Happy Anniversary, Donna Reed!
"Forty pictures I was in, and all I remember is 'What kind of bra will you be wearing today, honey?' That was always the area of big decision - from the neck to the navel." -Donna Reed
They gave Donna Reed the best supporting actress Oscar (Sinatra got supporting actor, too), and so they should have. But there she was in this scene, there was Donna Reed, gazing into the depths of life with shocking bleakness and talking about how one day she’d go home and get married and join the country club and do all the “proper” things for the “proper” people.
The scene jumped out of the picture—how did Lorene and the lovely, sweet Donna Reed get all that self-loathing and contempt on screen? Well, maybe she was more interesting than anyone guessed. I looked the picture up in the collected reviews of Manny Farber and, wouldn’t you know it, he said this in The Nation in 1953: “Miss Reed… is an interesting actress whenever Cameraman Burnett Guffey uses a hard light on her somewhat bitter features.”
In truth, the scene is better than Farber suggests, and it leaves Montgomery Clift’s Prewitt (the self-conscious emotional heart of the picture) somewhat at a loss. Because Reed’s face has seen a truth that exceeds the rest of
From Here to Eternity. In addition, the film was boldly cast: Deborah Kerr (it was going to be Joan Crawford) is a surprise as the disillusioned wife, Karen; Burt Lancaster is subtle as Sergeant Warden; Clift is Clift; and then, there was Frank Sinatra, who knew this was his title shot and wasn’t going to let it get away. -David Thomson
Maggio (Frank Sinatra) busts in on Prewitt (Montgomery Clift) and Loreen (Donna Reed) as they try to get to know each other in this scene from FROM HERE TO ETERNITY.
World War II pinups appeared in many forms, from fighter and bomber nose art and bomber jacket art to calendars, postcards, matchbooks, and playing cards. The term pinup was coined during World War II, when soldiers would "pin up" these idealized pictures on their barracks and foxhole walls, and sailors did the same to lockers and bulkheads. There were photos of Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth and Lana Turner, and hundreds of other calendar girls and Hollywood starlets whose only claim to fleeting fame was their image seared into a GI's brain from a ragged page of YANK or Esquire magazine. Servicemen soon began to create their own pinup art, decorating the noses of their planes and their bomber jackets with more primitive paintings of shapely babes.
Source: www.skylighters.org
Servicemen would purchase such publications as Yank — the soldier’s magazine — which proudly displayed centerfolds of lovely young women in seductive poses, typically adorned in bathing suits, which the boys would “pin-up” on their barracks walls. However, prior to World War II and before the age of the photographic lens, soldiers and fighting men didn’t possess the luxury of hording an eight-byten image of their idol. Established stars such as Myrna Loy and Ida Lupino would hand out sandwiches at the Hollywood Canteen to soldiers on blackout assignments.
Penny Singleton, the pin-up girl of the Marine Corps — she was married to a Marine captain — established an alterations and repair community for the servicemen, which she called the “Sew and Sew Club.” The fair-haired actress, best known as the lead in the many Blondie pictures, enlisted a number of Hollywood personalities to assist her in this free-for-the-troops endeavor.
Such alluring cheesecake models as Marlene Dietrich, Jinx Falkenburg, Candy Jones, and Carole Landis entertained troops in foreign settings, and the troops were eternally grateful for their sacrifice. Little meant more to the American fighting man than to know that the ladies had them uppermost on their minds. To be greeted by a pin-up girl and given a fond farewell by her, before departure into war, was a gesture of profound magnitude. Linda Darnell, although a stunning pin-up girl whose beauty was out-of-this-world, enlisted in the Women’s Ambulance and Defense Corps of America and even took lessons on motor vehicle repair in her spare time.
Veronica Lake acquired over fifty sets of wings from cadets on one junket, as admiring gents surely wanted to pin their brass wings on the stunning Miss Lake’s dress. The wearing of military paraphernalia by pin-up girls became a common practice, for the gals showed the men in the armed forces that their simple little admiring gifts did not go unnoticed or unappreciated. -"The Pin-Up Girls of World War II" (2013) by Brett Kiser
US and British military culture in World War II promoted this preoccupation with sex. Over 5 million copies of Life magazine’s 1941 photo of Rita Hayworth (captioned the “Goddess of Love”) were sent out to US soldiers. Such “pin-ups” were ubiquitous among US forces. They were published not only in men’s magazines but in service publications like Stars and Stripes (or for Britain, Reveille).
The appeal of the “undisputed leader,” Betty Grable, “was less erotic than as a wholesome symbol of American womanhood,” based on a “carefully groomed exploitation of her good-natured hominess by 20th Century-Fox.” Hayworth, however, the “runner-up” to Grable, “exuded the sultry sex appeal of a mature woman” whose “appeal was more erotic than wholesome.”
Jane Russell’s “flamboyant sex appeal made her pin-ups wildly popular with GIs overseas.” Her large breasts were shamelessly exploited by movie producers as “the two great reasons for [her] rise to stardom.” Moralists at home opposed the pin-up craze. In 1944, the Postmaster General banned Esquire with its Vargas Girl fantasies, and Congressional hearings ensued. However, officers decided that pin-ups contributed to soldiers’ morale. In Britain, meanwhile, the cartoon heroine “Jane” boosted morale during the Blitz and thereafter by taking her clothes off during periods of bad news. “It was said that the first armored vehicle ashore on D-Day carried a large representation of naked Jane.” The comic-strip Jane “finally lost the last vestiges of her modesty during the Normandy campaign” in 1944, and soldiers said, “Jane gives her all.”
Behind the lines, by contrast, sex flourished in World War II. By one calculation, the average US soldier who served in Europe from D-Day through the end of the war had sex with 25 women. The peak was reached after the surrender of Germany in 1945. Condoms had to be rationed at four per man per month and medical officers considered this “entirely inadequate.” Over 80 percent of those who had been away over two years admitted to having regular sexual intercourse. In US-occupied Italy, three-quarters of US soldiers had intercourse with Italian women, on average once or twice a month.
War stories that focus on the front rarely discuss sex. For example, historian Stephen Ambrose gives detail-oriented accounts of battles, but only a vague mention that Paris after liberation in 1944 “over the next few days had one of the great parties of the war.” Ambrose mentions that German soldiers in the Battle of the Bulge were motivated by being told that hospitals in Belgium contained “many American nurses.” When the huge bureaucracy of the US Army’s Services of Supply moved to Paris, “a black market on a grand scale sprang up… The supply troops… got the girls, because they had the money, thanks to the black market.” Ambrose can take for granted that “girls” were a commodity in wartime cities. Aside from these occasional references, however, Ambrose bypasses sex, presumably because it does not matter at the front.
By some reports, “war aphrodisia” – common among soldiers in many wars – extended into many segments of society during “total war.” The million and a half US soldiers who filled England before D-Day in 1944 had a well-deserved reputation as “wolves in wolves’ clothing.” They were, in one British phrase of the time, “oversexed, overpaid, and over here.” England’s men were absent in large numbers, and its women had survived blackout and Blitz. The US soldiers’ presence contributed to a shake-up of British sexual mores, already under strain from the war. Back in the United States, “Victory Girls” gave free sex to soldiers as their “patriotic duty.”
The ill-defined “‘victory girl’ was usually assumed to be a woman who pursued sexual relations with servicemen out of a misplaced patriotism or a desire for excitement. She could also, without actually engaging in sexual relations, was testing the perimeters of social freedom in wartime America. According to FBI statistics, the number of women charged with morals violations doubled in the war years. A “surprising number were young married women.” Detroit banned unescorted women from bars after 8 pm. In Germany too, as social control disintegrated at the end of World War II, civilian gender limits expanded. In the Rhineland in 1945, advancing Allied forces found “Edelweiss gangs” of young men in pink shirts and bobby-sox, who “roamed the rubble hurling insults and stones at the Hitler Youth – when they were not trading sexual favors with willing girls.”
Source: www.warandgender.com
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