Haunting Books and Movies: FROM HERE TO ETERNITY and BRIDESHEAD REVISITED

During October, I’ve traditionally posted about “haunting books” I’ve read in the past year. This year, I haven’t read many books I can honestly say were haunting. So I’ll post instead about the Movie Group I’m in.

I joined this group about the time I retired after it had been underway for several years. A friend I’d worked with who had retired several years before I did had started the group. She hosted irregular sessions in which she invited friends to watch one of the Top 100 Films, as selected by the American Film Institute in 1998. At about ten movies a year, it took the group a decade to finish. AFI updated its list in 2007, so that added another ten or twelve films to watch.

After the group finished watching all those movies, it went on hiatus for a few years. Recently, my friend decided to reconvene the group to focus on bestselling novels that were made into movies. We would read the book, then watch the movie and compare the two. We would start with books that were bestsellers in the years that various members were born. (She hosts the group, so she picked the rules.)

Usually, when I compare books and movies, I like better whichever I read or saw first. I wondered if that would hold true. Since I was supposed to read the book first, then watch the movie, would I always prefer the book?

We’ve had two sessions in the new format thus far. The first month, we read From Here to Eternity and then watched that film starring Burt Lancaster, Frank Sinatra, and Deborah Kerr, among other noteworthy actors. I’d never read the book, and surprisingly, I’d never seen the film in its entirety (just a few scenes on television through the years). Thus, this novel and film would be a good test of how the group’s new format would work for me.

To be frank, I hated the book by author James Jones. In fact, after I started the reading assignment, I found myself resisting it. And the book was 800 pages—far too long, in my opinion, and much of it unhealthy internal monologues by various characters about unsavory topics. I read the ebook version, which added back in several raunchy scenes that the publishers had deleted in 1951. No matter how realistic the censored scenes, I could have understood the characters well enough without them.

I can see why the novel was popular in 1951. America’s soldiers were home from the war. The setting was Hawaii in the months leading up to Pearl Harbor, and the novel ended with the U.S. entering the war right after Pearl Harbor. The story depicted various soldiers’ mindsets. Even though most of the book dealt with the peacetime Army, many male readers would have related to the descriptions of military life. And many women probably wanted to know what the men around them had experienced.

The reason I hated the book was that I despised most of the characters. Almost all the officers were venal and poor leaders. Most of the enlisted men and NCOs were cruel or uneducated or slovenly or all of the above. They were drunk and disorderly, they gambled and consorted with prostitutes or had affairs. They tried to get around the rules or used the rules to punish other soldiers they disagreed with. Even the protagonists—Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt (played by Montgomery Clift in the movie) and First Sergeant Milton Warden (Burt Lancaster)—were often not admirable men. From today’s point of view, the book is openly sexist and racist and homophobic. From my perspective, there was very little honor in the book, though some of the men were loyal to their unit and the Army.

The one thing I did like about From Here to Eternity was the frequent philosophizing about organizational politics. Prewitt was an idealist and foolish sometimes because of it. First Sergeant Warden and a couple of the other characters told him what he needed to do to be successful in the unit, but he refused to do it. I related much more to those realists than to Prewitt.

The 1953 movie version of From Here to Eternity was far superior to the book, in my opinion. It did leave out chunks of the book, including some of my favorite chunks of philosophizing. The movie kept a lot of the ugliness and violence, though some of the book’s most violent scenes were cut or handled off-screen in the movie.

Still, I was disappointed in the movie also. I admire many of the actors in the film and wanted to see how they interpreted the characters. I’d been looking forward to the romance between Warden and Karen Holmes (an officer’s wife, played by Deborah Kerr). But that was a minor part of the plot, and the iconic beach scene we’ve all seen in the trailer lasted about four seconds on the screen.

The movie, too, depicted the veniality of most of the characters—the toadying of lower-level officers to their superiors, the subterfuges the NCOs took to avoid officers’ orders they didn’t like (some of which deserved to be ignored), the cruelty of various soldiers against those they thought weaker than them. I didn’t like the characters any more on film than on paper.

I’m left wondering after reading the book and seeing the movie whether I disliked the story so much because the book was clearly a man’s book told from a man’s perspective. The female characters felt flat to me and they were seen only through their relationships with men. That was true in both the book and the movie. And, as I said, the book was overtly sexist.

So my Movie Group’s initial foray into comparing books and movies fell flat with me.

Our second book/movie combination was Brideshead Revisited. Again, I’d never read the book (published in 1945), and I hadn’t seen the 2008 movie, though I had watched the 1981 miniseries and enjoyed that. But once again, I didn’t like the characters and didn’t find either the book or the film version compelling.

The story contained too much drunkenness and angst and infidelity for my taste. Did narrator Charles Ryder and his college friend Sebastian Flyte have a homosexual relationship or not? The book left it veiled, the movie was more explicit. Whether it was platonic or sexual, their relationship was not healthy, because the whole Flyte family was unhealthy.

The version of Catholicism shown in both the book and the movie was a distorted perversion of the religion I have known. I’ve read older Catholic texts that focus on the fires of Hell, but that version of Catholicism was of my grandmother’s generation and not mine. The novel depicted a pre-Vatican II, guilt-ridden Catholicism, which Lady Marchmain, the mother character played by the always excellent Emma Thompson in the 2008 movie, used as a whip on her four children. No wonder her husband left her to live with his Italian mistress. The possible chance at happiness that Charles Ryder and Julia Flyte (Sebastian’s sister) might have had was squelched by Julia’s guilt over divorcing her husband to be with Charles.

Again, large chunks of the book were omitted in the movie, and several lines were inserted in the screenplay that made clear what the book left ambiguous—so clear it felt to me that the movie was taking away the viewer’s opportunity to interpret the story for one’s self.

So which version of Brideshead Revisited did I prefer? The book and the 2008 movie were about equal in my estimation. Evelyn Waugh’s prose was often beautiful, but the novel was overwritten in places. The movie, as indicated above, took away the novel’s delicacy. Both versions ultimately left me disappointed. I might try to watch the miniseries again, though I’m not sure I have eleven episodes in me, knowing of the story’s unhappy ending.

Maybe all I really want in books and in movies is a happy ending, though there are stories that satisfy despite their tragic denouements. Neither From Here to Eternity nor Brideshead Revisited offered a happy ending, nor even a fully satisfactory conclusion. The acting in both movies was wonderful, so watch them for that. But don’t expect to come away uplifted.

For that reason alone, both stories ultimately left me haunted.

Do you prefer books and movies with a happy ending?