I don't know exactly why this film gets as much applause as it does from reviewers. It's not bad, it's just unexceptional, even for 1950.
A DUKW delivers a platoon of Marines to an unnamed Pacific Island. As the ungainly craft drones slowly shoreward we get to know a little -- a very little -- about a handful of the men. Sometimes there is a voice-over to help us out. ("What am I doing here? I should be back on my farm. Cows don't cause trouble.") Sometimes there's a visual flashback to spell out the more complicated backgrounds, but the flashbacks don't last long, and they don't tell us much.
Nobody has more than one dimension. For instance, Jack Palance and Skip ("Prettyboy") Homeier are good friends. (Maybe what we used to call "******* buddies".) Homeier is going to be boxer Palance's manager after the war. Homeier comes from a crummy background and wants to be a big man, someday. And that's that, except that one dies trying to save the other.
Slattery is a beefy unthinking slob who wants nothing more than to build a still and make whiskey. He eyes a discarded samurai sword and mutters, "That'd be worth a pretty drop." And that's it for Slattery.
Another guy used to stutter but, with Lt. Richard Widmark's help, he overcomes it along with his fear of combat. So much for him.
Every man carries some sort of demon with him going ashore, and he either overcomes it or dies trying. Of the half dozen or so men we get to know something about, one by one half of them are picked off so the remainder can grieve in their varying ways. The personal stories seem patched together by a platoon of orthodox screenwriters.
The engine that moves the plot is that the Marine's advance has been stalled by an unexpected hail of rockets. Nobody can figure out where they're coming from. The Navy plasters the forward slopes of the ridge ahead. No dice. They plaster the reverse slopes. No good either. They plaster a nearby sugar cane field. Everything is plastered, except Slattery.
"Do you not remember," philosophizes an English-speaking Japanese prisoner, "that we Japanese always take the obvious and do the reverse." Light bulbs go off and an epiphany occurs. It means that the Japanese have actually built tunnels inside the ridge and placed the openings for the rocket-firing apparatus in the forward slopes of the ridge ahead.
Actually, I kind of enjoyed it. It's ridden with clichés and the script really isn't innovative but there's plenty of action, and Lewis Milestone has directed with his usual aplomb. He uses several long pans of men charging and falling, which dates back to his "A Walk in the Sun," and before that to "All Quiet on the Western Front." The performances don't hurt either. Richard Widmark, as the officer who suffers migraines and is dependent on analgesics, isn't bad. Sometimes, when the scene calls for it, he can look positively pained. Jack Palance doesn't have much of a part as the would-be boxer but it's hard to ignore him when he's on screen. Richard Boone, at that age, before wasted by booze, looked more like Scott Glenn than I'd ever noticed before, at least from certain angles.
A DUKW delivers a platoon of Marines to an unnamed Pacific Island. As the ungainly craft drones slowly shoreward we get to know a little -- a very little -- about a handful of the men. Sometimes there is a voice-over to help us out. ("What am I doing here? I should be back on my farm. Cows don't cause trouble.") Sometimes there's a visual flashback to spell out the more complicated backgrounds, but the flashbacks don't last long, and they don't tell us much.
Nobody has more than one dimension. For instance, Jack Palance and Skip ("Prettyboy") Homeier are good friends. (Maybe what we used to call "******* buddies".) Homeier is going to be boxer Palance's manager after the war. Homeier comes from a crummy background and wants to be a big man, someday. And that's that, except that one dies trying to save the other.
Slattery is a beefy unthinking slob who wants nothing more than to build a still and make whiskey. He eyes a discarded samurai sword and mutters, "That'd be worth a pretty drop." And that's it for Slattery.
Another guy used to stutter but, with Lt. Richard Widmark's help, he overcomes it along with his fear of combat. So much for him.
Every man carries some sort of demon with him going ashore, and he either overcomes it or dies trying. Of the half dozen or so men we get to know something about, one by one half of them are picked off so the remainder can grieve in their varying ways. The personal stories seem patched together by a platoon of orthodox screenwriters.
The engine that moves the plot is that the Marine's advance has been stalled by an unexpected hail of rockets. Nobody can figure out where they're coming from. The Navy plasters the forward slopes of the ridge ahead. No dice. They plaster the reverse slopes. No good either. They plaster a nearby sugar cane field. Everything is plastered, except Slattery.
"Do you not remember," philosophizes an English-speaking Japanese prisoner, "that we Japanese always take the obvious and do the reverse." Light bulbs go off and an epiphany occurs. It means that the Japanese have actually built tunnels inside the ridge and placed the openings for the rocket-firing apparatus in the forward slopes of the ridge ahead.
Actually, I kind of enjoyed it. It's ridden with clichés and the script really isn't innovative but there's plenty of action, and Lewis Milestone has directed with his usual aplomb. He uses several long pans of men charging and falling, which dates back to his "A Walk in the Sun," and before that to "All Quiet on the Western Front." The performances don't hurt either. Richard Widmark, as the officer who suffers migraines and is dependent on analgesics, isn't bad. Sometimes, when the scene calls for it, he can look positively pained. Jack Palance doesn't have much of a part as the would-be boxer but it's hard to ignore him when he's on screen. Richard Boone, at that age, before wasted by booze, looked more like Scott Glenn than I'd ever noticed before, at least from certain angles.