FeistyUpper If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Konterr Brilliant and touching

ChanFamous I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Hot 888 Mama . . . my rating of "8" out of 10 actually is for a supplemental piece titled ON DIRECTOR WILLIAM A. WELLMAN, which is one of the many diverse and unconnected musings thrown together into something called THE MAKING OF THE HIGH AND THE MIGHTY for this film's 2005 restoration and DVD release. Wellman, of course, directed that John Wayne vehicle, as well as the first-ever Best Picture Oscar winner, WINGS. Wellman's biographer, Kevin Brownlow, emphasizes here that MIGHTY was NOT Wellman's preferred bag of popcorn, but that the director was a sucker for any story involving flight, since he was a decorated WWI war hero himself as a military aviator. Though it's mentioned in passing that Wellman's masterpieces were such movies as HEROES FOR SALE, this DVD extra clocks in at less than 10 minutes, so there apparently wasn't time for anyone to explain how an authentic American Hero politically to the left of Bernie Sanders could have co-existed during the shoot with Wayne, America's self-appointed "Snitch-in-Chief" at this time, who during the 1950s ruined the lives of Oscar winners such as Dalton Trumbo (please see TRUMBO) and Paul Revere's several-times great grand-daughter Anne, and fingered many Hollywood greats for Black Ops assassination by the CIA, including John Garfield and Errol Flynn.

CinemaDude1 Soooo many people seem to have such a fond, albeit clouded, memory of this trashy, badly acted and worse directed early attempt at the Hollywood "disaster" genre. I too saw this as a youngster at a time when CinemaScope and really good magnetic stereophonic sound was all the rage (to give you an idea, the word CinemaScope is placed BEFORE the main title and in a bigger point size!) and for years I enjoyed this skewed memory of it, always thinking that it was a great film. Over the years we were able to hear the very popular Dimitri Tiomkin theme song in a variety of instrumental and vocal arrangements play on the radio and records and cassettes continuously over the years. This kept a memory of the film in our collective consciousness, but without ACTUALLY having access to the film itself as it never played again in theatres. Decades later when the age of video was upon us, that title was not available for decades. I posit that this attributed to keeping a very romanticized memory of it alive in our collective psyche. Alas, not having it available for decades seems to have seriously distorted and fogged that memory as we recall it thru the distance of time and rose-colored classes. Now that it IS available again and we can actually watch it from start to finish with a critical eye not distorted by questionable memory of our youth or the John Wayne mystique, upon watching it again, I was really shocked; it was quite obvious to me that my memory was way, WAY off! By any standard, this is one sappy, overblown, wholly unbelievable piece of trash -- badly acted, terribly directed and edited and with dialog that at times is downright laughable. Except for a great music score which only attests to how talented Tiomkin is and that he was able to save an otherwise awful, incoherent story-line, a painfully overacted script, characters who not only were uninteresting, but who, by midway through this overly long drudge of a movie, had become so annoying that I was secretly wishing the plane would indeed plunge into "the brink," as they called the Pacific Ocean, and drown the whole lot of them. About the only saving grace for me was I could see all the great iconic bits which, decades later, were so brilliantly incorporated into AIRPLANE! -- I didn't realize so many actually came from this clunker with Robert Stack hilariously caricaturing his incredibly stiff performance, which only pointed to the genius of the AIRPLANE! writers and to the utter silliness of this dog. Here we have a text-book example a vanity project (producer and actor rolled into one) and what happens when a good cast is put the hands of an what can only be described as untalented director who doesn't know when to yell cut, letting shots run on much longer than they should and who cannot rein in his cast so they don't make fools of themselves, all over-acting to the point where the thing starts to look like a third- rate, really bad soap-opera or a silent film melodrama. It's a shame Warners let this one out of "the vault;" it would have been much smarter for the Wayne estate to just keep it off the market indefinitely -- that would have allowed it to retained that mystique that we all shared about it, i.e., that it actually was a really decent, even great movie from our youth that we wish we could see again. Now that we can see it, I must say that sadly, the bloom has gone way, WAY off that rose. Seriously. My recommendation -- if you think you remember this as one of the great films you saw when you were a kid, watching it will only waste 2 hours and 24 minutes of your life (it feels much MUCH longer) and serve only to teach you the hard lesson that the memories of our youth are not always what they seem. For anyone under, say, 40, or who's never seen it before, it won't even be comprehensible why anyone would think the awful acting style and amateur direction could have ever been thought of as some great film work of a past generation. They might even mistake it as just an early attempt at an AIRPLANE! wannabe comedy. And of course they would be wrong. Keep it in the vault.

evanston_dad The phrase "they don't make 'em like they used to" frequently refers to movies made long ago that are much better than most movies made now. But it can just as often refer to movies that aren't necessarily that good, and weren't really that good even at the time, but which carry such a freight of nostalgia with them that watching them all these years later makes us realize we no longer care all that much how good they are, just so long as they're still fun to watch.Such is the case with "The High and the Mighty," a cornball disaster movie about an airplane in peril that set the blueprint for films like "Airport" and "The Poseidon Adventure" two decades later. Actually, those movies from the 70s are much cornier than this one, so it is really a testament to how good "The High and the Mighty" really is that it holds up well in comparison to movies made much later. Its success is largely due to veteran director William Wellman, who was much more exciting when directing grittier stuff like "The Public Enemy," but who worked across so many genres ("A Star Is Born," "Battleground," "Wings") that he knew how to make a popcorn movie that you could also take seriously. But much credit for the film's success must also be given to the film's cast, which features John Wayne and Robert Stack as the pilots of the plane, and a host of passengers, each with his/her own story, but which is headlined by two marvelous actresses who both received Best Supporting Actress nominations for their work in this film, Claire Trevor and Jan Sterling.Movies like this are fascinating to watch now, because they work in so many of the cultural topics that were dominating public discourse at the time. This film brings up the atom bomb, American relations with Korea, disintegrating marriages, you name it. It's like a Cliffs Notes version of everything that was wrong with the 1950s.In addition to the Oscar nominations for Trevor and Sterling, the film garnered a nomination for Wellman's direction and brought three-time Oscar winning editor Ralph Dawson ("A Midsummer Night's Dream," "Anthony Adverse," "The Adventures of Robin Hood") his fourth nomination. Also, legendary composer Dimitri Tiomkin won his third Oscar for the film's famous score, and he inexplicably received a nomination, with lyricist Ned Washington, for Best Original Song, even though there is no song in the movie.Grade: B+EDIT: I have since found out how the film was nominated for Best Original Song even though no song appears in the movie. Apparently the main theme had lyrics, but the song was pulled from the film by a studio exec during its previews. Tiomkin protested and fought to have one print of the film released in Los Angeles with the song intact so that it would eligible for an Academy Award. The studio obliged, and Tiomkin got his Oscar nomination.

nomoons11 This is by no means a bad film. It's just not terribly original. The area of film-making where the plane gets into trouble and everyone's story on-board the plane gets told and why they're there was started with "Phonecall from a Stranger". A very fine film with Bette Davis in a minor role.This was a good watch but right off you already know the ending so what your in for is the stories from each passenger. What put them there and they tell their story and what not. All good actors in here but as I mention, not original.If you wanna get an idea of a good film with an airplane scenario...try a better film before this was made..."Island in the Sky". It's miles above this one in terms of enjoyment and edge of your seat thrills. You won't waste your time with this one and it has a lot of good points but go and find "Phonecall from a Stranger" and see what I mean.