Memorable, crazy movie

Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Sgt. John Stryker (John Wayne) is a hard-nosed marine still suffering after his wife left him taking his son with her. After getting some replacements, they go into the battle of Tarawa. Stryker is hated by the squad especially privates Conway and Thomas. Conway is educated and hates his officer father whom Stryker admires and served under. Thomas was runner-up in heavy weight boxing to Stryker and blames him for his troubles. After Tarawa, the squad takes a rest in Honolulu and Stryker strikes up a romance. The next target for the squad is Iwo Jima culminating in them witnessing the flag raising on top of Mount Suribachi.The guys spend a lot of time with their personal melodrama in between the battles. It's 30 minutes before Tarawa and only the final 30 minutes is intermittently the battle for Iwo Jima. The personal stories are horribly cliché and convenient. The battles are much better integrating real battle footage. Although the actors need to improve their dying. I can forgive the bad death acting seeing the era when this was made. The battle footage was probably quite compelling coming so soon after the war. If this was mostly about the battle, it would be a compelling war movie.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with unpredictability. In fact, being unpredictable usually makes a movie worth watching. "Sands of Iwo Jima" IS unpredictable - at least in the sense that the title sets you up to expect a movie that's largely about the Battle of Iwo Jima. That turns out to be not what you get, though. This is really about a squad of US Marines led by Sgt. Stryker (played by John Wayne) and it traces their development into a fighting unit at the Battle of Iwo Jima. Iwo Jima actually takes up little of the movie. Almost the first hour and a half is about the squad itself and about some of its adventures and exploits. There's a fairly long look at the Battle of Tarawa, before Iwo Jima. Some of the lead-in is interesting enough, especially some of the portrayal of the personal tensions within the squad. Stryker has a history with some of the men. He's not liked - especially by Conway (John Agar) and Thomas (Forrest Tucker.) Stryker is battling demons of his own on the home front - a broken family and a 10 year old son he never hears from, which lead him to get drunk whenever he's given leave. Wayne's performance in this was actually pretty good. I'm not his biggest fan, but he did well with this role.The thing I didn't like in this was too much melodrama. I realize that those who made this were trying to give us insights into the lives of the men, but there was too much of it, at the expense of the war, to be frank. I found that especially the case with Conway, who meets a girl (Adele Mara) while on leave in New Zealand and ends up married to her pretty quickly. I can see how that would happen in wartime, but I really didn't find it an especially noteworthy addition to the story. I also found it strange that when the men were on leave in New Zealand all the girls they met spoke with American accents? (The studio couldn't find someone who sounded at least a bit like a New Zealander, or who could at least pretend?)Interestingly, I didn't find this to be as much of a flag-waver as I expected it to be. It's just a pretty solid study of this particular squad of Marines. (6/10)

Sgt John M. Stryker is a battle hardened Marine who's job it is to prepare his new charges for the realities of war. With no care for making friends, Stryker does what ever it takes to make these men tough and ready for the Pacific conflicts to come. Sands Of Iwo Jima is unashamedly proud in its jingoistic fervour, and rightly so. Iwo Jima, and the now immortal portrait of weary American soldiers hoisting the flag atop Mt. Suribachi, has become a bastion of bravery, a beacon of triumph if you will. So it's no surprise to find Allan Dwan's film has no intention if deviating from boasting its colours, and hooray to that. Here as Stryker we find John Wayne giving a bit more to his character portrayal than merely some beefcake winning the war. Wayne puts depth and sincerity into Stryker, an air of believability shines through as he shows vulnerability, we believe he can win this war with his men, but we also see tenderness and it lifts Sands higher than your average war picture. Wise old director Dwan (432 directing credits to his name), weaves the picture together with admirable restraint. Fusing actual newsreel footage with his own tightly handled action sequences, Sands plays out as the tribute and rally call that it has every right to be, even finding place in the film for three of the soldiers who hoisted that now famous flag. Ira Hayes, Rene Gagnon and John Bradley are the three gentlemen to look out for. The rest of the cast don't really have to do much outside of respond to Wayne's two fold performance, but keep an eye out for a fresh faced Richard Jaeckel as Pfc. Frank Flynn, while I personally enjoyed the brief, but important contribution from Julie Bishop as Mary. Wayne received a nomination for Best Actor at the Academy Awards (too bad for him that 49 contained brilliant shows from the winner Broderick Crawford & a blunderbuss turn from Gregory Peck), with other nominations going to the Best Story, Editing and Sound categories. Ironically it was a role Wayne didn't fancy doing, but some encouragements from war veterans humbled him into starring. Lock and load and saddle up for a top entry in the WWII pantheon. 8/10

"Sands of Iwo Jima" (1949) directed by Allan Dwan in its modesty as movie was interesting because concerning namely the photography, which is instinctively made as though it was similar when it occurs like during the event itself. Near the recent myth of the images distributed elsewhere around the world, also as news after the battle with great losses from the soldiers who took part, expelling in that past occasion from the island the Japanese soldiers. Director Allan Dwan with this B picture immortalized this act, with a lack of much more production recourses to bring us a better movie, but it was also that fragility what putted inside the true history in his own plot, by the feeling of a document much more authentic in its similarity with the almost forgotten same event, barely five years after the end of the war in Pacific islands.For me what I remember as young of the main scene is the acting as though something of unexpected and not well prepared, but nonetheless well done like the feeling of an accomplished aim when some of the mariners in several positions, putting the leaning flag as pushing it against the slope almost shadowy as a strange cliff on the island horizon : leaning their bodies drilling a hole on the ground and in meantime one of them took snapshots and from these all newspapers sometime later made a choice of one, the one whose fame was known since then. This reconstitution is so well made by Dwan team, that it still makes emotion to the viewers over a landscape as though before derelict. Something of a touch from random that allowed to take this single picture, almost without any previous preparation as improvised it was the feeling on it with a leaned flag, observed by an infinite stand on the land of the battle with the corpses and the wounded imposing the framework of the composition, inspiring plenitude and the strength of tired muscles after great losses of human beings there in that war. It became one of the few most popular photographs of the WWII, the moment of high intensity and dramatic tension also on this movie and too a great chance for the almost anonymous survivors in it, as though in statuesque kind of stressing immobility for a second by a single imperfect shot and quite dark on the bottom of the slope, because the mental foolish of the death toll in it but bypassed by a few men up and down as mere working boundary of living.