Halls of Montezuma (1951)
Review by Bailey
Film:
DVD:

Directed by Lewis Milestone
Written by Michael Blankfort
Starring Richard Widmark, Walter “Jack” Palance, Reginald Gardner, Robert Wagner, Karl Malden

Features:

• Theatrical Trailer

Anamorphic: NA; presented in its original 1.33:1 ratio.

My Advice: Borrow It.

For the first 30 minutes of this movie it had me interested. Instead of being one of a thousand such war flicks that came out during the late forties and fifties, this one had an intriguing feel to it. The director was using flashbacks as a device to give us a glimpse of these soldier’s lives before they were found themselves at war. I am a child of the seventies, and while that makes some laugh, some groan, and some think to themselves, “I wasn’t even born then” (which in turn makes me groan), I was afforded the opportunity to watch nearly all thousand of those aforementioned old war movies on cable TV. You see, in the beginning of cable TV, when there were only 4 cable channels, old war movies and westerns were all we had to watch. Well, that and WCW wrestling. But I digress; the point is I’ve seen them all. I have an appreciation of what’s good and what isn’t and after 30 minutes I was thinking Halls of Montezuma was pretty good. But then something interesting happened.

The movie slipped out of this fairly effective use of flashbacks and fell into the old war movie formula. And here’s where not only the movie--but also the DVD--lost any chance of finding favor with me. Why did this movie stop being unique? Excellent question. In my mind I can see the studio heads watching the dailies and going “what the @#% is this? We’re paying for a war movie not some artsy $%#@.” At which point the director was given his own marching orders to go back and make a war flick just like every other studio was making war flicks. Just remember, this is just me speculating, but that’s part of my point: why isn’t the real answer to this mystery on the DVD?

Maybe this movie is exactly what the director wanted to make, maybe not. Maybe this movie was made for a buck thirty-eight and everyone phoned it in, maybe not. I don’t know, but I would like to know. It just seems a waste to go through the effort of transferring a movie to DVD if you’re not going to put a little effort in to it.

This one just didn’t pan out, the extras don’t add anything, and if you catch it on TBS one night you’re going to see everything that this disc has to offer. If you pass this one on the shelf, leave it there. If you want to see a more compelling war movie check out another Fox War Classics release, Guadalcanal Diary, instead.