Heartbreak Ridge

Tom "Gunny" Highway is a Marine gunnery sergeant and a veteran of both Korea and Vietnam, a man whose years in uniform have cost him his marriage and left him drinking too much. Sent back to his old reconnaissance regiment, he is given a platoon of undisciplined young Marines and a command structure that sees his methods as out of date. He imposes hard training, morning runs and strict discipline on men who had grown used to going easy, while also trying to rebuild something with his ex-wife, Aggie. When the unit is sent to a small Caribbean island, his insistence on readiness is tested.

Clint Eastwood directs and stars. It is the twelfth of the forty films he has directed, following Pale Rider and preceding Bird, and he produced it as well. The screenplay is credited to James Carabatsos, Joseph Stinson and Dennis Hackin. Eastwood plays Highway alongside Marsha Mason as Aggie, Everett McGill as Major Powers, Moses Gunn as Staff Sergeant Webster, Mario Van Peebles as Corporal Jones and Eileen Heckart as Little Mary Jackson. It runs 130 minutes and was made for about 15 million dollars, taking roughly 43 million worldwide.

On IMDb the film holds a rating of 6.9 out of 10 from 1,165 votes, and on TMDB it stands at 6.9 from the same number of votes. The critics' rating of 6.8 from 28 reviews places professional opinion close to the audience response, so it is received as a solid, if not exceptional, entry in Eastwood's directorial filmography.