The Gallant Hours (1960) on Netflix
Approved19601h 55mBiographyDramaWar
October 1942. Admiral William F. Halsey Jr. takes over the hard-pressed American forces in the South Pacific. He matches wits with Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto during the Guadalcanal campaign.
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Plot summary
At a 1947 ceremony where Admiral William F. Halsey Jr. goes on inactive duty, he looks back five years to the South Pacific. There the American forces at Guadalcanal are beleaguered, and the fighting stays off screen: the campaign is carried on through logistics and strategy rather than battle tactics. Across the water, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto leads the Imperial Japanese Navy, and scenes of the Japanese staff are played in Japanese with narration that summarizes them. The strain of high command falls on Halsey and on the officers around him, among them Lieutenant Commander Andy Lowe, Captain Harry Black and Commander Mike Pulaski.
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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Gallant Hours (1960)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Due to a lack of Grumman F4F Wildcat fighters at the time of filming, the producers substituted the similar but somewhat larger Grumman F6F Hellcat in one scene, even though the Hellcat was not yet available at the point in the war the film depicts.
- The studio rented a four-engined Sikorsky VS-44A flying boat, N41881, nicknamed "Mother Goose", from Catalina Air Lines and painted it in wartime camouflage for Halsey's flight from Pearl Harbor to Noumea. It promised to repaint the plane afterwards but never did, so the airline had to restore the civilian livery itself.
- Under his contract agreement with Cagney-Montgomery Productions, the real Admiral William F. Halsey received 10 percent of the profits from the motion picture made about him.
SPOILER
For dramatic effect, the film moves Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto's April 18, 1943 death, which actually came about five months after the period it covers, into the Guadalcanal fighting; otherwise the action runs from October 8 to December 1, 1942.- Robert Montgomery, the film's director, had served under Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr. as a U.S. Navy commander during World War II, and got the idea to make a film about him at the admiral's 75th birthday celebration in 1957.
- To make the interior battleship shots easier to move and light, the walls of the sets were hung from overhead grids so they could swing in and out as needed, a new construction technique at the time.
- The Gallant Hours was the first feature film Robert Montgomery both directed and produced, and it turned out to be his last involvement of any kind in film and television, as a producer, director or actor.
- James Cagney's dignified Admiral Halsey may have softened the real man's salty, pugnacious personality: when Halsey received his orders to take command of the South Pacific forces, he said, "Jesus Christ and General Jackson! This is the hottest potato they ever handed me!"
