Halls of Montezuma (1950)

Wow.  Talk about a movie that was ahead of its time in its message.  Well, mostly anyway.  Halls of Montezuma follows the journey of a squad of US Marines as they storm an anonymous Japanese held island in the Pacific during WWII.  They are then tasked with locating a Japanese rocket emplacement before the next wave of troops arrive.

Their leader, Lieutenant Carl Anderson aka "Andy" (Richard Widmark) is a troubled man, having just lost most of a squad on Tarawa, and trying to make the best of his situation while combating recurring psychosomatic migraines.  The rest of his current squad (including a young "Walter" Jack Palance and an equally young Robert Wagner) come from diverse backgrounds, and carry weights of their own.

The film starts off as a flag waving, anthem blaring, do-or-die salute to the Marines, but quickly evolves into a more complex drama, detailing the insanity of war, and the toll it takes on the Marines.  We see a few of his squad overcome their problems, and a few who do not.  But overall the drama in this picture is some of the more intense I've seen, matter of fact I'd rate it right up behind "Private Ryan" in the quality of it all.

After they storm the beaches, they end up on a mission to locate a Japanese rocket base which is giving them nothing but grief.  On this mission they capture a  few prisoners, which further defines their struggle.

I won't spoil the ending, but suffice it to say its not all flags and fireworks.  Anderson defeats his demons, and then they all end up more or less right back where they started.

But confusingly enough that includes more of the same flag-waving and anthem-blaring that started the picture.  That I just didn't get.  After evolving this picture into the complicated story they did, to turn it around a complete one-eighty just ruined it for me!  Maybe that was on purpose, as part of the message, maybe it was just a ploy by the studios to not end the picture on such a down and somber note, I don't know.

The acting on most everybody's part is mostly brilliant, subtracting a few typically-50s overacted moments.  The cinematography shines, well, mostly as well.  And the action scenes get interspersed with stock footage of Iwo and other Marine actions.

I really enjoyed this picture, and I'm giving it a full 9/10.  Take away one for the 180-degree turn at the end and a few overplayed moments.  I highly recommend this one.

Technorati Tags: halls of montezuma, 1950, richard widmark, walter jack palance, robert wagner, karl malden, war movie review, world war ii 2, wwii, pacific, japanese, usmc, marines

• Details
• Description
• Features
• Reviews

Halls of Montezuma List Price: $14.98 Sale Price: $2.93 You save: $12.05 (80%)   Eligible for free shipping! Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days

Description

Richard Widmark leads an all-star cast of leathernecks (Jack Palance, Robert Wagner, Karl Malden, Richard Boone, and Jack Webb) into battle on a heavily-fortified enemy island. Their objective is a Japanese rocket sit in the island's interior, and the combat-packed story follows the squad from beachhead to battle, as they pick their way trough enemy-infested jungles. Along the way, Widmark is transformed from a former school teacher into a combat-wizened leader, and his disparate squad of men is forged into a cohesive fighting unit.

Lewis Milestone was the American cinema's premier maker of war movies for three decades. He won an Academy Award for the single most honored film about World War I, All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), and made one of the most distinctive contemporaneous films of World War II, A Walk in the Sun (1945)--a notable influence on Saving Private Ryan. Still, some of his efforts were rather less than milestones, including The Halls of Montezuma. That still leaves room to accord the picture a marginal recommendation; it's well cast, competently made, and free of "Hollywood" heroics. But the hallmarks of Milestone's style--such as his syncopated tracking shots--were becoming mannerisms, and the screenplay's rhythms of personal crises set against the bigger picture of the military campaign are pretty mechanical. Richard Widmark stars as a Marine platoon leader who, having brought only seven of his men through Guadalcanal, is determined to see them safely through the next island conquest. The lieutenant was a schoolteacher in civilian life--as we see in flashbacks--and one member of his command is a former student (Richard Hylton) he helped overcome fear. Other platoon members include ex-boxer Jack Palance, trigger-happy bad boy Skip Homeier, hardcase veterans Neville Brand and Bert Freed, and Karl Malden as a philosophical corpsman. However, the most arresting performance is given by Milestone discovery Richard Boone, making his screen debut as a sympathetic colonel stuck with fighting the Japanese and fighting off a miserable cold at the same time. --Richard T. Jameson

DVD Information

Binding: DVD
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Brand:
Manufacturer: 20th Century Fox
Original Release Date:
Actors:

• Richard Widmark
• Jack Palance
• Reginald Gardiner
• Robert Wagner
• Karl Malden

Features

• TESTED

Reviews

Related posts:

1. Morning Departure (1950)
2. Battle Cry (1955)
3. Guadalcanal Diary (1943)
4. Flying Leathernecks (1951)
5. Marines, Let’s Go! (1961)
6. Gung Ho! (1943)

This entry was posted on Friday, June 15th, 2007 at 10:39 pm and is filed under 1950s, Reviews, World War II Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.