Halls of Montezuma
by Lewis Milestone
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Jack Palance, Karl Malden, Reginald Gardiner, Richard Widmark, Robert WagnerDirector: Lewis Milestone
Brand: HALLS
Cinematographer: Harry Jackson
Cinematographer: Winton C. Hoch
Editor: William Reynolds
Producer: Robert Bassler
Writer: Michael Blankfort
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language); Japanese (Original Language)
Format: NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 113 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2002-05-21
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Movie Reviews of Halls of Montezuma
Movie Review: A Fitting Anthem To The Marines Of Their Day
Summary: 5 Stars
I was looking for a rousing film featuring the Marines and found it in "Halls of Montezuma". Richard Widmark gives an unexpectedly balanced performance as the Lieutenant of a platoon making a landing on one of the island chains leading to Japan. In a flashback, Widmark is revealed to have been a former teacher who helped a student overcome a speech impediment to become his class' graduation orator and when that student subsequently joins his command, Widmark helps him overcome shellshock to find the courage to make the landing featured in the film. Widmark's despondency when that soldier is killed in action then becomes all the more poignant.
Instead of projecting pure machismo, Widmark's role allows him to show that intelligence and psychology had much to do with the war effort of the time. Particularly during the scene where Japanes PoW's are interrogated and when Widmark uses the partial results of the interrogation to determine the location of an enemy rocket battery.
There are fine battle scenes as well, both of the ground troops as well as excellent use of real Navy footage of support ships opening fire on the landing zone in an effort to soften it up for the Marines landing.
The shots of widely separated Marines striding through the front also reveals the homage that later films like "Full Metal Jacket" paid to films like "Halls of Montezuma".
I'd recommend this film as a good starter for anyone wishing to begin building their own World War II library.
Summary of Halls of Montezuma
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
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