Word: montezuma
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...Halls of Montezuma. In Detroit, Edward J. Lappan won a divorce from his wife Edith, testified that since she got out of the service she 1) "couldn't forget she had been a marine," 2) "always wanted to fight...
There is a bushel of fine war photography in the "Halls of Montezuma" and some suspenseful plot development from its director Lewis Milestone (whose "Salerno Beachhead" is playing down the street). Unfortunately, it tends to deify an individual whom I consider a damn fool and a type of thinking which could stand some careful serutiny, war threat or no war threat...
...Halls of Montezuma" is not a superman comedy of the "Air Force," "Operation Pacific," or "American Guerrilla in the Philippines" stripe. It is a film which must be taken seriously, if only for the fact that roughly half the cast gets killed off, and nobody stands off a Banzai charge of Japs with two grenades, a penknife, and a Louisville slugger. "Halls of Montezuma" attempts to show that war is hell and pretty well succeeds...
...Halls of Montezuma (20th Century-Fox), Hollywood's latest tribute to the U.S. Marine Corps, is a good movie gone wrong. Depicting the invasion of an unnamed Japanese-held island in World War II, the film ranges between such extremes of sharp combat reporting and low-grade romanticism that the same moviemakers hardly seem capable of both...
Like other recent war films (Battleground, Sands of Iwo Jima), Halls of Montezuma concentrates on a single platoon, this time headed by an ex-schoolteacher (Richard Widmark) who is harried by battle-induced migraine. Unlike the others, Halls gives its characters some dimension and illusion of freshness. The characterizations of Lieut. Widmark and two insecure enlisted men (Richard Hylton, Skip Homeier), for example, are bolstered by short flashbacks to civilian life. Scripter Michael Blankfort also goes beyond lip service to the standard war-is-hell theme; his marines (including Walter Palance, Karl Maiden, Bert Freed and Richard Boone) grimly prove...