It's been a while since the Southern military academy was taken to task (Jack Garfein's The Strange One, 1957, swims up from memory), and it seems fitting that this should be set in the early Sixties. The time period permits the movie to usher in the James Meredith of the Carolina Military Institute, but the racial element does less to generate heat than the espionage element: the problem of uncovering and stamping out a sadistic clique of upperclassmen, sanctioned by tradition, who have always found someone to pick on even before the color line was crossed. One nice bit of espionage strategy: the passing of secret messages in the library's copy of Spengler's Decline of the West ("It hasn't been checked out in the history of the institute"). Some of the relations between individual cadets, or between cadets and officers, or between any of these and "The System," attain a measure of complexity; but melodrama predominates. With David Keith, Robert Prosky, and G.D. Spradlin; directed by Franc Roddam. (1983) — Duncan Shepherd
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