Another period piece, “From Here To Eternity” followed a trio of U.S. soldiers stationed in Hawaii in the early 1940s, just before Pearl Harbor. The cast was led by hunks Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, and Frank Sinatra, and its most famous scene features Lancaster locked in a passionate embrace with Deborah Kerr’s character after a day spent frolicking on the beach. In retrospect, the sandy love scene is short and not all that steamy, but at the time, audiences and Hollywood reacted strongly to the film’s frank scenes of sexuality. “From Here To Eternity” went on to win eight Oscars, and posters for the film still feature its most famous make-out scene.
Enter zany tragicomedy “M*A*S*H”: according to the late actor Kellye Nakahara, who played the endearing and underrated supporting character Nurse Kellye on the show, Alda spent two hours of the finale’s beach-set shoot filming a scene in which she and co-star G.W. Bailey, who played obnoxious company driver Rizzo, parodied the “From Here To Eternity” love scene. “For two hours, we lay down in that water with waves running over us,” Nakahara told the outlet, explaining that the sequence was dreamt up after Alda saw the pair messing around during the shoot.
Instead of an emotional scene, though, this one was meant to be funny. “G.W. had a cigar in his mouth. I was spitting water in his face with waves washing over us,” Nakahara told THR. The scene sounds hilarious, especially given the fact that neither character had interacted much beforehand, so it would’ve given the impression that they got carried away by the brief respite of a sunny day off and decided to randomly hook up. “We had a crowd cheering and laughing,” the actor recalled.
