From Her to Eternity

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You didn't have to be a talent scout to recognize that Kerr was the perfect package of a quality actress. Her large blue eyes could glare in disapproval or moisten dewily in the surrender to love. Her mouth expressed primness or sensuality, as needed; and in many films it relaxed into the self-depreciating smile of a woman who can't believe people when they say she's gorgeous — someone for whom every conquest is a new surprise. Whether her film characters had an unapproachable (and thus enticing) air or bore the unspoiled stamp of the dream girl next door, she stirred romantic interest in her movie men. From the start they'd be considering strategies to thaw her out, measure up, muss her up.

And often it's the men who'd be reformed. Playboy Cary Grant, in the 1957 An Affair to Remember, meets chanteuse Kerr on a long cruise and, at nearly the first stop, takes her ashore to meet his aged mother. By the end of the voyage they've agreed to test their love by waiting six months before meeting again at the top of the Empire State Building ("the nearest thing to heaven"). The ending, which I'll just say involves painting and walking, makes this film all-time romantic soaper, and Kerr and Grant the ideal middle-aged lovers.

Often in a Kerr movie, love is unspoken, not acted on, as in Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (again with Mitchum), whose plot sounds like the first line of a joke — did you hear the one about the Marine and the nun, stranded on a Pacific island? There's the spark of attraction too when she plays the English governess to Yul Brynner's Siamese monarch in The King and I. Shall they dance? Divinely. Consummate their affections? Unthinkable.

Another part of Kerr's chameleonic character was her red hair, a dramatic frame for her pale skin. For her three Colonel Blimp characters she had worn it in different shades and styles, from upswept scarlet to sensible russet. She was a natural for Hollywood in the postwar years, when more movies were made in Technicolor, and red was the fashionable tint for an actress. Yet in her most famous film role — anyway, film scene — she went platinum blond.

That was the 1953 From Here to Eternity. As it rescued Frank Sinatra's career from the B-movie commode, the film also showed that Kerr could play something tougher than a lady: a woman. As the company commander's wife in Pearl Harbor just before the war, she's a siren this time, a notorious lay on Army barracks from New Jersey to Hawaii. "Her and them sweaters!" one soldier says as she walks toward him. In curly blond hair and a halter dress like the one Monroe wore two years later in The Seven Year Itch, Kerr lasers a knowing, weary sensuality. On the beach with a beau, when she removes her skirt to reveal a swimsuit, she could be Monroe's double; the resemblance is that close.

But there's also a battered bitterness in this Karen Holmes. She may sashay in public, but at home with her philandering husband she spits out her contempt in cigarette puffs. Her hatred for him, and what he did to her, leads Karen into liaisons out of desperation and revenge. She thinks that robust Sgt. Warden (Burt Lancaster) may be the man she searched for in all those other men. In the famous beach scene, as waves crash over them, they lie down and she rolls on top of him, in command. "Nobody ever kissed me the way you do," she purrs ("kiss" being a metaphor for a closer form of contact). Suddenly he's proprietary, wondering how many men she has "kissed." "Can't you give me a rough estimate?" he asks, and she replies, "Not without an adding machine."

The scene is remembered for the much-imitated smooch at the shoreline, but it's more mature and complicated than that. From Here to Eternity helped Hollywood approach themes of sexual yearning and remorse in a more mature fashion. The movement could have no finer exemplars than Lancaster, the wily male animal, and Kerr, the lady who revealed, with her subtlety and daring, that things may never be quite what they seem.