Baseshment I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

ThedevilChoose When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

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

Cheryl A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

HotToastyRag The High and the Mighty was the grandpa of the plentiful disaster movies from the 1970s, so if you like that genre and haven't yet seen this original version, rent it this weekend. It has all the elements: a large, star-studded cast, backstories for each character to make you care, a reason why each character should survive even when it doesn't look like they will, and of course, a disaster. It's intense and exciting, and while I find the subject matter frightening, it's very good!John Wayne and Robert Stack-who would later spoof this role in Airplane!-are airline pilots on a flight from Hawaii to San Francisco. Keep in mind, back in the day, that route was a twelve-hour flight, not a five-hour flight like it is now. Among the passengers are Claire Trevor, Laraine Day, Robert Newton, Phil Harris, Jan Sterling, and Joy Kim. During the flight, the audience is treated to everyone's backstory as the tension builds; we finally learn there's a problem with the plane and it might not make it all the way to Frisco!As a sidenote, Dimitri Tiomkin won an Oscar for his memorable theme. If you listen to it, you might recognize it, but while it is a pretty theme, it sounds much more like a romance than a thriller. If it was the theme to Peyton Place, it would have been lovely. For a disaster movie about a plane crash? It just doesn't fit, and it almost ruins the movie.Besides the music, a couple of technical flaws, and a healthy bit of Americana racism, the rest of the movie is very good, especially when you consider it was the first of its kind. John Wayne and Robert Stack, the two with the vastly larger amounts of screen time, are very good. I've never thought John Wayne was the greatest actor in the world, but he puts his whole heart into this movie.

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.

BoomerDT I have to admit I'm a sucker for airline disaster movies. "The High & The Mighty" was one of the pioneers of the genre, along with 1956's "Julie" a Doris Day thriller in which she is playing a stewardess who has to take controls in the cockpit and land an airliner after her estranged husband has shot the pilots. It was followed the next year by "Zero Hour" in which the flight crew is incapacitated after getting food poisoning and a passenger has to land the plane. If it sounds familiar, this would be used in 1980's "Airplane" the hilarious spoof of the genre. "Julie" and "Zero Hour" have one big advantage over THATM in that their running time is each about 90 minutes. THATM comes in at incredibly bloated 147 minutes and I could only imagine how much non-essential backstory was cut from this. THATM easily has about 90 minutes that could have cut, such as thoroughly unfunny flashback scene where passenger Phil Harris (the bandleader and regular from Jack Benny's radio program) recants to another passenger about the various calamities the happened to him and his wife on their Hawaiian vacation or another involving the well-endowed Jan Sterling and her pen pal romance. It's chock full of this kind of tedious stuff about the passengers that goes on and on and on.It's a good time capsule type of movie, in that it gives a wonderful sense of an era in air travel, back when passengers were treated like guests, rather than cattle and dressed as one would going to a fine restaurant or theatre. It is more than a bit preposterous as far as making us believe that we are actually travelling on a DC-4. The set for the cockpit and cabin are more spacious than a 747 and for a piston driven aircraft it is incredibly quiet. Much of the dialogue and performances are pure corn, although Wayne gives a decent low key performance as Dan Roman, a veteran pilot haunted by the memory of the crash of a flight he was captained that killed everyone except him, including his wife and son. If you are interested in commercial aviation history you may find this movie interesting, if you can tolerate some of the silly dialogue. Good cast.