Halls of Montezuma (1950)

Sgt. Randolph Johnson: Wasn't there a comment by your General Sherman about war?
Lt. Butterfield: Yeah, he said, "War is Hell." What did he know, that eight-ball never left the States.

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This movie's title is taken from the first opening line lyric of the Marine's Hymn, the official hymn of the United States Marine Corps. In turn, the phrase "Halls of Montezuma" in that hymn is taken from the September 1847 Mexican-American War's Battle of Chapultepec when American Marines attacked the Chapultepec Castle (Spanish: Castillo de Chapultepec) west of Mexico City and later occupied that city. The Chapultepec Castle is also known as the Halls of Montezuma. The castle was depicted in the movie Vera Cruz and was an actual filming location in the film Romeo + Juliet.
Twentieth Century-Fox film studio publicity reveals that studio mogul Darryl F. Zanuck and producer Robert Bassler derived this movie's story from a short Marine film called "Objective-Prisoners" labeling this as "the key". The essence of this short film's plot was the high importance of capturing prisoners-of-war for interrogation as part of the military intelligence rationale.
Script treatments written by Sy Bartlett, Harry Kleiner and Major George A. Gilliland USMC held in the Twentieth Century-Fox Scripts Collection at the UCLA Arts Special Collections Library were not apparently used for this movie though Gilliand did stay on as a credited technical consultant to this movie's production.
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