Halls of Montezuma

This is one of a slew of WW2 films made in the late 40's and early 50's, some better than others. This is definitely one of the better ones. This film features a whole bunch of future stars, such as Richard Widmark, Karl Malden, Richard Boone, Jack Palance, Robert Wagner, Jack Webb and Martin Milner. Most of them hadn't completely honed their skills yet and a couple of the performances are either a bit wooden (Malden, Wagner and Webb) or overdone (Widmark). The technology is very primitive by today's standards, yet this film holds up well. The acting aside, it seems that every effort was made to make the film as realistic as it could be. In that respect, this film is much better than some of the others of the same era. There are a lot of films from this era. If you choose to watch only a few of them, make sure this is one of the few.

Halls Of Montezuma is a busy, Technicolored war film circa 1950, and was a big hit in its day. The story-line, such as it is, is convoluted and not really worth going into. Basically the film is about the psychology of war and its effect on human relations, especially those created by the war itself. A good deal of the film, as I recall, takes place in caves, ditches and deserted buildings. Unlike most war films this one emphasizes the fact the most soldiers, even Marines, are made, not born; they all come from someplace and would like to return there, preferably in one piece. Lewis Milestone directed the picture, and while it is a far cry from his classic All Quiet On the Western Front, this film is no shabby piece of work. Richard Widmark heads a cast of future stars, and they all perform well, if a bit too strenuously at times. The actors tend to be grouped together a good deal, maybe to ensure that no one can outshine anyone else, and this, plus the emphasis on isolated settings, succeeds in making the film strangely intimate. The color is bright and often glaring, and the Pacific island setting well-rendered. It's worth mentioning as a footnote that the studio that made the picture, 20th Century-Fox, would soon be switching over to making almost exclusively CinemaScope films, and would also soon be dropping Technicolor for the cheaper De Luxe color. Their post CinemaScope product is for the most part vastly inferior than what they previously had been doing, and Halls Of Montezuma, while not a great film, shows, even today, just how beautiful Technicolor could be. This, plus the use of the square, tidy space movies were limited to in those pre-wide screen days, makes for a depth in perspective that is at times almost seductive, even in so grim a film as this.

I was surprised that Halls of Montezuma was not an adapted play since a great deal of the action takes place in a cave that serves as a battalion headquarters where Colonel Richard Boone is trying to extract information from prisoners.

That in itself wasn't easy because the Japanese were not known for surrendering. Boone gives an order to try and take prisoners on this landing on an unnamed Pacific island.

Richard Widmark's company finds a few of them and it's a rough go and several members of Widmark's command die in the mission. The Japanese are firing a lot of rockets from a hill and the bombing from planes doesn't do any good. Before the big push towards that hill can be made those rockets have to be dealt with.

A lot of promising young players from 20th Century Fox were in Widmark's platoon like Robert Wagner, Jack Palance, Richard Hylton, Skip Homeier, Martin Milner. Some make it and some don't. There are several flashback sequences showing these guys in their civilian lives and earlier in the war.

At the headquarters there's also quite an assortment, Jack Webb a war correspondent, Philip Ahn an articulate Japanese prisoner who is a baseball player in civilian life and looking decidedly out of place there is the urbane Reginald Gardiner replete with cigarette holder. He's along for the ride because he's an expert on Japanese culture and psychology and speaks the language.

Halls of Montezuma is a good, not a great war film. Three performances do stand out. Karl Malden as the veterinarian now serving as a medic and career marine Bert Freed and his sergeant Neville Brand.

Arguably, it's one of the three or four best WWII movies ever made. A group of U.S. Marines race against the clock to find the source of enemy rockets that prevent them from taking control of a Japanese-held Pacific island. It's certainly a patriotic film. But there is also an undercurrent of despair, based on the human toll that war inevitably takes.

These Leathernecks are tough, but they are also subject to death from enemy fire. And the screen story puts a lot of emphasis on individual characterization. I don't recall a film that did such a good job of combining scene transitions with flashbacks to help viewers understand the motivations of the main characters.

Lt. Anderson (Richard Widmark) is the leader; he suffers from debilitating migraine headaches, but nevertheless pushes on to fulfill whatever dangerous mission he's assigned. One of his men is Conroy (Richard Hylton) who used to stutter, until Anderson helped cure him of it years earlier. Slattery (Bert Freed) is your typical Marine toughie, but he's got a sense of humor and conceals a portable still to make booze. Pretty Boy (Skip Homeier) is a pistol packing dude with a chip on his shoulder. Through the screen story's deep characterizations, viewers naturally become attached to these guys, and root for them as they enter into their dangerous mission. Of the dozen or so men Anderson leads, not all will make it out alive.

As in other battle films, viewers learn the importance of quick decisions, teamwork, effective communication, and keen awareness of one's surroundings. Life occurs moment by moment, in the here and now. Make a plan; execute it; dodge a problem; ignore pain and fatigue; persist. These are lessons applicable to anyone at any time, not just warriors on the battlefield.

"Halls Of Montezuma" is a quality production all the way. The color cinematography is fine, despite the fact that some of the techniques are dated. The ensemble acting is credible. The editing and scene transitions are just terrific. And, as the film's bookends, that rousing theme song: "From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli" gets the viewer in the right frame of mind.

I normally don't care for movies in this genre. Even this film, like other WWII films, is a tad too predictable, slightly manipulative, and contains some outdated assumptions. Nevertheless, as war movies go, "Halls Of Montezuma" is one of the best.

When it was released in 1950, "Halls of Montezuma" was one of the most realistic and ambitious war movies yet made. Today its strengths still outweigh its unfortunate flaws. The flaws are an all-too-familiar sentimental streak, an absurd "revelation" about Japanese tactics, an unconvincing psycho in a clumsy explanatory flashback, and the unlikely presence, in Lt. Anderson's platoon, of a replacement who just happened to have been one of his high-school students in civilian life.

Many viewers will find such flaws even more annoying because they detract from the good things about this movie, including some solid performances (Widmark, Palance, Boone, Webb) a realistic plot, an unusually authentic look--including some (mostly) well integrated combat footage--and a spectacular scope. Until "The Longest Day" (1961), the beach landing here(with flame-throwing tanks)and the later assault on the Japanese were more impressive than any other screen depictions of a large military operation. (BTW, the failure of the Japanese to oppose the landing itself isn't a Hollywood howler; the movie accurately reflects the Japanese defense strategy on Okinawa in 1945.) Milestone's directorial masterpiece, "All Quiet on the Western Front" (1930), expresses revulsion at the slaughter of World War I. "Halls of Montezuma" affords a more complex view of men in World War II. The hero is a high-school chemistry teacher whose migraines have addicted him to painkillers; he doesn't care because he assumes he's going to be killed. One character is blinded and another killed by accident. By modern standards such incidents may seem relatively mild, but during the war such troubling images were thought to be too disturbing for film-goers. Even in 1950 they were strong stuff for a movie.

Made at a time when the Cold War was heating up dangerously in Korea, "Halls of Montezuma" is still a revealing postwar response to World War II in the Pacific.