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.

Of course, it has occasional relapses. People make oblique references to the Lieutenant's heroic conduct at the "Canal" and about the guy "he pulled out of the drink at Tarawa." But the Lieutenant is too tough to own up to these exploits; in addition, he has a case of psychological migraine which would put a lesser man back in street clothes. The Lieutenant is the hero, and there is not a man in the audience who would not be proud to serve under him.

But as a thinking citizen, the Lieutenant is a pretty sad apple. He doesn't particularly care whether he lives or dies, since all his friends are being killed off, and he is not interested in returning to his home and attempting to rebuild it into a better world. "Not after all this," he says. The Lieutenant is fighting simply to give him something to do until he gets killed. When one of his men goes berserk and is accidentally shot, he remarks in one sentence that it is too bad, but he disobeyed orders.

One the other hand, Reginald Gardiner Portrays a man who is just as brave and twice as admirable as Richard Widmark's lientenant. He proposes to survive the war and he also recognizes that maybe all the superimposed homogeneity of the Marines dosen't have much to do with their fighting efficiency. Perhaps in the future Hollywood should concern itself with the activities of the Citizen Army.