#12 o clock crack#Latterly, with Peck beginning to crack under the emotional strain and go the same way as Merrill. Against his wishes, he starts to care for them a trait that jeopardises his effectiveness in the eyes of his superiors, ironically making him more like the commander he replaced.Ī superb first half dissects the sense of demoralisation, with the group, already bowed under its reputation as a hard-luck outfit, initially wilting even further as Peck applies kill or cure remedies like segregating the worst misfits and malingerers as a crew known as 'The Leper Colony'. The more he mixes with the men, earning their respect, the more he feels personally responsible for them. Savage seems a stern man who plans to reshape the unit into an effective fighting force, insisting on discipline and impersonality, at first having little but scant tolerance for the inter-personal bonds around him. With success and morale low, General Frank Savage (played by Gregory Peck) is sent in to replace the popular Colonel Davenport, a man seen to have become too close to his men. The generals push these men to see what can be endured: to determine how effective the strategy is and if more important raids into Germany itself could thus be assigned to the daylight bombers. These squadrons are ordered to try a new, dangerous strategy – daylight saturation bombing raids – designed to cripple German industry and reduce its massive war machine. The film subsequently tells the story of the early days of the USAAF presence in England, long before the D-Day invasion gave the allies a foothold on European soil. Twelve O’Clock High begins as an ex serviceman revisits an airfield and remembers its use during the war. Instead, it builds 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. King’s film is in retrospect 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. Effective tales of combat heroism, the plight of the returning 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. 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. Indeed, Twelve O’Clock High garnered some of the best reviews King had ever received and proved an enduringly popular war movie. Real bombs were filmed, and shown here, hitting real buildings with real people in them.ĭirector Henry King flourished enough in his career 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 Bravados – stand as his most well remembered works. Men really died-were shot, crashed their planes, or were victims of explosion before they could bail out-in the black-and-white film work on your home television screen. This does not just make for a higher level of entertainment, and it is not merely an improvement upon stunt work. The air-combat scenes are not merely historically correct: the shots pieced together to create the fictionalised version of a real mission were taken from United States Army Air Force and German Luftwaffe archives. This is not a bloody film, but it is a necessarily and highly violent one. Grim phrases like “You can see his brain,” “… took the back of his head right off,” and “…wiping frozen blood off the windshield,” create enough of an image to satisfy the interests of historical accuracy. Nor does an audience need to see the blood, in order to understand what happens to men in war. It has been done, it has been done very well. No individual, once he or she has seen Twelve O’Clock High, will ever again believe that it is impossible to craft a serious war film without profane language and graphic violence. Twelve O’Clock High is different, revealing both the power and challenge of leadership. While many movies have valuable leadership lessons, few are about the very nature of leadership itself. One of my all time favourite movies, Twelve O'clock High, is despite being over 60 years old apparently still required viewing at US Military training schools and academies.
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