The New Pictures

Take the High Ground (M-G-M), an Ansco Color hymn to the glories of the Army's basic training, was filmed to the tune of a flag-waving theme song (Take the high ground and hold it! Tho' you face eternity . . .). The raw recruits who are to be turned into soldiers include such familiar characters as the bragging Texan, the brash college boy, the sensitive Negro and the weakling. Happily, the picture spares moviegoers another movie version of the Brooklynite. Richard Widmark barks his way through the role of the tough sergeant, and a curious attempt is made to give him an extra dimension by having him quote from Edna St. Vincent Millay. Karl Maiden, as his easygoing sidekick, tries to soften Widmark's third-degree tactics in close-order drill and simulated combat.

On weekends Widmark switches from glowering at recruits to glowering at pretty Elaine Stewart, a crazy, mixed-up kid who cannot stay away from soldiers, apparently because her soldier-husband was killed in Korea. Despite all its predictable moments--Widmark has a fight with another noncom, is nearly shot by one of his resentful recruits, makes a man of the weakling, falls in love with the girl but stays true to the Army--High Ground manages to generate a clumsy, convincing power. But not many ex-soldiers are likely to concede that 16 weeks of basic training --even under such a superman as Widmark--would result in the superbly trained and conditioned squad that marches offscreen, at the picture's end, to Dimitri Tiomkin's heroic music.

Half a Hero (MGM) is a comedy that sets out to tell a few home truths about middle-class life in the U.S. suburbs. For those who are suffering the general financial trials of raising a family and buying a house, and would like company, Half a Hero provides a pretty satisfying answer to the eternal question of how to keep a soft heart in an era of hard currency.

Red Skelton, the hero, is a rewrite man on a small magazine in Manhattan. Though sure of neither himself nor his job, he is happy with his bride in their cozy little flat. Then baby comes, and his wife (Jean Hagen) begs Red to find a place outside the city. In the end, of course, she finds the place herself and carries him bodily across the mortgage threshold.

Once inside, Red rallies briefly, but in no time a colossal plumbing bill knocks him flat. Down he goes again when the interior decorator delivers his account. ("Sconces!" he croaks, discovering that all he gets for so much money are wall fixtures.) In the next few months, Red plays hard to get, but the tradesmen get him anyway. By quick stages, he is reduced to a fiscal wreck who can only make feeble protests against his son's dental expenses. Thereupon his wife stuns him to silence and final despair by explaining coldly that, when a baby tooth falls out prematurely, "the other teeth drift."

Comedian Skelton plays with fine restraint; his horid face wears a look of such battered averageness that it is hard to see in it the TV clown. As the typical suburban wife, Jean Hagen is as tersely true as the quotient of a questionnaire brought to life. Best of all, the picture is about something, and (thanks to Director Don Weis) never drops its sincere regard for its subject just to pick up a quick laugh. In mass-conscious Hollywood, it took courage to maintain the point that comedy is not always well served by funny lines.

Botany Bay (Paramount) takes the slow boat (94 minutes) to Australia. The ship's log of the trip to the first white settlement in Australia (established in 1788) graphically records a couple of cat-lashings, three deaths, a stabbing, a few larcenous interludes, and even a twin-bill keelhauling. All the same, there are too many becalmed stretches when hardly anything happens. Based on a novel by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, the script is a sort of reefed-in version of Mutiny on the Bounty. Instead of Clark Gable there is Alan Ladd, an actor who, even in the squalor of a windjammer's brig, carries himself as if he were wearing a dinner jacket under his rags. Instead of Charles Laughton there is James Mason, who makes (whenever he raises his voice above its customary elegant whisper) a fetching younger version of Captain Bligh. The wishbone of contention between Ladd and Mason is provided by a chicken named Patricia Medina, who offers, to say the least, some pretty pickings. She is rather peremptorily picked, in the end, by Actor Ladd, when both have safely reached Australia--a continent which, to judge from the views of it in this film, has not yet been towed off the Paramount lot.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.