User Reviews

The hate content in war films which had up to this point been reserved mainly for the Germans was now temporarily re-channeled in the direction of the Japanese, and the Pacific War was revived in aggressive patriotism in films like Allan Dwan's "Sands of Iwo Jima," Fritz Lang's "I Shall Return, " Nicolas Ray's "Flying Leathernecks," and Lewis Milestone's "Hall of Montezuma."

The focus of Milestone's film is the capture of a site on which the enemy have set up rocket sites… A Marine patrol is sent out, with orders to take prisoners and bring them back for interrogation…

Much of the movie's appeal arises from its future ensemble cast… There is Richard Widmark, a former schoolteacher who fights the war with his head in a vice; Karl Malden, the medical corpsman who knows what psychological migraine is; Reginald Gardiner, the British-born sergeant, who can speak Japanese; Robert Wagner, the young radio man who kept pestering his fellow soldiers; Skip Homeier, the hotshot 'pretty boy' who is in a hurry to get home; Jack Palance, the protective and grateful boxer who wants his pal as his future manager; Richard Hylton, the student who handled fear once; Richard Boone, the desperate colonel who insists on taking prisoners; Neville Brand, the strong sergeant blinded during a bomb attack; and Bert Freed, the best fighter man but before and after "the no-good money burnin', gin-drinkin' horsehead…"

All the characters solved their hang-ups with bouts of heroism, and Widmark was on hand to lead the last attack with a rousing battle-cry "Give 'em hell!"

I don't know exactly why this film gets as much applause as it does from reviewers. It's not bad, it's just unexceptional, even for 1950.

A DUKW delivers a platoon of Marines to an unnamed Pacific Island. As the ungainly craft drones slowly shoreward we get to know a little -- a very little -- about a handful of the men. Sometimes there is a voice-over to help us out. ("What am I doing here? I should be back on my farm. Cows don't cause trouble.") Sometimes there's a visual flashback to spell out the more complicated backgrounds, but the flashbacks don't last long, and they don't tell us much.

Nobody has more than one dimension. For instance, Jack Palance and Skip ("Prettyboy") Homeier are good friends. (Maybe what we used to call "******* buddies".) Homeier is going to be boxer Palance's manager after the war. Homeier comes from a crummy background and wants to be a big man, someday. And that's that, except that one dies trying to save the other.

Slattery is a beefy unthinking slob who wants nothing more than to build a still and make whiskey. He eyes a discarded samurai sword and mutters, "That'd be worth a pretty drop." And that's it for Slattery.

Another guy used to stutter but, with Lt. Richard Widmark's help, he overcomes it along with his fear of combat. So much for him.

Every man carries some sort of demon with him going ashore, and he either overcomes it or dies trying. Of the half dozen or so men we get to know something about, one by one half of them are picked off so the remainder can grieve in their varying ways. The personal stories seem patched together by a platoon of orthodox screenwriters.

The engine that moves the plot is that the Marine's advance has been stalled by an unexpected hail of rockets. Nobody can figure out where they're coming from. The Navy plasters the forward slopes of the ridge ahead. No dice. They plaster the reverse slopes. No good either. They plaster a nearby sugar cane field. Everything is plastered, except Slattery.

"Do you not remember," philosophizes an English-speaking Japanese prisoner, "that we Japanese always take the obvious and do the reverse." Light bulbs go off and an epiphany occurs. It means that the Japanese have actually built tunnels inside the ridge and placed the openings for the rocket-firing apparatus in the forward slopes of the ridge ahead.

Actually, I kind of enjoyed it. It's ridden with clichés and the script really isn't innovative but there's plenty of action, and Lewis Milestone has directed with his usual aplomb. He uses several long pans of men charging and falling, which dates back to his "A Walk in the Sun," and before that to "All Quiet on the Western Front." The performances don't hurt either. Richard Widmark, as the officer who suffers migraines and is dependent on analgesics, isn't bad. Sometimes, when the scene calls for it, he can look positively pained. Jack Palance doesn't have much of a part as the would-be boxer but it's hard to ignore him when he's on screen. Richard Boone, at that age, before wasted by booze, looked more like Scott Glenn than I'd ever noticed before, at least from certain angles.

HALLS OF MONTEZUMA is yet another Hollywood WW2 movie of the 1950s that sees a squad of US soldiers landing on a Japanese-occupied island in the Pacific and attempting to take down the enemy. They're led in this case by Richard Widmark in the type of role that could easily have been played by John Wayne or one of the other contemporary action stars of the era. Their goal is to find and destroy a Japanese rocket base that has been sending out a wave of rockets decimating their troops.

The film boasts the likes of Robert Wagner, Neville Brand, Jack Palance, Karl Malden, and Richard Boone in support. Most of the actors get at least one scene of emoting to themselves. The battle scenes are depicted in a vivid and realistic way with the intercutting of real-life battle footage to add to the realism. The film also explores the relationship of the soldiers with the enemy as some of the troops are driven to the edge by having to take prisoners instead of killing them outright. It's fairly engaging stuff, with a handful of hard-hitting moments to see it through.