I'm reading From Here to Eternity and loving it completely. The class I'm reading it for, American Sound Cinema is taught by the highest paid professor in America, Drew Casper, so I'm told. He's a great lecturer/performer, pacing, beating and proclaiming, "A film is meant to watched in a theatre--in a COMMUNITY! Not at home on a VCR!"

He theorizes that the post-Classical era of Hollywood, 1946-1962, witnessed among many things, the fall of the America male, who has never recovered. Men are broken, bruised, and battered post WWII and FHTE demonstrates it like films of the period. Prew, stubborn and young, unwilling to conform, will undoubtedly be broken by the end of the novel--as will all of them once they engage in WWII.

It reminds me of Rio Bravo, the bruised and broken men, the Dean Martin character, but also Wayne and certainly Walter Brennen, the cripple. And Ricki Nelsen who will soon have his cockiness beaten out of him with age...

And how that applies to now, the present, the broken American male? to be cont