Film Studies: 'From Here to Eternity' and 'Chicago' - spot the difference

Daniel Taradash died last week, aged 90. You may not know the name, but you know some of his achievements. He was President of the Academy when it gave its honorary Oscar to Charlie Chaplin; he was President of the Writers Guild; and he was a screenwriter, who won his own Oscar in 1953 for adapting James Jones' novel, From Here to Eternity. Fifty years ago, that movie won 13 Academy nominations. This year, another film – Chicago – has done the same thing. And all I want to ask is whether Chicago is in the same class as From Here to Eternity? The Jones novel was published in 1951 and it became a sensational best-seller in an age when books of quality might top the charts. It is a book about the Army as a model for all that is good and bad in society. The Army is monotonous, boring, corrupt, inefficient – yet noble in its ultimate design. The Jones book traces the lives of several soldiers stationed in Hawaii in the months just before Pearl Harbor. The leading characters are Prewitt, a rebel who refuses to box for his unit; Maggio, another flagrant outsider; and Warden, an efficient sergeant who lives by and beneath Army rules, and who has an affair with his Captain's disenchanted wife.

There's a lot of rough language, and a good deal of sex – all of which is surely true to life when you shut young men up in a barracks and train them for some large ordeal that never happens. In 1951, the picture business concluded that no movie could ever handle the language and the sex of the original. It was unfilmable.

Until the arrival of Columbia, its boss Harry Cohn, and Daniel Taradash, who took the huge novel and turned it into a 118-minute movie. Yes, the language was toned down; the sexuality was alluded to. But James Jones cabled the screenwriter with congratulations for hitting "so close to the original intention of the book". And that intention was to show that the Army fighting for freedom in the last "just war" was compromised, odious and boring to most of its members – but necessary. When the crisis came, the miserable, exploited, disaffected men fought with heart and feeling.

The film made audiences understand the drab spirit of the Army – and the desperate lives of Prewitt and Maggio. Directed by Fred Zinnemann, it was marvellously cast: Burt Lancaster as Warden; Montgomery Clift as Prewitt; Frank Sinatra as Maggio; Deborah Kerr and Donna Reed as the women. Out of its 13 nominations, it won eight Oscars: Best Picture; to Zinnemann for directing; to Reed and Sinatra; to Burnett Guffey for photography; to Taradash for adapted screenplay. It also won for sound and editing.

Fifty years old, the picture more than stands up. The sexual restraint may even seem welcome (it is certainly not the case that the movie lacks eroticism – the relationship between Clift and Reed is steamy and suggestive). Two years ago, when Michael Bay's dreadful Pearl Harbor (183 minutes) was released, it was easy to see how all the advances in special effects barely masked two things: that the new film could not create characters anyone cared about; and it accepted an Army with Boy Scout attitudes – one in which every soldier thought of nothing but doing his duty. Far from the real awkward Army that Roosevelt and George Marshall led, this was the cockeyed Army that Bush and Rumsfeld dream of.

The comparison with Chicago cannot be direct – the films are so far apart in genre. And Chicago may not win Best Picture, though for now I think it has to be the favourite. It is the only one of the nominated films that is still steadily making money at the box office. And Rob Marshall, its director, has just been given the directors' own award for excellence. The writing is on the wall.

Not that I am against musicals. Last year's Moulin Rouge was a wonderfully passionate and innovative picture. In contrast, the songs in Chicago are hackneyed; the dancing is Bob Fosse shtick – the angular finger-clicking spasms he lived by; the characters are as flimsy as Renee Zellweger's underwear; the story is junk. This is not a picture about anything. It presents a cold, bright world, so packed with timing that mortality seems eclipsed. Just compare Richard Gere's smarmy character with Joel Grey's haunting MC in Cabaret.

Does it matter? Seemingly not. But that's one more nail in the coffin of Oscar's indifference, and one more step towards irrelevance and oblivion on the part of the Hollywood movie. For 1953 (not a very comfortable world), From Here to Eternity was honest entertainment. It did not cheat on the nature of reality. Chicago is froth that has no notion of such duties.

d.thomson@independent.co.uk