The film stars Robert Wagner, Terry Moore, and Broderick Crawford, and was directed by Richard Fleischer.

He is transferred to a punishment company, run by the dictatorial Captain Grimes, who insists on being called "Waco" in order to prevent his own death by Japanese snipers.

Through flashbacks, we learn Gifford's backstory—his civilian status as a wealthy cotton farmer, hard and uncaring towards his employees, and married to the beautiful daughter of his National Guard commander, a well-to-do plantation owner.

Another officer, disdainful of his men both as sharecroppers and as soldiers, machine guns Gifford's friends out of cowardice and panic.

Wanting to show that he is still an officer, Waco dons his formal Class A uniform including rank insignia.

Arkansas-born Francis Irby Gwaltney soldiered in the Philippines with the 112th Cavalry that served throughout the Pacific doing several amphibious landings.

When Fox picked the 1955 novel up for filming, they assigned it to Philippines veteran Rod Serling, famed for his American television plays.

Unfortunately, Serling's first screenplay was nine hours long, and the project was given to other writers,[7] notably Harry Brown, who had written the book A Walk in the Sun.

Between Heaven and Hell is one of the 1950s depictions of the US Army that did not paint a recruiting poster image and was more in tune with many soldiers' memories, such as From Here to Eternity, Robert Aldrich's Attack or Samuel Fuller's films.

This curiously rambling, unconvincing and often baffling picture, opening yesterday at Loew's State, very sketchily suggests the regeneration of a hard-headed young G. I. on a Japanese island in the Pacific...Except for the sideline skirmishes with the Japanese, and one fine, big beachhead battle staged by director Richard Fleischer, the action focuses on the outpost, where a brutal, slightly demented company commander, Mr. Crawford, reigns supreme.

Mr. Wagner not only manages to survive some snarling comrades, most of whom are wiped out, but also the enemy in a series of lagging, disjointed clashes, verbal and physical, that shed little light on anything or anybody.