Uncomfortable. That’s how this week’s BP From Here To Eternity makes me feel. To be frank, while I was watching this film, I was counting down the minutes until I did not have to be watching this film. Just not my cup of tea. Really raw and really difficult to swallow. I like heroic war movies, which is not this one.

Anyhow, the film’s final scene did grab my attention more forcefully than the rest of the movie did. So, spoiler alert! At the end of the film, the two main female characters, Karen, the adulterous officer’s wife, and Lorene, a “hostess”/call girl of the New Congress Club, stand together at the railing of a ship heading to the continental United States after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. As the two women gaze back at the lovely island of Oahu, it is obvious that they couldn’t be more different socially, but what they do have in common is their reason for leaving: failed romances with men whose first love is the Army. Karen is returning home due to her husband’s forced resignation from the Army for misconduct and her failed romance with her husband’s sergeant, whom she had wanted to marry. Lorene is mourning the death of “Prew,” her sort-of boyfriend.

Both women watch as the leis Karen tosses into the ocean float out to sea. Karen explains to Lorene that if the leis float toward shore, the person who threw them will return to Hawaii. Lorene states flatly that she won’t be coming back because her fiancé was killed “on December 7th.” As Karen expresses her sympathy, Lorene continues: “He was a bomber pilot. He tried to taxi his plane to the edge of the apron. And the Japs made a direct hit on it. Maybe you read about it in the papers? He was awarded the Silver Star. They sent it to his mother. She wrote me she wanted me to have it…they’re very fine people, Southern people. He was named after a general – Robert E. Lee – Prewitt…Isn’t that a silly old name?” Viewers then see that while Lorene is talking, she is tightly holding the mouthpiece of Prew’s bugle, the one he had played at Arlington. The leis float out to sea, and the film ends. This is the part of the film that lingers in my mind.

Prew and his bugle.

A little earlier in the film, Robert E. Lee Prewitt goes AWOL for several days after a knife fight during which he kills the stockade sergeant who murdered his friend Maggio, recuperating from his wounds while hiding out in Lorene’s house. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Prew vows to return to his company—despite their cruelty to him and even though he will probably be punished for his absence. He refuses to listen to Lorene’s desperate pleas for him to stay safe with her, and he also fails to heed the orders of the men of his own company who are patrolling the barracks at night on the lookout for Japanese spies. When Prew doesn’t halt at their command, they shoot him dead. So, here’s the big question: why does Lorene lie to Karen at the end of the film regarding the manner of Prew’s death? This little untruth, for me, suddenly elevates Lorene to the most interesting character in the whole film (not that I’m a fan of lying, but just that it seems so unnecessary to the film’s story and occurs right at the very end). Here’s my theory.

Lorene, a.k.a. Alma. What motivates her lie at the end?

We find out earlier in the film that Lorene had a lengthy relationship with a wealthy young man that ended at the altar—for him and another socially superior young woman. A little later when Lorene refuses to marry Prew, we are told what her goals in life are: “I won’t marry you because I don’t want to be the wife of a soldier…Because nobody’s gonna stop me from my plan. Nobody, nothing. Because I want to be proper…Yes, proper. In another year, I’ll have enough money saved. Then, I’m gonna go back to my hometown in Oregon and I’m gonna build a house for my mother and myself, and join the country club and take up golf. And I’ll meet the proper man with the proper position to make a proper wife who can run a proper home and raise proper children. And I’ll be happy because when you’re proper, you’re safe.” Prew replies that he hopes she can “pull it off.” Lorene still wants what she almost had: respectability, financial security, and social comfort—all of which she is more than willing to sacrifice love for. I think that her lie to Karen at the end of the film is Lorene’s last desperate play to become “proper.” If she returns to the mainland as the former fiancée of a war hero, then any doubts about what other shady activities she may have been involved with in Hawaii disappear, and she becomes an object of sympathy and pity. People will feel sorry for her instead of judge her.

Karen and Sgt. Warden, a relationship not meant to last.

What Lorene does not know is that Karen is aware of Prew’s absence from his unit because of her affair with Sergeant Warden, Prew’s superior, who feels compassion for the mistreated soldier and wants to see him back safely with the company (and later mourns his untimely death). What Karen is thinking after Lorene’s lie is not clear, but perhaps she begins to realize that there could be an underhanded way for her as well to return home not completely disgraced. Perhaps she could also spin a story about the army men she loved and what horrors befell them on that day of “infamy.”

For Me Then…

I struggle with Lorene’s lie because I feel that it really denigrates Prew’s consistency in standing up for what he believes is right. Time and time again, he refuses to join the regimental boxing team because he had accidentally hurt someone he cared for while sparring and he wasn’t about to risk harming another. Even when he is mistreated and abused, Prew carries on with his duties, still professing his love and loyalty for the army: “You love a thing, you gotta be grateful. See, I left home when I was seventeen. Both my folks was dead and I didn’t belong no place, ’till I entered the Army. If it weren’t for the Army, I wouldn’t have learned how to bugle.” Though some other members of the Army try to take Prew’s pride and dignity away, the Army still gives him a part of himself. It reveals his talent and gives him purpose. For Lorene to change Prew’s story in order to give herself a better life is to attempt to cheapen Prew’s life. Maybe we can see this as the deceased Prew enabling Lorene to alter her life for the better; but it seems a selfish move on her part, even though her cherishing Prew’s bugle mouthpiece hints that she does still love him…or does it? We just don’t know enough about her to fully understand her motives, which makes her lie all the more compelling. But the end of From Here to Eternity sure doesn’t give me warm fuzzies. No doubt about it.

Prew refusing to budge under pressure from his superiors.