Twelve O’Clock High (1949)
On this Memorial Day, consider one of the best WWII movies of the late 1940s, the years in which Hollywood began examining the war with a new objectivity and increased depth, free from its wartime obligation as stalwart morale booster. With the war over in 1945, and with The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) dealing so eloquently with the returning servicemen and their transition into civilian life, it was soon the right time for a movie like Twelve O’Clock High, directed by Henry King and starring Gregory Peck, a significant step forward in Hollywood’s burgeoning maturity on the subject of the Second World War.
Twelve O’Clock High holds up extremely well, partially because it’s not really about WWII but war in general, specifically the psychological toll of command. The setting is England during 1942 and 1943, with the focus on an American “daylight precision bombing” unit whose mission is to target German industry. Though it’s a taut and tense film, it’s unlike most war pictures because it stresses talk over action. The screenplay deftly dramatizes opposing leadership techniques from the two men who hold the position of group commander. First there’s Gary Merrill as a colonel who is sensitive to his men’s needs, a beloved figure but unsuccessful at whipping the unit into shape. His successor, the general played by Peck, is unlikable, demanding, and soon feared, but he’s the one who gets excellent results. Despite resistance to his managerial style (“Consider yourselves already dead”) and his personal unpopularity, Peck and his exacting methods increase the men’s pride in their work, allowing them to expect more from themselves.
The movie may appear to be endorsing Peck’s tactics, but it’s ultimately about the impossibility of not becoming emotionally involved, whether you’re empathetic Col. Merrill or no-nonsense Gen. Peck. Keeping his emotions in check finally proves to be as difficult for Peck as being openly nurturing was inadvertently damaging for Merrill. Twelve O’Clock High depicts war as a mental game, not between enemies but within each individual, trying whatever it takes to do your job as effectively as possible, to sustain the state of mind that gets you through the day. How much stress and fear can reasonably be withstood by any man? The story has no interest in the men’s pasts or futures, just their wartime usefulness. There is no outside world beyond the bombing raids. Peck’s stiff-backed attitude and core of strength are finally unable to shield him from impending exhaustion and collapse, of both the physical and mental varieties.
Surpassing all his previous work, Peck plays a man who forces a persona upon himself. Deciding in advance what’s best for his men, he enacts the role of formidable boss, knowing he will be despised in the process. (He isn’t named Frank Savage for nothing.) There’s a great moment when Peck, about to assume his new post, smokes a cigarette outside his car, absorbing his final moments of freedom before becoming the seemingly unfeeling fellow he needs to be. He’s like a stage actor in the wings, waiting for his first entrance. Fine as Peck is, in a performance that nabbed him his fourth Best Actor Oscar nomination in five years, Gen. Savage is a role with the potential for a greatness that Peck can’t quite attain. Though unerringly intelligent and intensely committed, Peck’s acting is more often sturdy and admirable than complex and fascinating.
As group adjutant (a desk job), Dean Jagger won the year’s Best Supporting Actor Oscar. It’s not the usual type of Oscar performance, far subtler and less showy, though he does have two (admittedly restrained) drunk scenes. It’s an honest, warm performance, though an Oscar seems excessive appreciation of good, solid work. (How could anyone not have voted for Ralph Richardson in The Heiress? An equally good, if not better, choice was unnominated Paul Douglas for A Letter to Three Wives.) Jagger is the focus of the film’s 1949 framing story, when he revisits the airfield in which the bulk of the film takes place, flashing back to 1942. (So, Jagger is the only character we know for sure has survived the war.) Gary Merrill is such a limited, obvious actor, hardly inhabiting his role as the colonel, while Hugh Marlowe fares better as a particular Peck target who becomes a fine soldier. (Merrill and Marlowe played major roles in the following year’s All About Eve.)
Henry King’s direction may seem somewhat drab, but the film is clearly aiming for a plain, stark, almost documentary look and feel. Its long, uninterrupted dialogue scenes further add to an overall atmosphere of realism. Certainly among the top five American films of 1949, and infinitely superior to All the King’s Men (the year’s Oscar-winning Best Picture), Twelve O’Clock High remains a challenging, riveting, and probing war movie, still fresh and adult. It was the first of six collaborations between Peck and King. Their second effort, The Gunfighter (1950) is, for my money, the standout, not just a magnificent western but a film with a Peck performance endowed with all the churning complexity and layered depths merely hinted at in Twelve O’Clock High.
