Odelecol Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

MusicChat It's complicated... I really like the directing, acting and writing but, there are issues with the way it's shot that I just can't deny. As much as I love the storytelling and the fantastic performance but, there are also certain scenes that didn't need to exist.

Lollivan 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.

Janae Milner Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

RanchoTuVu Richard Widmark and Karl Malden portray two US Army drill instructors whose task is to prepare a new group of recruits and draftees to face combat in the Korean War.The real basic training seems to take place off base in the bars. The film is somewhat reminiscent of From Here To Eternity with its portrayal of the military and its sordid social life. The men hang out in the bars around Fort Bliss, kind of like the bar scenes in From Here to Eternity, only but these bars are shot in cheap color. Elaine Stewart as an attractive young widow who hangs out at the bar, is sort of the Donna Reed or Deborah Kerr of this movie. This was a pretty stand out role for Richard Widmark in a movie that has slipped into obscurity.The use of Ansocolor makes the night time scenes in the bars look even more lurid than they already were.

dougdoepke 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.

shelton_harry The staple of war movies is the Basic Training Movie, where raw recruits are transformed from peace loving civilians into competent and capable fighting men. Thorne Ryan (Richard Widmark) and subordinate LaVerne Holt (Karl Malden) have returned from combat duty in Korea to Fort Bliss, Texas where they are assigned Drill Sargent duty. Ryan loathes his seemingly thankless task of running the recruits through uniform issue, close order drill, and rifle cleaning, preferring instead to fight communists in Korea. Ryan starts his recruits off with the proclamation, "You will never make it!" Laverne seems more content in his job and is happy to be in his station. The two then proceed to train the cross section of city boys, country boys, educated boys, goof-balls, idiots and klutzes into fighting machines.Two subplots emerge; first the meeting of Julie Mollison (Elaine Stewart), the ex-wife of a combat casualty, who it is suggested to somehow have brought about the soldier's death by her desertion of their marriage after he deployed. Ryan and Holt, nevertheless, compete for her affections. Ryan holds her with disdain at the outset, but is soon overcome by her seeming helplessness. Holt does not care to judge her at all. He accepts her as she is. Julie seems to only to like the soldier with the highest rank.The other weaker subplot involves the rivalry between Sargents, pitting Ryan against a Master Sargent who outranks him but does not have the hallowed Infantry Badge (a symbol of combat experience). There are the requisite fights and male posturing typical in military situations. The young recruits suffer exhaustion, panic, and rage at their Drill Instructors as they master the craft of soldiering. The location of the border town of El Paso provides an interesting twist in the off duty experiences of the recruits where they somehow find the only Anglo woman in the bars of Juarez while the Mexican women populate the background shots with barely any attention at all.One of the stars of the movie is the desert background of El Paso, Texas where location filming took place. The end of the movie is somewhat predictable and comes off as a recruiting tool for the U.S. Army, but as war buddy movies go this one has sufficient tension to keep most viewers entertained.

rpburg Okay, this is not a great movie when considering it in the war movie genre or side by side with some of the classics that both Richard Widmark and Karl Malden made, but I will always think this as one of my favorites because my father is one of the extras in the movie. Take the High Ground was filmed at Fort Bliss in El Paso, TX in 1953 when my dad was in advanced training before being sent to Korea. When the movie crew came to the base, my dad's training platoon was "loaned" to the filmmakers by the Dept. of Defense to make the training scenes look a bit more realistic. There are the five or so "recruits" played by actors, then the rest are real U.S. Army soldiers. Whenever I watch this with my friends, I'm proud to point out my old man as one of the soldiers marching by, under the watchful eyes of Richard Widmark and Karl Malden. After the filming was over, Widmark and Malden took several of the soldiers (including my dad) out on the town to thank them for helping with the film. Both Widmark and Malden were classy men, and right away became my dad's favorite actors/stars. He just wishes that Elaine Stewart filmed her scenes in El Paso, instead of staying in Hollywood where they were shot at the studio.