From Here to Eternity at 70: an unusually soulful, feel-bad blockbuster

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