Take the High Ground!

TCM's annual Memorial Day Weekend marathon of war-themed movies began yesterday evening, and I have to admit to not noticing that there was a movie on today that's currently sitting on my DVR. In any case, I've got a movie airing tomorrow that's on my DVR, so I watched that instead: Take the High Ground!. It shows up tomorrow, May 25, at 5:15 PM.

The opening credits have a scene that could either be combat in Korea, or else training for what new recruits might have faced when they went over to Korea. Except that the movie was made in 1953, by which time the active fighting in Korea had ended. Not that that really matters, since the movie can be judged as a basic training movie regardless of the time in which is was set and made.

After the credits, a train shows up at Ft. Bliss, in west Texas, and a new crop of fresh-fased recruits (most likely draftees since we still had a peacetime draft in those days) gets off the train. They're met by two sergeants: Thorne Ryan (Richard Widmark) and Laverne Holt (Karl Malden). Also there are platoons of soldiers who have finished basic and are showing off how good the training was as they're able to march in formation and other fun stuff like that.

The new soldiers are, of course, a disparate lot, ranging from men who aren't certain they're cut out to be in Uncle Sam's army to sarcastic know-it-alls who need that attitude smacked out of them except that the drill sergeants are for good reason not allowed to smack the soldiers under them as we learned in Patton. Also, as you might guess, the two drill sergeants are opposites in personality, although I wouldn't be surprised if some bright officer higher up figured out that pairing a "good cop" and a "bad cop" would be a good way to handle basic training.

As for those two sergeants, both of them had served over in Korea before being sent stateside to run basic training. Holt is OK with that, but Ryan seems to be the sort of soldier who wants to fight, not train, and is bitter about being here at Fort Bliss. And don't you know he's going to let that show. In addition to this subplot, there's another one about the sergeants meeting a nice girl Julie (Elaine Stewart) at a bar and one of them falling in love with her.

Basic training rumbles on, and the recruits go through pretty much every trope you can think of in a movie about basic training, with even one of them planning to go "over the hill". Among the recruits are Russ Tamblyn, Steve Forrest, and Carleton Carpenter. As you also might guess, the recruits eventuall do seem to become good soldiers, although I don't think they ever wind up going to fight anywhere since the armistice in Korea will have been signed by the time they could get over there.

Take the High Ground! is a competent enough movie, helped out a lot by the location shooting and color photography, but boy if it isn't formulaic with pretty much every issue facing recruits and the sergeants training them showing up. I've also read reviews from people who served in the army well after 1953 saying that their experiences of basic training were not like what's presented on screen here. I'm not a military person so I have no idea what it was really like.

If you have 100 minutes to spend on a rainy day, I suppose you could do worse than Take the High Ground!. But at the same time, you could certainly do better too.