This is the sixth in my 2025 monthly series in which I alternate winners of the best editing Oscar I have seen with those I haven't seen, to try to get a better handle on what professionals consider superlative editing.
I ultimately did have some examples of good editing I found in From Here to Eternity, which I was seeing for the second time overall and first in 20 years, but I wanted to start out by telling you about what I considered a no-no. It's more a decision by a director than an editor, I would say, but it involves the tools of editing so I thought it was appropriate to mention it here.
And yes, it involves "The Scene."
If you don't know what I mean when I say that, it's the most famous scene from the 1953 best picture winner, which you are always seeing in clips packages about romantic moments in movies. You know the one: Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr locked in a passionate kiss on the Hawaiian beach as waves crash over them. A more iconic image of romance in the movies there may not be.
And I was surprised to be reminded that the mood sours pretty quickly after this as the two become petulant and end up in a fight. Some iconic romance.
But that's not the sin I want to talk about today. That sin involves cross cutting.
I think you know what cross cutting it is, but because there is a learning aspect to this whole series, I will belabor it with an explanation.
Cross cutting involves intersplicing action from two different scenes taking place at the same time, such that you spend maybe 30 seconds of screen time in one scene, then shift to the other, then shift back again, for however long it takes both scenes to reach a logical denouement. And they do usually both end at the same time, as this frees them from their entanglement with one another, and the next scene is some place else at some other time. And one scene of cross cutting would not usually follow another, since the device should stand out for its sparse usage.
At least, the idea is supposed to be that the two scenes are occurring contemporaneously. From Here to Eternity violates that rule in a way I found fairly careless, especially for a film that won best picture and was also honored for its editing.
So the other scene that is being cross cut with this beach scene is a scene of the film's other two main characters, soldiers played by Montgomery Clift and Frank Sinatra, going out on the town, getting way more drunk than they should, and picking up women.
One scene occurs during the day. The other scene occurs at night.
Game show buzzer. Wrong answer, From Here to Eternity!
Like I said, though, we'd be more likely to blame director Fred Zinneman or writers Daniel Taradash and James Jones than we would editor William Lyon, who nabbed his first of two Oscars out of six nominations, the other win being 1955's Picnic.
And there are certainly some things we can credit Lyon with here, though at first I thought it might be more of a case of Lyon getting swept along for the ride on a movie that won seven other Oscars including best picture.
I did eventually identify a couple things that I thought were worth commenting on in a post like this, which put me in mind, structurally, of another film I watched for this series, Sergeant York. Both films are nominally war movies that don't have much in the way of war until the very end, at which point they shine in that regard, particularly in terms of their editing. Eternity culminates in the attack on Pearl Harbor, and here we see the frenetic feeling on the ground that morning recreated by the quickened pace of Lyon's editing. Especially strong is a series of shots back and forth between gunners on the ground and Japanese planes they are trying to fell from the sky, the chugging motion of the guns whipping back to the swooping motion of the planes.
Any time Lyon is called upon to goose this otherwise fairly talky film with a little action, he comes through. Clift's character is a boxer who doesn't want to box, though his superiors at the base are trying to pressure him into it. He's goaded into a fight in the yard with another soldier, at which point Lyon again increases the pace of the shots to feel frenetic, with flying fists and heads recoiling from landed punches.
There was also one instance I liked of cutting on form, where the splashing of a wave (at the end of "The Scene") cuts into the upward rising smoke of a cigarette in the next scene. The wave and the smoke take the same shape, and I thought it was nicely done.
The last specific thing I'll call out that caught my attention was a montage of reaction shots to the playing of "Taps." I won't tell you who got killed because you may not have seen the movie, and it doesn't matter for the purposes of this discussion, but the solemn bugle music takes in groups of faces from around the compound, looking on forlornly to honor their fallen comrade.
I think I probably didn't like From Here to Eternity as much as when I saw it in November of '05, where it made enough an impression on me that I listed it as my favorite newly seen movie of that month. (Yes, that's something I keep track of.) I still liked it quite a bit, but spent more time than I remembered wondering why we cared so much about these characters and whether anything was ever going to happen to them. (The ultimate calm before the ultimate storm, I guess.)
In November of '05 I had only just, two months earlier, visited the beach where "The Scene" was shot, when we were in Hawaii for a wedding. It's funny now to think that I didn't actually know that beach from having seen the movie, but just from seeing "The Scene" in so many Oscar clips.
I wanted to finish by noting that this is my second straight Montgomery Clift movie in this series, after A Place in the Sun last month. He's not an actor I was really tracking until the past few years, and I definitely would not have remembered he was in this. He may steadily be becoming a favorite of mine.
I'm back in July with the next previously unseen movie in this series, jumping forward nearly a decade to 1962's How the West Was Won.
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