Surprisingly incoherent and boring

Excellent adaptation.

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

A cast of familiar actors (none of them stars) take you on a journey through the real horrors that is war. Imagine being the parent of a soldier in the South Pacific, unaware of what was going on other than what was permitted to be printed, and sitting in a movie theater during the middle of a world war and wonder if your boy would return home complete, minus a limb or in a box. Nearly 75 years later, numerous wars later, and countless deaths, these themes still resonate and the impact is still massive.Done in a semi-documentary style, this is powerfully narrated by ... and features a dozen or more familiar faces, yet as real as the home sprung young men who really were over there. MGM had "Bataan"; Paramount "Wake Island", and Warner Brothers "Destination Tokyo", and this 20th Century Fox historical documentation of a real battle, making it one of the very best of the hundreds of war films released up until the end of the war just two years later. Combination of slice of life and riveting action, this has a storyline (if not a fully fleshed out plot line) that probably packed the theaters each and every showing.Of the cast, Preston Foster (as the troop minister) was probably the best known at the time, with Anthony Quinn perhaps the biggest name to rise from this. William Bendix is the most memorable, totally bombastic as a good natured, if overly chatty Brooklyn native. Richard Conte, Lloyd Nolan, Lionel Stander and Richard Jaeckel are other familiar faces who each get moments to shine. The film shows them first relaxing on their way to their assignment, laying around on each other's shoulders and chests as they bond before battle. They deal with the unknown, the impact of killing a supposed enemy, and their own mortality. It's poetic and beautiful.

GUADALCANAL DIARY is an American WW2 movie made when the war was still in full flow. It's a surprisingly modern film in feel, with the battle sequences in particular feeling expansive and well-staged; they're chock-full of explosive action and gunfire, and they feel large budget and convincing as a result. Not bad when you consider the war effort going on at the time.The story is straightforward and, as it happens, true; a bunch of marines invade an island in the Pacific held by the Japanese and all hell breaks loose. There are many turns from famous faces like Anthony Quinn, Richard Conte, Lionel Stander, Richard Jaeckel, and William Bendix. The performances feel naturalistic and real, without any overt mannerisms or the like that can make them ring hollow. It's solid stuff throughout.

This actually was the first war movie I ever saw; would have been in about 1957, on t.v., when I was 5 yr. old., and had scarcely any idea about war, Marines, Guadalcanal, WWII, and so forth. At the time, I loved it. Saw it this weekend on DVD...oh, my word, what a different response I had! This movie does have a number of very compelling images and well-done scenes. Two of the latter include: Wm. Bendix's solo hula dance that turns into an Irish jig with Preston Foster; and A. Quinn, Roy Roberts and a third Marine, sole survivors of an ambush, passing one last cigaret hand to hand to take last puffs before attempting to vacate their besieged position. Too much of the movie contains scenes that are embarrassing in their manipulative sentimentality. An example is the night before the "big push," the camera pans across the Marines' encampment as "Home On The Range" wells up from the soundtrack in perfect multi-part harmony. I presume this movie was designed to reinforce morale on the home front, and perhaps it did accomplish that. I found too much of the movie--the bloodless injuries, the lame jokes, the stereotypical characters, the racism--difficult to bear, however. For me, it was an exercise in nostalgia to see a movie I recall enjoying in my youth; it was not the experience of encountering a movie to which I'd attach the label "classic."

This surprisingly effective tuppence-halfpenny war movie made quite a splash when it first came out and is often remembered fondly. It was made very close in time to the events it depicts and its cross-section of ordinary Joes fighting for their country obviously hit home with a national audience. There is a fresh, immediate feel to it. Lamar Trotti's script is a bit prosaic in that literate, high-toned style of his and it has an appalling narration read by Reed Hadley in the tones of a depressed speak-your-weight machine, (you pray that a sniper's bullet takes him out).The director, Lewis Seiler, couldn't shape the material in any dramatic sense, (like history, it's one damn thing after another; it soon wears you down), but the battle scenes look authentic and there is one classic scene where an entire patrol is wiped out on a beach with only Anthony Quinn surviving by swimming into the ocean. Terrence Malick covered the same events in his own distinctive, poetic style in "The Thin Red Line" but that is about the only comparison you can make between the two films.