Twelve O’clock High (1949)
Fox DVD (region 4)
d. Henry King; pr. Darryl F. Zanuck; scr. Sy Bartlett, Beirne Lay Jr.; ph. Leon Shamroy; m. Alfred Newman; ed. Barbara McLean; cast. Gregory Peck, Dean Jagger, Hugh Marlowe, Gary Merrill, Millard Mitchell, Robert Arthur (132 mins)
Twelve O’clock High is one of the best ever films from Henry King, a director who started in the silent era. Although King flourished enough to attain the coveted veteran status, if not perhaps the label of “auteur”, his three films with actor Gregory Peck – Twelve O’clock High, The Gunfighter and The Bravadoes – stand as his most well remembered works. Indeed, Twelve O’clock High garnered some of the best reviews King had ever received and proved an enduringly popular war movie. Post World War Two films about the war were of course plentiful by the time of Twelve O’Clock High but few had approached the subject of war itself with as much ambiguity as King here attempted and also achieved success at the box office. Effective tales of combat heroism, the plight of the returning noble veteran and the inevitable stresses of war on individuals were common themes in films only tangentially questioning, if at all, the necessity of war rather than the terrible but necessary cost of it. King’s film thus in retrospect was thought a rarity, unusual for the fact that it examines wartime trauma but until the very end, it consciously chooses not to show any combat footage. Instead, it builds a telling drama based on the anticipation of combat by measuring the pressures on officers and their fighting subordinates forced to test a new strategic means of warfare, one which brings with it a tremendous responsibility.
Twelve O’clock High begins as a man (Dean Jagger) visits an airfield and remembers its use during the war. The film subsequently tells the story of the early days of a United States Air Force presence in England, long before the D-Day invasion gave the allies a foothold on European soil. These aerial units are ordered to try a new, dangerous strategy – daylight saturation bombing raids – designed to cripple German industry and reduce its massive war machine. The generals push these men to see what can be so endured: to determine how effective the strategy is and if more important raids into Germany itself could thus be assigned to the daylight bombers. One group is headed by a man (Gary Merrill) who is too concerned with his men and has let discipline slip, indulging his hard-luck unit. Merrill has become very wearied and even close to breakdown when his official replacement (Gregory Peck) arrives. Peck seems a stern man who plans to reshape the unit into an effective fighting force. He hence insists on discipline and impersonality, at first having little but scant tolerance for the inter-personal bonds around him. The more he mixes with the men, earning their respect, the more he feels personally responsible for them. Against his wishes, he starts to care for them; a trait that jeopardizes his effectiveness in the eyes of his superiors as it ironically makes him more like the commander he initially replaced. read more