Word: jima
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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...
...virtue: its release is timed 1) to cash in on U.S. naval aviation's well-publicized wrangling with the Air Force and 2) to get an early start in a new Hollywood cycle of World War II films. (Coming up in the near future: Battleground, Sands of Iwo Jima, Twelve O'Clock High, Three Came Home...
...cover of the pamphlet was the prize-winning photo of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima, along with the words...
Morris Rubin, an alumnus, sums up: "This bunch doesn't feel the compulsion to boast about its conquests the way my generation did. Iwo Jima was all the proof of their manhood anybody required." One well-informed coed says: "As far as smooching, et cetera are concerned, there is considerable smooching-but not much et cetera...