"The Morning of The Attack" - From Here To Eternity (1953) - Assorted Moments of Random Cinematic Hotness
This post is the first in what I expect to be an ir/regular series, featuring screencaps of "Assorted Random Cinematic Hotness" encountered during my home movie adventures. Hope you like it...
The Morning of the AttackFrom Here to Eternity (1953)
Fred Zinneman's film stages a curious spectacle of unpreparedness on the morning of December 7, 1941, as semi-clad soldiers scurry this way and that while Japanese bombers attack the Hawaiian military outpost. (For StinkyLulu, 'twas a curious moment of cognitive dissonance: Oh look at the nearly naked cute boy! Oh no the airplanes have machinegunners! Nearly naked! Machine guns!) The sequence utilizes male undress to signal the soldiers' collective "rush to readiness" on this historic morning. Yet the sequence also provides quite the unanticipated assortment of random cinematic hotness...
8 comments:
In one part, the orgasmic Jack Warden bends down and the fly on his underwear opens momentarily. You can't see anything, though. In another scene some fugly old guy crosses his legs while wearing a towel. I wasn't watching this closely, so I don't know whether anything is visible - I caught it the moment it finished.
Apart from Fugly Old Guy, FHTE has some of the most comprehensive displays of man candy I've ever seen in a film.
i like this idea. more please
although i should add: how can you have a post about random cinematic hotness from FHTE and not include the hottest of all hotties: Montgomery Clift?
I have long maintained that FHTE is the great "lost" classic gay movie - it's positively dripping with homoeroticism, all sitting right there in plain sight! And the whole plot translates itself into gay terms SO easily, that I have to wonder about the orientation of original author James Jones.
First off, we have two of the hottest bisexual actors in Hollywood history, Burt Lancaster and Monty Clift, in a loving father/son (or it is daddy/boy?) relationship. What's more, both of them end up leaving the women in their lives, because they just can't tear themselves apart from each other - oops, I mean "the Army."
And then there's the twisted S/M relationship between Frank Sinatra and Ernest Borgnine, which all reads like something right out of a John Preston story. The scene where Sinatra finally, helplessly gets himself sent to Borgnine's stockade (he just cannot resist the call of his Master...) and stands unmoving in front of Borgnine's desk, while Borgnine gives a "Now I've got you where I want you" smirk and meaningfully fondles a nightstick - the slash-fic just writes itself.
Let's not even discuss the semiotics of Monty Clift drawing Ernest Borgnine into a back alley, there to stab him to death. What did Borgnine think Clift wanted to do in that alley, anyway?
And then, as mentioned, there's all the beefy, semi-naked man candy on display. What with all the boxing stuff going on, and the numerous barracks scenes played in underwear, it all becomes something like a dramatic pageant based on an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue.
I couldn't agree with you more, Buck. I'm reminded of the curiously queer subtext of Montgomery Clift trying to fight his "true" nature. Then there's his charged resistance to the hazing of the commander's secret corps of buff boys. And how 'bout that queeny commander anyway? Borgnine always reads queer to me, for some reason. So I totally had that one...
ernest borgnine....big time a-hole.
Borgnine, along with pal Tony Curtis, led the
Motion Picture Academy's infamous attack on the Gay cowboy movie,
BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN in 2006. Borgnine made disparaging comments on the
critically acclaimed film, saying it defamed the late legendary cowboy
icon John Wayne. He also refused even to see BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, he told
Entertainment Weekly magazine.
Such orchestrated attacks, said BBM's producer James Schamus, were
pivotal in its losing the Best Picture Oscar that year.
Indeed. EB's legendarily retrograde sexual politics are part of why I'm just so fascinated by just how queer he reads in the 50s.
I have a hard time watching this film without thinking about how queer it reads now. Very sexy pics (in particular the top one).
Clift is just so damn dreamy in this flick!
ps: Just for more kicks - a link to a hot pic of Monty I posted at the Charlie Parker blog from the movie.
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