Sergent la terreur

An utterly routine military film, minus anything that might distinguish it from the many other recruiting posters of the time, e.g. The DI (1957), Battle Cry (1955), et al. Except for the first few minutes of combat in Korea, the remainder is taken up with Basic Training at Fort Bliss, TX. Widmark gets the stereotypical role of an emotionally crippled drill sergeant, while Malden is wasted as his straight-arrow assistant. Third billed Stewart is the required love interest, who unfortunately is all hair and little talent. The remainder of the cast fills out the ranks of recruit trainees, with the usual array of witty or problem personalities. The movie's one notable feature turns up in the multi-racial ranks of the trainees, a relatively new updating for Hollywood.

As a guy who went through Basic (at Ft. Bliss in the 60's), I have to agree with reviewer bkoganbing. Many of the incidents portrayed in the film would never have occurred in real training, especially Malden slugging Widmark in front of the trainees. But I guess the screenplay needed more action at that point. Then too, the language was really cleaned up for public viewing. I had to laugh every time Widmark benignly called the recruits "young people".

What surprises me is the movie's director, Richard Brooks. How he got the job of supervising this sort of pablum is a puzzle, having built a reputation for highly serious work as a screenwriter, Brute Force (1948), Crossfire (1947), et al. Anyway, the movie is fairly typical of the sanitized type of military drama of the 1950's, before the stark realities of Vietnam sank in. (Contrast Basic Training here with it's more starkly realistic counterpart in Full Metal Jacket {1987}.) All in all, Take The High Ground is little more than a bland period curiosity.

While this may not be the movie that made me want to join the Army in 1956, it may have helped. The plot is a formulaic coming of age in basic training story, turning boys into men. The personal interactions and love affairs of Widmark and Malden, the veterans of Korea who are now leading a trainng platoon at Fort Bliss, Texas, next to El Paso are also formulaic.

The real value of this picture is as a time capsule. Nothing herein is BS, dreamed up, or recreated such as are Platoon, or Full Metal Jacket or Apocalypse Now, to mention some more modern highly praised but highly fictionalized films. Nor is it an anachronistic mish mash such or a low budget BW cheapie such as many of that period were.

Everything shown here is as it was at the time of filming and the background extras and other military individuals were actually going through infantry training with the real possibility of going to combat in Korea when it was being made. (An amusing aspect is that the opening scene of the newly arrived trainees and the disciplined troops entraining for their new assignments were filmed on the same day with the same Southern Pacific locomotive and equipment. Yet supposedly took place three months apart.)

Other time capsule films of the time are Bombers B-57, and Strategic Air Command, which prove that officially approved films can be entertaining and informative both.

An opening scene set in the Korean war combat zone leads us ,briefly , to expect a war movie but the picture is actually about the training of a new batch of army recruits at Fort Bliss ,Texas .The drill instructor is teak tough Sergeant Ryan ( Richard Widmark )who bullies , browbeats and cajoles the assorted recruits into effective soldiers.His methods ar harsh but effective and bring him into conflict with the somewhat more avuncular sergeant played by Karl Malden

The recruits are a mixed bag --the black ,poetry reading intellectual ,the farm boy ,a brash young kid ,a Native American etc .The army as melting pot , in other words ,coming together as a smoothly functioning machine.

It is pretty obviously an "approved " movie shot at an actual training camp and this is not the revisionist view of the military that was so prominent in the following decade but a picture that could well be designed as a recruitment vehicle. Elaine Stewart as the girl who comes between the two sergeants is the only major female star in an otherwise testosterone heavy picture heavy on male bonding and the military virtues .Widmark is as ever excellent ,and he is backed up by the always reliable Malden.

A strong genre piece and a reminder that military excellence is not achieved by accident.

An interesting Korean-War era film, starring Richard Widmark and Karl Malden, Take the High Ground depicts sixteen weeks of basic training at Fort Bliss. The film revolves around the differing personalities of two drill sergeants (Widmark and Malden) as they shape hopeless recruits into combat-ready soldiers. Widmark's character, Sgt. First Class Thorne Ryan is a battle-hardened veteran, who believes that toughness is the best way to prepare recruits for combat. Staff Sgt. Laverne Holt (Malden), however, relies on compassion to help his men adjust to army life. These differences present a few interesting conflicts, but overall, their static characters add little. Like most basic training films, this movie offers a few predictable laughs and trivial subplots, but fails to develop a deep plot. Elaine Stewart's adulterous character, in particular, is unnecessary and only adds confusion. Overall, however, Take the High Ground is watchable, if not memorable.

At least Kubrick's film for its first part; in other words, the best movie ever made about military drills in a boot camp, far better for me than Ridley Scott's GI JANE, just a joke for me. Here, Richard Widmark is simply awesome, though the story could have been far darker, more dramatic, but I think the director Richard Brooks refused the idea to "disgust" the bulk of his audiences with a too gloomy atmosphere. The purpose was to denounce the harsh, brutal, sadistic methods of the US ARMY, or Marine Corps. That's what I got, what I understoood. And I was very amused to discover that, in the late eighties, a commercial for Lucky Strike cigarettes used a man with a face very close to Widmark's one for a sequence taking place precisely in a boot camp, where the sadistic instructor - with Widmark's face - pushes the young soldiers beyond the human resistance limit, showing that they were not lucky, like the cigarette brand.... Not very subtle but that tribute amused me much.