More than Meets the (Heterosexual) Eye: Soldierly Queerness, Wartime Bisexuality, and Fred Zinnemann's Films Starring Montgomery Clift

When it comes to director Fred Zinnemann’s two films starring Montgomery Clift – 1948’s The Search and 1953’s From Here to Eternity – there is certainly much more going on at the level of intriguing subtext than typically meets the (heterosexual) eye. In the years following the end of the Second World War, fears surfaced regularly in US society about whether soldiers returning home would successfully be able to fit back into the hegemonic expectation of being heterosexual family men, given that research findings revealed many of them had participated in homosexual acts with some regularity during their years of overseas military service. Such concerns are indeed raised at the level of subtext quite efficiently in The Search, through the living arrangements and emotionally charged interactions of Clift’s character and one of his fellow military officers, and a bit more blatantly and elaborately in From Here to Eternity, which to the careful viewer reveals itself to be a bisexual love story involving two military men. Accordingly, this article provides in-depth subtextual analyses of the bisexual undertones evident in both films, which were necessary in an era when Production Code Administration restrictions prohibited explicit references to non-heterosexuality in all US cinematic offerings.