With all the awards and other honours bestowed on this movie, I have to admit that I was slightly disappointed. Sinatra was a standout, and Clift was terrific in the lead role, but both Lancaster and particularly Borgnine have done a lot better in other movies - and not all of the plot threads were equally interesting.
Not bad in any way, just less that I expected.

What happens to soldiers tuned for war when it's peace time? From Here to Eternity, set in the weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor, shows them drinking, womanizing, and fighting, the tension they feel not so much because of some precognitive dread, but because of bad leadership. Their captain is also in shenanigans mode. In a way, this is a precursor to other war films on the margins of war itself, films like M*A*S*H and Jarhead. But there's frankly too much happening - the curse of adapting a novel - giving short shrift in particular to the female characters and their romances with key soldiers. Deborah Kerr is more hard-edged than I've ever seen her, even unrecognizable at times, and I believe this might have been one of her greatest performances if the film didn't forget about her for the length of a bible. Donna Reed is in the same boat. In the end, I know what the film's theme is - a soldier's listlessness when the role's ambitions are impossible to fulfill or corrupted to other goals - but I'm not entirely sure what it's trying to say about that. It either needed to be pruned or extended; I'm not sure which.

Wonderful casting; everybody did pretty darn well. Loved the movie every way :)