of his most famous songs after this movie. And there was this whole rumor going around Hollywood where Sinatra had connections to the mob, but he didn’t want anyone to talk about it. And when they made the movie,

The Godfather, there’s a character in The Godfather who’s a washed up singer who makes an agreement with the mob to get his movie career back. And a lot of people thought that that was a reference to Sinatra getting this role in From Here to Eternity. Now, the real story is probably more along the lines of he used his wife’s pull in Hollywood, his wife was Ava Gardner, obviously very famous actor in her own right.

he probably used Ava Gardner’s influence to get this role more more than any mob connections, but he was pretty upset about his depiction or or what he considered to be his depiction in The Godfather.

Maartje (09:56)
If he’d just not paid any attention to it, I think people would have been less inclined to believe it. I didn’t know he was such a gangly kind of I don’t want to say ratty because that sounds mean, but he’s kind of a funny little man.

Sam (10:02)
Right.

Yeah, he’s definitely like very energetic, very kind of frenetic.

Maartje (10:18)
the Bugle core is the band core, right? Basically. yeah.

Sam (10:23)
Yeah. So

in the book, Pruittt loves to play the bugle. He’s just a born musician. when he plays taps, it brings him to tears. he loves music so much. And so the fact that he leaves the bugle core a matter of principle is so telling about his character that he’s willing to shoot himself in the foot like that or cut off his nose despite his face, over something that he loves so much.

Maartje (10:45)
I also thought that Montgomery Clift I bet he’s not playing in the bugle or anything else he’s playing in the movie, but it looks really real. It looks really good.

Sam (10:56)
So it’s not him playing, but he did take I think it was six months of lessons so that he would know how to like shape his lips and like what to do with his hands and that kind of stuff so that it would look real.

Maartje (11:06)
And that’s yeah, it’s really glad.

Sam (11:08)
Pruittt refuses to box and doesn’t explain why. He says it’s a private matter. We will come to find out that he accidentally blinded a man with a punch during his previous amateur boxing career. Holmes is unsympathetic about this. He’s like, Yeah, yeah, yeah, you punched a guy and you blinded him. It’s fine. And he sets out to make Pruittt’s life difficult, supported by his quote-unquote jockstrap NCOs, including Sergeant Ike Galovich, played by John Dennis. Now

In this company, Holmes is the guy who runs the regimental boxing team, and so if you want to become an NCO, you have to box. And if you don’t want to box, then he’s gonna make your life miserable by forcing everyone to give you what they call the treatment in the book, where it’s like everyone just dogs you until you wanna quit. He even tries to court-martial Pruittt at one point, although Sergeant Warden cleverly talks him out of it. Sergeant Warden

Is a super interesting character in the book because like I don’t want to say he’s the grouchy guy with a heart of gold, because that is way oversimplifying it, and he is a shithead a lot of the time. But he also, like, he just has this innate thing about officers where he’s like, Pruitt’s a good soldier, and Holmes is being an asshole. Ergo, I am going to sneakily be annoying to Holmes.

Maartje (12:27)
It also feels like Warden is really running the show well Holmes is kind of away a lot on having affairs with women and doing shit and not being a very good CO.

Sam (12:38)
Yeah, definitely. Warden definitely has everything under control. There’s a a part in the book towards the end the attack on Pearl Harbor happens, Warden is in the mess hall, he’s still drunk from the night before. They realize what’s happening, and he immediately turns to the mess hall chef and he’s like, put on a bunch of coffee.

Make sandwiches, do this, do that. And then he turns to the orderly room guy and he’s like, Go and get this organized. And then he turns to the other guy and he’s like, Go get this and this and this and bring them up onto the roof so we can take on the Japanese. And he gets everything all sorted. And then and then their CO shows up and he’s like, Warden, what are you doing on the roof? You should be down here organizing the company. And Warden’s like, I did it already. And he’s like, Well, did you talk to the kitchen guy? And he’s Yes. And he’s like, Well, did you talk to the orderly? He’s like, Yes. And the guy’s like,

We’ll come down here anyway. Like he just he just can’t believe that Warden just has it all in hand, you know?

Maartje (13:29)
Ha ha ha.

Yeah, I liked Warden too. I I thought he was even for a movie that’s so classic and so old where characters sometimes can feel a little bit two dimensional. I didn’t get that from either Pruittt or Warden, to be honest. I feel like these characters are all pretty maybe it’s the acting, yeah. The acting is really phenomenal.

Sam (13:54)
It is really good and I their relationship is so interesting in the book. Just as time goes on, they obviously have such a high degree of respect for each other, but at the same time both of them thinks that the other one is like a little bit unhinged, you know?

Maartje (14:08)
Well they are both a little bit weird I would have to agree. They do things that are either just plain odd or things they’re not supposed to be doing. So I guess they are a little bit unhinged.

Sam (14:21)
Yeah.

Maartje (14:22)
Pruet and Maggio enjoy a night out in the town and visit the quote unquote social club where Pruitt becomes infatuated with a young woman called Lorene, played by Donna Reed. Their night is interrupted when Pruittt has to stop Maggio from getting into it with a field player who turns out to be a sergeant at the Army Stockade, which is not a good sign. And he’s a man named Fatso Judson, they call him Fatso. He doesn’t like it very much when they do.

He’s played by Ernest Borgnine yet again the two nearly get into a knife fight later at another bar but Warden stops them.

Sam (14:58)
one of the things I liked about the book, and it did translate into the movie, was indelible impression you get of what you know Hawaii was like in that era. It’s so interesting because a group of European and American businessmen effectively overthrew the Queen of Hawaii in 1893.

And the US was like, that’s illegal. And the provisional government was like, do something about it then. And so in 1898, the US officially annexed Hawaii as part of the Spanish American War, which we talked about super briefly when we talked about the Philippines. And since then, like there’s still a lot of people who live in Hawaii who believe that Hawaii should be sovereign. And at this point, there’s

A ton of military presence, like late 1930s, right before the outbreak of war. There’s a ton of US military presence in Hawaii, and that really shapes everyday life for people on the islands. And there’s also quite a lot more tourism coming from the US than there ever was before, because it’s just easier to get there. Tourism is becoming more of a thing because people are more upwardly mobile than they were. so it’s this place that’s in flux. And Joan Didion, writer and journalist, once wrote

Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them. A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image, and not only Schofield Barracks, but a great deal of Honolulu itself has always belonged, for me, to James Jones.

Maartje (16:29)
wow, what a what a raving review honestly

Sam (16:34)
Yeah.

Maartje (16:34)
I love that.

Sam (16:35)
⁓ worth noting here too that in the book, Lorene is a sex worker and Pruittt meets her at a brothel, and in the movie they make her into a hostess at a social club.

Maartje (16:47)
I will say I I host us with a wink a little bit. You can kind of tell what they’re trying to do there. But I enjoyed it. I think there’s absolutely nothing wrong with sex work, but I thought it it gave her character a little bit more agency perhaps than she would have otherwise had in the relationship at least.

Sam (17:09)
Yeah.

Warden and Captain Holmes’ wife, Karen, played by Deborah Kerr, have been flirting ⁓ and he comes to her house ostensibly with papers to sign, but it’s really to make an overture, and this scene is straight out of the book, and I was glad that they they basic basically adapted it, whole cloth. They agree to meet up for a date where they go swimming

Warden has heard a rumor about Karen sleeping around at her husband’s old posting at Fort Bliss. And he actually hears this rumor from a barely present Sergeant Stark played by George Reeves randomly. And she explains about her unhappy marriage and stillborn son. And this is another change that was made because in the book she very much does have a son. And she

The reason why she had this other miscarriage was because she got an STI from her husband who was sleeping around and they didn’t want to depict that in the movie because they’re like respectable women, don’t have sexually transmitted infections.

Maartje (18:04)
You cannot be a slut is what they’re saying Which is wrong like women can do whatever the fuck they want now at least but in nineteen fifty three I guess that’s really not a message they want to be putting

Sam (18:14)
What’s

what’s interesting to me is that like, yeah, she does sleep with a couple guys, but she notably gets the STI from her husband because he’s been sleeping around and having an affair. So it’s like she’s bearing the brunt of her husband’s infidelities, like has nothing to do with her being someone who sleeps around.

Maartje (18:23)
Yeah.

the movie’s really protecting the man, then in this case. Really.

Sam (18:35)
Yeah. It feels that way. And I thought it was interesting that we only see Sergeant Stark a couple of times, like he doesn’t really have a lot of dialogue. And in the thin red line it was very similar. Like his character is played by John C. Riley and I think we see him like once or twice maybe. but Sergeant Stark and Sergeant Storm, who are effectively the same character, they are definitely like main characters in the book.

Maartje (18:37)
Huh.

Sam (18:56)
Like there’s there’s quite a lot of scenes, like Pruittt and Warden and Stark are all kind of they move in the same circles. So I just I thought it was interesting that in both cases those movies chose to focus on the relationship between Pruittt and Warden, or between Wit and Welsh in the thin red line, to and and then kind of exclude the third guy in the triangle a little bit.

Maartje (19:20)
Yeah,

Purrit is having a miserable time. While he’s cleaning up in the gymnasium, Galovich taunts him. Pruittt mouths off and walks away, which earns him climbing a mountain in full gear twice since he refuses to apologize on principle. Which to be fair he’s being kind of

Tortured like a modern form of torture the entire time.

Sam (19:45)
Yeah. And this incident is one that was pulled directly from Jones’s actual life. this did occur to him at one point having to climb this mountain in a full pack in the heat. And this is one of the parts too that reminds me of the way that Jones carries characters from work to work because if you remember Witt in the thin red line, he was constantly being like, Well, I don’t

feel like following this order because it’s not convenient to me. So I’m actually gonna go to the other company and do whatever over there. And then when they replace the CO, he’s like, actually I’m coming back because I felt like you did the right thing. And he’s really behaving in a way that you can’t really act in the army or you’re gonna get in trouble. But he just has this fierce independence streak that he can’t let go. these characters appear again in in Jones’s final novel in nineteen seventy eight under different names again.

notably none of these characters are specifically self-inserts for Jones. He does have other characters that kind of do that, but he does include some incidents that happened to him and and ascribes them to like Warden or Pruittt or whoever.

Maartje (20:45)
It also feels like the main characters are all like outsiders. Like they don’t really wanna be there. They’d rather be doing something different, but at the same time they also wanna do eventually wanna stay in the army and do their job or duty or whatever. But they’re very similar.

Sam (21:04)
Yeah, definitely. spoilers I guess, but Pruittt dies at the end of From Here to Eternity. And Jones hadn’t originally intended to have the same characters throughout his three novels, but he felt that it was spiritually necessary to have Pruittt die at the end. He’s like, I don’t really see any other way out for this guy, like it has to happen.

And so that’s why his characters are back under slightly different names in the next two books.

Maartje (21:30)
wonder if that’s why in the thin red line movie wit dies.

The end.

Sam (21:35)
Goodbye.

Pruittt hasn’t been allowed on a pass for some time, so he has to stay on base. He’s not allowed to go into town. Because of the treatment he’s been getting from Captain Holmes, but Warden lets him out one night. Pruittt’s like, Yeah, but how will you get him to sign it? And Warden’s like, He signs whatever I put in front of him, dude. Don’t about it So he goes into town and he’s a little miffed because it’s a super busy Saturday night or whatever night it is, and Lorene is busy obviously ’cause she’s at work.

And she doesn’t seem to have time for him, but she displays a a moment of vulnerability when she admits to him that her real name is in fact not Lorene, but Alma.

Maartje (22:10)
Yeah, just I really like that they just revealed her very common simple name instead of the more exotic Lorene that she’s been called by her boss.

Sam (22:22)
Yeah.

Maartje (22:22)
And then in the same moment, doesn’t she also later still show up to the bar where he is at? Is the this scene or did I misunderstand?

Sam (22:32)
maybe. I don’t remember.

Maartje (22:32)
I think sh

I think she says I don’t have time and he kind of fucks off and then lights where he’s at the bar where Maggio also is and she shows up anyway so she does come after him Which I thought was sweet but also give this woman let her do her job, let her make some money. Come on guys, she doesn’t have to do whatever the man wants her to do.

Sam (22:40)
Right, right,

Makes sense.

Yeah, let her make that bank. Come on now.

Maartje (22:57)
Exactly. Maggio meanwhile, is too slow getting dressed and gets assigned guard duty as a result. Unfortunately gets drunk and wanders off and turns up at the night out that they’re at in the bar. And he’s caught then he’s court martialed and sent to the stockade. Which is not a good thing because remember who’s at the stockade?

Sam (23:19)
Yes, his arch nemesis, Fatso Judson. ⁓

Maartje (23:23)
Fet

Fets are such a rude nutmarge.

Sam (23:27)
It is, but man, the stockade in the book and I mean they don’t really depict it in the movie at all, but there’s a a quite a long passage of time that is spent at the stockade and it’s like these guys will get taken away and put in they call it the hole, where you’re in just like a dark room for three days or six days or however long they feel like putting you in this dark room and like

They’ll come every intermittent period of time and just beat the shit out of you. And you don’t get enough food when you’re in there. and they’re making these guys when they’re not in the hole, they’re breaking rocks in the hot Hawaiian sun using like a 16 pound hammer. And the guards can beat the shit out of them for, you know, not making their bed correctly or whatever. It’s just brutal. Like they’re having a terrible time. and

I mean we’ll talk about this more later, but they were made to change a lot of these details when it got made into the movie because the army didn’t want to admit that they had this kind of structural abuse happening.

Maartje (24:24)
Yeah, that’s not a very good postcard from the military.

Sam (24:28)
Right.

Pruittt asks Lorene to marry him. but he soon learns that Lorene intends to return to the mainland to marry after she makes enough money. She’s like I’m gonna I’m gonna go marry I’m gonna go build a house for me and my mom. I think in the book she wants to marry a rich guy. But anyway, he she’s gonna go back to the mainland, she’s not gonna be here forever, and since he’s a career soldier, their future looks doubtful.

Maartje (24:51)
I don’t know how how I feel about their relationship in general. I thought it was cute when it started and then afterwards it became kind of cumbersome for me. I thought they were kind of being very dramatic and where’s the fun? The fun was kind of out of it, but I guess Pruittt doesn’t have a lot of fun.

Sam (25:09)
Yeah. Well that’s what happens when you fall in love with a sex worker. I mean, famously. I don’t think you’re supposed to do that. We also have pretty women, right?

Maartje (25:15)
No

we did but that did end up like a fairytale in the end.

Sam (25:20)
It did.

Maartje (25:21)
Sergeant Galovich initiates an argument with P Pruittt and they get into a physical altercation. Pruittt is reluctant to hit him in the face at first because of his history with hitting people in the face, but finally does go for it and punches the living daylights out of this guy. Holmes witnesses the fight, but he doesn’t stop it, which is witnessed by

The regimental commander, so Holmes is in hot water, you guys, and I like that about the movie. And I also like that the other soldiers there kind of took for red side too. It was like yeah, he finally he gets people kind of sticking up for him.

Sam (26:00)
Yeah, this isn’t in the film, but in the book Pruittt goes to the stockade for a little while and when he comes back, all of the guys pretty much just like respect him after that. And even before that, it’s like there are a small number of NCOs giving him shit, but most of the guys in the company are like, Yeah, we see what’s happening, we’re not vibing with it, but there’s nothing we can really do about it.

Maartje (26:22)
Yeah, and I think at this point they also kind of let him off the hook for not wanting to be a boxer. up until that point they’ve been ho kind of hounding him on it and being like, Come on, you have to join, there’s still time. you can make us champions and all that, but now they kind of give up on that.

Sam (26:39)
Yeah. In the book there’s a character called Bloom who is also a boxer, and he and Pruittt don’t get along. And Bloom is one of these guys who takes advantage of the benefits that are offered by being a boxer. Like he gets promoted to corporal and he gets all these little perks for being on Holmes’ boxing squad. And it’s him and Pruittt who get into a big fight at one point.

And it’s him who ultimately dies by suicide. And there’s a whole scene where you get to learn, I guess, his inner thoughts and inner turmoil. I really was not expecting him to kill himself. And then when he did, I was like, you know, it was it’s a really ⁓ like that is a passage of the book that I highly recommend to people to read because it’s just you can tell that Jones is working through some stuff, you know, related to his dad’s suicide probably and and that kind of thing.

Because Bloom kills himself in the same way that Jones’ dad did. And Galovich, who’s in the movie, he is also a character in the book, but later on he gets mad at Pruittt for something, I don’t remember what it was, and then he pulls a knife on him, and Pruittt knocks him out, and then later Galovich like, Pruittt tried to stab me, and that’s how he ends up in the stockade. So there’s these like two different antagonistic characters, but I find even the ones that are

I guess as Jones would say, a real son of a bitch, you still get to you know, sympathize with them in some ways and understand at least what’s going on in there.

Maartje (28:06)
I guess he makes them really human. Like they’re not two dimensional. They have all these inner feelings and inner thoughts.

Sam (28:13)
Yeah.

Maartje (28:14)
I think often if there’s a bad guy, especially in a movie, but I guess also in books, the bad guys don’t nearly get as much backstory as or inner thoughts as the good guys do, so I guess it’s good that he describes both of them

Sam (28:28)
Pruittt wanders off from a drunk sing along with some friends one night and encounters an equally drunk warden sitting in the middle of the road. This is another scene that’s lifted whole cloth from the book, which I was happy about. They are nearly hit by a car, but neither is too concerned. They’re doing that drunk guy thing where they’re like No you get off the road so you don’t get hit by a car. No, you have so much to live for you get off the road so you don’t get hit by a car. it really ⁓ made me chuckle when I was reading it in the book too.

And just then a wounded maggio staggers up, having escaped from the stockade. His injuries, the result of having been beaten by Fatso Judson, are so severe that he dies.

Maartje (29:06)
He was dying for so long in this scene. I was like Is he dying? Is he surviving? What’s happening?

Sam (29:13)
Yeah. And this is a key change because in the book Maggio doesn’t die. He and Pruittt end up in the stockade together, but Maggio goes a a while before Pruittt, so by the time Pruittt gets in there with him, Maggio has changed a lot. He’s really evolved into the kind of person that you have to be when you’re constantly worried about taking a shit kicking. Like you can tell that it’s kind of knocked him off some kind of, you know, hinge inside his mind a little bit. And

Pruittt, when he’s in the stockade, he’s there on principle, yet again, because he refuses to say what they want him to say at his court martial. So this is just classic Pruittt. It’s very in line with his character. And ⁓ and and yeah, by the time he gets there, Maggio’s been in there for so long that he decides that he’s going to deliberately try and get himself thrown in the hole for 30 days, because if that happens, then you can get sent to the mental health hospital. I mean, they don’t call it that, but I’m gonna call it that.

And as you can imagine, putting someone in a dark hole for thirty days and beating them regularly if they weren’t already mentally unwell, then they sure as shit will be. And he ends up getting a section eight discharge. So basically just loses his marbles at the end.

Maartje (30:20)
Pruitt is upset about his pal dying, so he checks down Judson and pulls a knife. They have a fight and they have a bit of a stumble and they stumble out of frame which I thought was funny. And then Judson stumbles back into it and he dies. And we find out that Pruitt has stabbed him and killed him, but he’s also injured himself.

Unable to return to the army post because he fears that Judson’s death will be tied to him, which is not unreasonable to think, he goes to Lorene’s, and Warden, the good man that he is, covers for him while he’s awall.

Sam (30:54)
I enjoyed it in the book because Warden is he decides that he’s gonna go on furlough so he can go hang out with Karen for a few weeks. And she’s like, Bro, I can’t just like leave for a few weeks and go with you on a vacation. And he was like, Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’ll be fine. So they end up going on this vacation. It sucks. Like they don’t have a good time. And then when he comes back, the guy who’s been covering him while he’s been gone like

by the way, Pruittt hasn’t shown up the last three days. And Warden’s like, so? And the guy’s like, Yeah, so I just put that he was here. And Warden’s like, Fucking, why? And the guy’s like, Well, I figured you want to deal with it when you got back. And Warden’s like, For fuck’s sake. So now he feels responsible, right? He’s like, he didn’t make this decision himself, but he’s like, Alright. So he ends up marking Pruittt as present for as long as he can, because Warden knows.

Who killed Fatso Judson? He’s not an idiot. And he’s like, At least if I can say he was here for another week, then they won’t draw like a link between his absence and Fatso Judson’s death.

But I just love I love Warden pretending that he’s not gonna do the good thing and then doing it anyway. I get a kick out of that.

Maartje (32:04)
Yeah, Wood and if you look at him in a movie you think at first that he’s gonna be some hot head sergeant, but he’s really not.

Sam (32:12)
Yeah. His character in the Thin Red Line, if you remember, ⁓ is the one who there’s the guy, the d Kirk Acevedo character who’s dying on the hill, and Welsh slash warden runs out and he essentially gives him all of these syringes of morphine so that he can kill himself. And when he gets back, his CO’s like, my god, you’re a hero, and he’s like, I am not a hero. I just wanted him to stop yelling. So it’s just like

Yeah, he’s definitely a guy who’s like he’s complex, you know? He’s got all kinds of stuff going on.

Maartje (32:43)
Yeah.

I just also noticed that the name Pruitt has a writ in the actual name.

Sam (32:50)
Yep. it does.

Holmes is soon relieved of his command because of his treatment of Pruittt. He is replaced by Captain Ross, played by John Bryant, who quickly demonstrates that there will be no more funny business in his company. filming took place at Schofield Barracks, and in exchange, the U.S. Army insisted that the filmmakers make a bunch of changes in the movie. So one of those is the whole Lorene can’t be a sex worker,

Karen Kant have had an STI. They took out the death by suicide. And one of these changes was in the movie, Captain Holmes is forced to resign. So we see the system working as intended. He’s one bad apple and he gets removed, and then a better guy comes in. In the book, Holmes gets promoted, which is what he wanted all along. But the army did not want systematic abuse depicted as routine or part of the institution.

And so they insisted it being being depicted in this way. And I think it was the director who said he was so disgusted about that scene. He said, It looks like a recruitment film. Like they really didn’t want to be doing that because it it it changes a lot of the messaging in the movie, right?

Maartje (33:58)
I was gonna say propaganda.

Sam (34:00)
Yeah. And a a similar thing happened to the book. It’s been claimed that the book had the most swears in it of anything ever published at the time. And it ended up being heavily sanitized during its first publication. They took out a ton of references to sex of all kinds, including gay sex. they took out in the in the book Maggio

has performed sex acts for money when he’s been running low before payday. They took that out of course. and obviously a lot of the swearing was was dulled down. And then it wasn’t until like decades later that they reversed those changes and now you can get a copy of the book as Jones intended it to be read.

Maartje (34:40)
Quite I don’t want to say impressed, but I’m quite surprised by Jones how he openly writes in that time about things that would have been pretty scandalous things to write about.

Sam (34:53)
Yeah, no, definitely. And Jones you know, openly admitted that he had had same sex relationships before. I think today we’d probably call him bisexual because he also did date women, but I don’t know that he ever, you know, expressed a s a specific label for himself. But ⁓ I did laugh because there was a lot of Hollywood rumoring that Montgomery Clift was gay. And when someone brought it up with Jones, he said

I never had an affair with Clift. I would have, but he didn’t ask me.

Maartje (35:22)
Sorry. I love a man who’s confident enough to say that in nineteen fifty three.

Sam (35:27)
Right.

Yeah.

Maartje (35:28)
Warden had promised Karen that he was working on becoming an officer. To suit the pipe dream that maybe one day she could leave her husband and they could marry instead, but he wasn’t able to go through with it. She informed him that she will be returning to the mainland because of her husband’s resignation from the company. They agree that they will meet again, but they both know better and so do we.

Sam (35:51)
Yeah, I liked the way that Jones wrote this in the book where, as Karen’s walking away and th they’ve been like, Yeah, you know, we’ll see each other again, whatever. And as Karen’s walking away, she’s going, Yeah, I I know we’ll never see each other again, but sometimes you just have to reassure someone and you know, men are so weak when it comes to this kind of stuff, and I just need to let him think that everything will be okay. And then you flip to his perspective and he’s like

Yeah, I know we’ll never see each other again, but I just wanted her to feel reassured. You know what women are like with these things. So it’s it’s just they’re both having the exact same thoughts and you’re like, man, this relationship really should have worked out.

Maartje (36:23)
Ha ha ha.

They’re perfect for each other. I like that there’s romance in this book that is truly romantic, yet none of it works out.

Sam (36:31)
Yeah, really.

Yeah. Yeah, I like it too. I think that Jones is one of the better mid century male writers of female characters that I have read and all the relationships feel honest to me, which I really enjoy.

Maartje (36:54)
Yeah.

Sam (36:55)
December seventh, nineteen forty-one, and by the way, it cracks me up because in the scene before this, Warden is leaning against a wall and there’s a calendar hanging on the wall that says Saturday, December sixth, nineteen forty-one. And I was just like, Pearl Harbor’s comin’, huh?

Maartje (37:08)
Mm-hmm.

Very subtle foreshadowing.

Sam (37:14)
Yes. And

I will say in the book, Pearl Harbor okay, this book’s like eight hundred and fifty pages, and Pearl Harbor happens around like the seven hundred and some odd page mark, like seven hundred and change. So you’re waiting a long time for Pearl for Pearl Harbor to happen. But yeah, so the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor. We get to see some of the footage that they used in the movie, the the filmmakers actually got it directly from the army. So this is real

footage of Pearl Harbor, some of these scenes where you’re seeing explosions and that kind of stuff. The men at the barracks are strafed by a Japanese plane before they come to their senses and they get the fuck out of the big open square and they go hide out inside. Warden gets the company organized and goes up on the roof to lead an attack against the Japanese planes soaring overhead. So they’ve got their BARs on their machine guns and they’re they’re taking pot shots at these planes.

Maartje (38:04)
Enjoy Warden telling people to get ammunition and then the other guy being like No, I’m not allowed to open the ammunition room. You’re not allowed in there. I’ve got my orders and then they just all break it open.

Sam (38:17)
Yeah. That was also a scene from the book which I which I did enjoy.

Maartje (38:21)
Like dude, you mean attacked by the Japanese Why the heck won’t you keep following orders?

Sam (38:27)
I

know. It’s just so indicative of everything that Jones had to criticize about the army, you know, following orders even when it doesn’t make sense.

Maartje (38:33)
Yeah.

Sam (38:35)
I have a passage from the book where, as I mentioned, you get a whole ton of buildup to Pearl Harbor. and so I’m just gonna redo the passage where it actually happens. And Jones wrote so the the passage is from Warden’s point of view, but what what happens to Warden is largely what Jones experienced. Jones was in the mess hall, he was coming after a night out, I think.

And so everything that you’re getting here from Warden’s perspective is like, this is how Jones experienced it. So it says it was a typical Sunday morning breakfast for the first weekend after payday. At least a third of the company was not home. Another third was still in bed asleep. But the last third more than made up for the absences in the loudness of their drunken laughter and horseplay and the clashing of cutlery and half pint milk bottles.

Warden was just going back for seconds on both hot cakes and eggs, with that voracious appetite he always had when he was drunk, when this blast shuddered by under the floor and rattled the cups on the tables and then rolled on off across the quad like a high wave at sea in a storm. He stopped in the doorway of the KP room and looked back at the mess hall. He remembered the picture the rest of his life. It had become very quiet, and everybody had stopped eating and looked up at each other.

Must be doing some dynamite in down to Wheeler Fields, somebody said tentatively. I heard they was clearin’ some ground for a new fighter strip, somebody else agreed. That seemed to satisfy everybody. They went back to their eating. Warden heard a laugh ring out above the hungry gnashings of cutlery on China as he turned back to the KP room. The tail of the chow line was still moving past the two griddles, and he made a mental note to go behind the cook’s serving table when he bucked the line this time, so as not to make it so obvious.

That was when the second blast came. He could hear it a long way off, coming toward them under the ground, then it was there before he could move, rattling the cups and plates in the KP sinks and the rinsing racks, then it was gone, and he could hear it going away northeast toward the twenty first Infantry’s football field. Both the KPs were looking at him. He reached out to put his plate on the nearest flat surface, holding it carefully in both hands so it would not get broken, while he congratulated himself on his presence of mind by

and then turned back to the mess hall, the KP still watching him. As there was nothing under the plate, it fell on the floor and crashed in the silence, but nobody heard it, because the third groundswell of blast had already reached the PX and was just about to them. It passed under, rattling everything, just as he got back to the NCO’s table. This is it, somebody said quite simply.

Maartje (41:03)
Wow, I really need to read this book. I like that it’s described as passing under, like a blast fell through the floor. I’ve never thought of it like that before.

Sam (41:14)
Right? Yeah, Jones has a real knack for a turn of phrase, man. There’s just so many passages in this book that are just wow beautiful.

Maartje (41:22)
And they’re also very visual, like I can just you know I can’t v visually imagine anything because my brain is broken. But it does make it interesting when there’s descriptions like this in the book because I cannot have them in my mind, so it’s lovely when they’re actually in the book.

Sam (41:39)
Yeah.

Maartje (41:40)
thing, it’s so just day to day still, even in that description of those explosions. They’re just going about their business even as they’re happening because they don’t yet know what is going on.

Pruitt realizes he must return to the company despite Lorene’s tearful protests. Unfortunately, he is shot by one of the MPs in the dark before he can reach his unit, which is stationed on the beach. Warden identifies his body, acknowledging that they were friends. I was so sad. His death was so unnecessary and

I like the conversation that they have where one of the MPs or one of the COs, I think it’s a CO asked Warden why the hell didn’t he stop when they halted him because they shout halt at him like a million times and he just doesn’t and Warden says something about him being a hard head. I guess he was a hard head to the end.

Sam (42:35)
Yeah. And he really thought I think that ’cause you know, he’s always talking about how he’s a thirty year man, he’s a career soldier, and he really thought that going back to the army would be like a homecoming and then obviously that did not occur. And in the book he’s armed, he has a gun on him, it belongs it’s it’s Alma’s gun or Lorene’s gun. And he gets stopped by the MPs and he decides that he’s like, I just I just gotta get back to my company.

Like, if I can just get back to my company, everything will be fine. So he legs it, and they’re calling for him to stop, and they’re shooting at him or whatever. And then they turn on the spotlight and he turns around and he doesn’t raise the gun because he’s like, I don’t want to shoot them. They’re my own guys. And then they shoot him and he like falls into the sandpit. And afterwards, like the guy who shot him is like,

Why didn’t he try and shoot me? I don’t understand why he didn’t raise the gun. But it’s very like is very prun it to the end, right? Like he’s on principle. He’s even if something is good for him, he’s not necessarily gonna do it if he doesn’t believe that it’s right.

Maartje (43:37)
No, and also they are his guys, so why would he shoot him? Anyway, why did they shoot him? Because they couldn’t see him like this.

Sam (43:46)
Well in the book he’s been AWOL for several weeks. He killed Fatso Judson, and then even after Pearl Harbor happened, he was basically just sitting around L Lorene’s apartment getting wasted every day, and she was like, Are you gonna figure your shit out? And he was like, Mm, never. But then eventually when he does decide that he’s gonna go back to his company, he’s been gone a long time. So he’s wearing this uniform that’s

Way too clean because Alma had it washed for him. And he has like ID card that he’s able to carry around expired because he never he was AWOL. He didn’t go get his new one that he was supposed to get. And also the the US in Hawaii instituted martial law after Pearl Harbor and so

Maartje (44:12)
Mm.

Sam (44:27)
They needed you very specifically had to have like your army ID. Nobody had weekend passes. Like you very much had to have like the right paperwork if you were just gonna be out walking around. He didn’t have any of that. And he was like and so when he started to run from the MPs, they’re like, Is he a spy? You know, they think that he’s maybe like someone who’s there to do sabotage or something.

Maartje (44:47)
I do like that in a movie he’s running like sort of crouched, like he does not want to be seen. I guess it would look really, really suspicious.

Sam (44:57)
Yeah, and these guys are scared, right? Like they’re they’re driving around at night and they’re at any minute they’re sure that they’re gonna come across a patrol of Japanese saboteurs or whatever, right?

Maartje (45:07)
Yeah. I mean that’s fair. They’ve just been attacked by the Japanese. So And there were there were Japanese people on the island, right?

Sam (45:12)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And one of the things I thought was really remarkable is that I think it would have been easy for Jones to write the book with so much foreshadowing for Pearl Harbor. But there’s just a complete lack of it. Like you just if you if you watch the movie and you didn’t know what it was about, like you would not guess, I don’t think, that Pearl Harbor is coming. And I really like that.

Maartje (45:17)
Some

Sam (45:37)
Like I like that it’s not you don’t get this sense of anticipation, it just happens out of the blue. It startles you as much, you know, as it as it probably s startled these guys when it happened.

Maartje (45:46)
Yeah, in a way, I don’t know if you’ve seen this movie, but there is a movie Robert Pattinson in it about nine eleven. And in that movie you also don’t know that nine eleven is going to happen. So it’s just a story about this guy and his dad and all that sort of shit. And then by the end of it, nine eleven happens and you’re like, shit, nine eleven’s here And they they do a similar thing.

to what they do I guess in this movie where he’s standing in front of a calendar in a movie ⁓ with Robert Pattinson They write September eleventh on the school board and you’re like, shit, this is this kind of story.

Sam (46:25)
You’re like, it’s coming.

Maartje (46:26)
Yeah. It’s a good movie, by the way, if you should ever wanna watch it.

Sam (46:30)
Keep that in mind. Karen and Lorene cross paths on a ship to the mainland. This also comes right out of the book. Lorene explains that her quote unquote fiance, a guy named Pruittt, died valiantly defending Pearl Harbor and his bomber. Karen recognizes his name, she knows that this isn’t true, but she doesn’t say anything because she’s like, I get it, man. We all tell ourselves lies to make ourselves feel better, you know.

And Karen is has been wearing these these lays around her neck. And they’ve she’s heard this thing where as you’re leaving Hawaii, if you throw your lays into the water and they drift back towards the island, then you’ll return to Hawaii someday, but otherwise you’ll never return. So she’s thrown her lays into the ocean and they both watch these lays float away, leaving it doubtful that either one will ever return to Hawaii.

Maartje (47:16)
I like this ending. It says nothing about World War II, but I liked it very much. Like

Sam (47:21)
I

really liked it too. And I was glad that they let the female characters carry this and tie it up, you know.

Maartje (47:28)
Yes. I agree, I thought it was good. Yeah. That’s the end of the movie. I’m surprised I enjoyed it so much because when we watched The Dirty Dozen, which is also an older movie, I wasn’t that entertained. Yet this movie I found way better. But it’s mostly I think the acting. Like you really can’t get a sense of the characters a lot more.

And I enjoy that. So that worked.

Sam (47:54)
Yeah, and I do think barring the changes that the army forced them to make, it really is loyal in spirit, at least, to the book. And yeah, I I think that’s I think that matters. And I think that in as much as it’s a depiction of the peacetime army and the events leading up to America’s entry into World War Two, we haven’t really seen

A movie like that before that’s kind of like honest about what the army was like and the building blocks or the foundation of the regular army that existed before these like hundreds of thousands of draftees and volunteers poured in after Pearl Harbor.

Maartje (48:29)
Yes I agree. Maybe that’s what makes it so fresh too. Ha, I’m so glad I liked it. I was really afraid of being kind of bored. But no

I wrote down a couple of notes. They have nothing to do with the movie, but as glad as I was to have women in the movie, they had very little to do with the war. But there were women on Hawaii in Hawaii during World War Two. And they were up to a lot of things. And one of them that I found the most interesting was

The women’s air raid defense or the wards as they were called are also sometimes shuffleboard pilots. So this was a secret organization, more or less, at least the recruitment of it was quite secretive, because after Pearl Harbor, young Hawaiian women in military wives were recruited for a top secret Army Air Defense Mission, which is what this was.

And what they did was they ran continuous radar plotting and aircraft tracking to detect threats approaching the Hawaiian Islands from nineteen forty two until nineteen forty five, so throughout the war after the US entered. And we’ve seen this before with the Brits, basically. And if you wanna see some more women doing radar stuff, you should watch the Battle of Britain movie.

And then listen to our episode about that. but the words these women who were recruited if they were between the ages of twenty and thirty-four had had no children and they had to pass the physical and army intelligence exams. And they were pretty badass because they would work six hour shifts, then they would get six hours of free time, and they would continue to do that for eight days.

Before getting only thirty two hours off, so basically all these women were working in shifts of twenty four hours a day, which is pretty crazy to me. besides being on a Honolulu there were also stations opened on the island islands of Maui, Hilo and Kauai,

And on february first, nineteen forty two, one hundred and four Wards began working in a secret tunnel at Fort Shaffner. And I think this is where Pruittt is transferring from in the beginning of the movie. I think he mentions Fort Shaffner. and they nicknamed this tunnel the lizard. And this is where they operated around the clock until the war ended, after which they were disbanded eventually.

So I thought it was pretty neat that there were women out there making a real difference to the war effort on Hawaii because many of these women were trekking planes and some of them even had their husbands on they were trekking people going away and also being taken prisoner by the Japanese and they would have their husbands on the planes and they would know that they were on it. Which is pretty badass, you know?

Sam (51:30)
Yeah. Definitely an incentive to on your A game.

Maartje (51:34)
And they were called shuffleboard pilots because if you’ve seen the Battle of Britain and many other kind of control room movies, you will see a big looming table with a map on it, and you’ll see women pushing these little miniatures of ships and planes over the board. And that is why they call them shuffleboard pilots, which I think is so cute.

Sam (51:56)
Yeah, and especially badass because they I mean, the army evacuated any woman who wanted to be evacuated effectively, well, any American woman who wanted to be evacuated. So a lot of these ladies could have gone home and they didn’t.

Maartje (52:11)
Nope. They decided that they wanted to be a part of the war effort and they they were monumental in these radar operations. And I think at the time radar was pretty new too, so they were doing groundbreaking tracking.

I also found something else that women were up to. I found a little quote from the then Honolulu Star Bulletin reporter Elizabeth McIntosh. And she is so interesting because she went on to work for the OSS because she spoke fluent Japanese. She taught herself Japanese. So she was eventually sent to India to mess of Japanese there and created a whole lot of propaganda.

And I’d love to read more about her, I’m sure there’s a lot more of her out there. But she wrote For seven ghastly confused days we have been at war. To the women of Hawaii it has meant a total disruption of home life. A sudden acclamation to blackout nights, terrifying rumours, fear of the unknown as planes thrown overhead and lorry streak through the streets. The seven days may stretch to seven years.

And the women of Hawaii will have to accept a new routine of living. It is time now, after the initial confusion and terror have subsided, to sum up the events of the past week to make plans for the future.

Sam (53:30)
Hell yeah.

Maartje (53:30)
And she was

there she was there for a long time, and both her parents were also journalists.

Sam (53:36)
That’s cool

Maartje (53:36)
I found another thing about women on Hawaii. So I guess I can tell you one more cool thing. There was an Hawaiian lady who was considered a rosy in a way. Her name was Mary Kaina.

Pukui And what she did was pretty cool too because and this is a a quote from a book,

And what she did was as part of the war effort from nineteen forty one to nineteen forty three, Karina served as a forelady of a camouflage unit in Waikiki under the US Army Corps of Engineers, working with the Lei Garland makers, whose job was to weave burlop strips into chicken wire for movable covers for ghost artillery, airplanes and trucks.

Karina’s job was also primarily counseling and peacekeeping among the some hundred employees and management staff. Additionally, during the war, Karina put together a dance group of nearly fifty people who entertained Army, Navy, and USO groups. So pretty kick us lady. There were people of all kinds, women of all kinds helping out with the war effort.

Sam (54:40)
Yeah, that’s awesome.

Maartje (54:45)
So yeah, women were not just sitting around being army wives, which is good.

I guess we have to rate this movie, but before we rate the movie I’d like to remind you that you can follow us wherever you get your podcast or you can send this episode to your friend.

Sam (55:02)
Every time you send this episode to a friend, Frank Sinatra gets a movie role from his dubious mob connections.

Maartje (55:07)
I’d love to see him in something else.

I don’t think I’ve seen him in anything besides this, but I guess I need to watch more golden oldies.

Sam (55:13)
Thank you.

For sure most of his early stuff was musicals for obvious reasons. I d I don’t know. I think this this is the first thing I’ve seen him in where he didn’t sing really.

Maartje (55:24)
And they make other people sing a song for like two and a half minutes or something. And he’s not in that.

Sam (55:31)
so the song The Reenlistment Blues that was made for this movie, it’s from the book. Pruittt and his musician friends write it together and they don’t manage to quite finish it. And then right before he decides that he’s gonna go back to his company after he went AWOL, he writes the last like couple lines or whatever and he folds it up and puts it in his pocket and then after he gets killed, Warden’s the one who finds it and, you know, sees that these lyrics that he’s written down.

Maartje (55:55)
going to rate this movie unusually sexy for the time beach makeout scenes out of ten. How many, Sam, would you rate this movie?

Sam (56:03)
I’m gonna rate it I’ll give it eight unusually sexy for their time beach makeout scenes out of ten. I was pleasantly surprised after finishing the book that the movie didn’t totally shit the bed. I guess I was trying to think of a more floating way to say that, and then I just and then I was like, you know what? James Jones would love it that I just said shit the bed, so it’s fine.

Maartje (56:17)
Ha

Sam (56:24)
Even though they did make those changes, and I I was pleased to note when I read about it online that all of the changes that I found the most jarring, particularly the one where Captain Holmes gets actually gets his comeuppance instead of getting promoted, that like the filmmakers were also mad about that. so so yeah, I was glad to see that. I was glad to see that the filmmakers were really on the same page with Jones and really working to get his vision across, you know, because that doesn’t always happen when these

very popular novels get made into movies. Sometimes they just don’t know why the novel was popular. They’re like, I like the premise, but I don’t really I don’t really understand the the heart of what’s going on here. And so, yeah, I think it’s worth watching. Burt Lancaster and Montgomery Clift do a great job. There’s something especially about Montgomery Clift. He just has this really like

Kind of innocent but not naive, like soulful feeling to him. And I think it’s it’s great that they cast him in this role because it would have been really easy to cast someone who wasn’t playing against type, who would have customarily played this kind of rough, tough young soldier who likes to box and whatever. ⁓ so yeah, it’s ⁓ I would recommend it. I would say definitely give it a watch. What about you?

Maartje (57:31)
Mm.

will quickly agree with you about Montgomery Clift. He’s sort of brooding in an awkward way. He’s kind of like you’d see him reading a book, but at the same time you’d see him fighting in an alley. I enjoyed that too. So I will rate this movie I guess I will also rate it eight unusually sexy for the time time beach makeout scenes. And I will say

the face glumping was back for that scene and I had to cringe my way through it. But I just I really enjoyed the movie. I would watch it again. I have in fact watch watched it one and a half times as I rented it for this podcast and I wanted to make the most of my money that I spent on it. So yeah, I would recommend it. I would watch it again. I like the little musical bits that were in it. I particularly like the acting.

It’s not slow it is like made in the fifties, so it’s slower than a movie nowadays, but it’s not slow. And it’s just a good one and I’m really pleased for James Jones that at least he gets two movies made out of his book that are decent.

Sam (58:43)
Yeah, me too.

Maartje (58:44)
Are you reading anything?

Sam (58:47)
reading Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.

Maartje (58:50)
Andy Weir again? This sounds familiar. it’s the new movie. Shit. No Have you seen a movie yet?

Sam (58:54)
Yeah. Yeah. Sunday movie with Ryan Gosling.

No, I wanted to read the book first. I’ve owned the book like since the movie came out, but I just haven’t gotten around to it.

Maartje (59:03)
⁓ you’ve been reading too many World War Two novels and

Sam (59:07)
I know,

Maartje (59:08)
Anyway, I would like to thank you for listening to yet another episode of Rosie. You can follow us wherever you get our podcasts and rate us five stars. You can send this episode to a friend. You can follow us on Instagram at Rosie the Reviewer Podcast, or you can visit our website.

Sam (59:08)
Right.

Maartje (59:25)
www.rosiethereviewer.com and we’ll see you next week.

Sam (59:30)
Bye.