Halls of Montezuma

The Pacific, towards the end of the war. A Marine platoon is sent to find where the Japanese rocket fire is coming from. There is little time: the rockets hit the landing area every day. Lieutenant Anderson, who leads them, was a chemistry teacher before the war and is now in the same unit as some of his own former pupils. He is held upright by pills against severe headaches. The patrol goes into the jungle. The rest of the film is a search across ground, with flashbacks to who these men were before the war. Lewis Milestone directs; a hundred and thirteen minutes, with Richard Widmark as Anderson and Jack Palance, Karl Malden and Robert Wagner in the cast. Milestone had made All Quiet on the Western Front twenty years earlier. This one was made with the cooperation of the Marine Corps.