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
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: ...."THIS US MARINE FILM IS ....NONPAREIL"....THE BEST!!!
Summary: 5 Stars
...Nowhere, have I set eyes on a better Marine movie than this one...it has so much to offer besides the lethal war scenes...ponder this scene...the Marines leaving the safe sanctuary of those gaping LST doors in their briney wake, even the music puts your in their boots...mulling over in their minds that shortly, this is their last day on earth...[powerful cerebrate moment]...the clanky Amtraks churning up the blue/white sea while racing towards the Line of Departure...all hell is about to blast 'you' out of the water..."Lock-N-Load"...we are crossing the Line of Departure" is shouted out!!!...the US Navy's club-wielding police force is turned loose to do their sworn duty to kill every Japanese Marine on another blood/soaked and palm fringed island...another gem, Widmark telling the Colonel who now wants prisoners, that once you teach Marines to hate and kill the enemy [take no prisoners]...it's almost impossible to reverse an ingrained trait for the lust of killing...the more we kill the longer we remain alive, even when the battle-scarred Marines do capture the enemy as ordered, most want to kill every son of Nippon as expressed by [Pretty Boy and Palance]....a multitude of these Marines have been through so much from Guadalcanal, Tawara, Saipan, Pelilieu, etc...that, they will never survive this endless of endless warfare...Widmark expresses this manic/depressive minsdet very clearly [a very great actor]..in real life Widmark's brother was KIA in the Pacific war...[it preyed on him his whole life]...young Bob Wagner was a Marine reservist in real life...the bellicose Colonel [Richard Boone]was for real, always chewing out non/conformist Sgt Reginald Gardiner for being out of uniform and his outspoken word, but once the rocket base is pinpointed the good Colonel gives Gardnier the OK, and Reggie gets the last word in with, "See, just give the Colonel some time, before he sees it our way"...great punchline!!...star studded cast blends in for a smothering display of Marine camraderie within the enlisted ranks...this Marine movie says alot about the protracted island invasions that dotted the looong road back to Tokyo... and ALL six [6] Marine Divisions FMF gave the Japanese a taste of their own medicine with accrued interest, I kid you naught, indeed..."Give 'em Hell"...."Gung Ho"....SSGT CHRIS SARNO-USMC FMF
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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