Word: jima
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Sands of Iwo Jima (Republic) is a war picture that bristles and booms with enough clips from official combat films to give its audience a realistic touch of battle fatigue. The rest of it is just plain fatiguing; the plot has no more freshness or emotional tug than a military manual, and it is peopled by a movie-hardened cast of characters who have served too many hitches on Hollywood's back-lot battlefields...
When the marines go into action, at Tarawa and Two Jima, they behave more like marines. While taking pains to reconstruct big scenes of the island battles, Republic has leaned heavily on incomparable wartime film to catch the terrible fury of the Pacific fighting. Unfortunately, by intercutting shots of Wayne & company-studio-lighted in uniforms that don't match those of the real invaders-Director Allan Dwan gets a patchwork that suggests a series of trailers intruding on some bang-up newsreel footage...
...Jima's greatest asset is leathery, lithe John Wayne. His relaxed acting of a sleepy-eyed, two-fisted he-man (6 ft. 4 in.) has made him a pillar of credibility in many an unlikely blood & thunder epic. Broken in like a good saddle, in 150 pictures over 20 years, his coarse-grained appeal has finally won 42-year-old Actor Wayne a place (according to Showmen's Trade Review) second only to Bob Hope among the U.S. box office's favorite male stars...