Widmark, who was born to play this kind of role, is Sgt. Thorne Ryan, a hard-as-nails taskmaster who realizes he has a limited amount of time to whip a bunch of raw recruits (including West Side Story's (1961) Russ Tamblyn) into the kind of shape necessary to survive the rigors of combat. There's often a good cop/bad cop situation in these pictures, so Karl Malden plays the benevolent Sgt. Holt. The sergeant is more responsive to the men as human beings than Ryan is, and he even confronts his hardened fellow officer about it. But he still understands that the hard-ass tactics are necessary. Throw in what the soldiers' wives have to endure while their loved ones are training for war, and there's more than enough discord to go around.
The recruits, as you might expect, are a cross-section of stereotypes: there's "Tex" (Jerome Courtland) from Texas, an African-American (William Hairston) from the inner city, an overtly cowardly recruit (Robert Arthur) who finally manages to shape up, etc. But director Richard Brooks orchestrates their conflicts by focusing on their shared humanity. In that sense, the stereotypes are shattered to reveal something far more powerful than what you might expect. Brooks' care with character construction places Take the High Ground several notches above the usual war movie.
Brooks was already something of an old movie-making hand at this point, and he learned the ropes from one the greats. He broke into the film industry by writing stories and scripts for the legendary producer, Mark Hellinger. Brooks' work on such tough Hellinger films as The Killers (1946), The Naked City (1948), and Brute Force (1947) are as hard-hitting as they come.
Even after leaving Hellinger, he continued to film testosterone-driven pictures in a frank, declamatory style that eventually led to his gripping, pseudo-documentary adaptation of Truman Capote's novel, In Cold Blood (1967). He claimed the best piece of filmmaking advice he ever got came courtesy of John Huston, who directed Brooks' script for Key Largo (1948). Huston's advice? "Get to the point." And that's what he did, throughout his long, celebrated career.
Director: Richard Brooks
Producer: Dore Schary
Screenplay: Millard Kaufman
Editor: John Dunning
Cinematographer: John Alton
Art Direction: Cedric Gibbons, Edward Carfagno
Music: Dimitri Tiomkin
Principal Cast: Richard Widmark (Sgt. Ryan), Karl Malden (Sgt. Holt), Elaine Stewart (Julie Mollison), Russ Tamblyn (Paul Jamison), Carleton Carpenter (Merton Tolliver), Steve Forrest (Lobo Naglaski), Jerome Courtland (Elvin Carey)
C-102m. Closed captioning.
by Paul Tatara
