His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [122]
“ ‘Did you see that son of a bitch, Sinatra?’ he asked.
“ ‘Yeah, I saw him but I don’t know what was happening.’
“ ‘Well, that bastard guinea was trying to tell us what to do. You know where he is now? He’s on an airplane going back to the studio.’
“ ‘How could you send him back without seeing the rushes?’ I asked.
“ ‘I don’t care,’ said Cohn. ‘The hell with him. That dirty little dago is not going to tell me how to make my movies.’ ”
The entire company returned to California a few days later to shoot interiors at Columbia Studios. By then Frank and Monty were inseparable friends and spent a great deal of time with James Jones.
“We talked about the injustice of life and love,” said Jones, “and then Monty and I would listen to Frank talk about Ava Gardner.”
One night during the course of the filming, Frank became so depressed by Ava’s rejection that he threatened suicide. Monty talked him out of it.
“We would get very loaded,” Jones said. “After dinner and a lot more drinks, we would weave outside into the night and all sit down on the curb next to a lamppost. It became our lamppost, and we’d mumble more nonsense to each other. We felt very close.”
The rushes were so spectacular that Harry Cohn insisted the film be in the theaters by August. He was the first to recognize the film’s quality. So proud was he of it, that for the first time in his career he allowed his name to appear in an advertisement before release, conveying to the public his pride in presenting From Here to Eternity. It became the biggest money-maker in Columbia’s history. The final cost was $2,406,000; the first release grossed nineteen million. By fiscal 1954 gross income totaled eighty million. So great was the demand for seats that the Capitol Theater in New York City remained open almost around the clock; it closed only for an hour in the morning to let janitors sweep the floor.
Critics, as enthusiastic as the public, praised the film and everyone associated with it.
“From Here to Eternity … tells a truth about life, about the inviolability of the human spirit,” said Time magazine. “[It says] something important about America. It says that many Americans, in a way that is often confused and some times forgotten, care to the quick about a man’s right to ‘go his own way,’ though all the world and the times be contrary.”
“[This is] a film almost as towering and persuasive as its source,” wrote Bosley Growther in The New York Times. “It captures the essential spirit of the James Jones study. … It stands as a shining example of truly professional moviemaking.” The New York Film Critics named the picture the best of 1953 and gave awards to Burt Lancaster as best actor and Fred Zinnemann as best director. All five leading players were nominated for Academy Awards. So were the director, the screenwriter, the cinematographer, the film editor, and the sound man.
The most superlative reviews were for Frank, who surprised everyone by his performance and earned the respect of the industry, which immediately proclaimed his “comeback” as the most dramatic in show business. “He does Private Maggio like nothing he has ever done before,” said Time magazine. “His face wears the calm of a man who is completely sure of what he is doing as he plays it straight from Little Italy.”
“Instead of exploiting a personality, he proves he is an actor by playing the luckless Maggio with a kind of doomed gaiety that is both real and immensely touching,” said the New York Post.
“Frank Sinatra is simply superb, comical, pitiful, childishly brave, pathetically defiant,” said the Los Angeles Examiner. “Prew (Clift) is able to absorb ‘the treatment