Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with today’s installment of A Movie A Day.
[For those now joining us, A Movie A Day is my attempt at filling in gaps in my film knowledge. My DVD collection is thousands strong, many of them films I haven’t seen yet, but picked up as I scoured used DVD stores. Each day I’ll pull a previously unseen film from my collection or from my DVR and discuss it here. Each movie will have some sort of connection to the one before it, be it cast or crew member.]
Okay, so thanks for bearing with me as I took a moment to… uh… sleep after the holiday shopping guide tried to kill me. I’m a little late with this movie and will be pulling double duty sometime over the weekend to catch back up.
Today’s movie is TWELVE O’CLOCK HIGH following lead actor Gregory Peck from the last AMAD, ON THE BEACH.
I first heard of this movie a few months back when I was on a flight. I don’t remember where I was going, but beside me sat a talkative guy, which is odd in and of itself. I’ve been a constant flier since my mid-teen years and back then everybody was talkative, but in the last few years I’ve noticed people keep to themselves a lot more.
This guy didn’t and we got to talking. He used to be a commercial airline pilot and was now in advertising, if I remember correctly, and before that he had a tour with the air force. It was really neat, actually, because he’d tell me what every sound I heard on the flight was, revealed just how automatic everything is and how a pilot really doesn’t do much anymore, etc.
We got to talking about me and what I did for a living and he was very interested, especially when I mentioned this column. He then mentioned this movie, which was the first I’d heard of it. He said that it’s pretty much every pilot’s favorite movie. I looked it up when I got back home and ended up picking it up.
Now we get to it on the column and I see why pilots love this film. It’s not a spectacle film, it’s not crazily dramatic. There’s an emphasis on reality… so much so that the tone almost works against the movie. I know I was itching to see more dogfights than what I got, but once you accept the film for what it is and what it intends to be, you’ll be pulled in.
Peck, in a role that was reportedly turned down by John Wayne, plays a General who has to take over the 918th Bomb Squad, the only American bombing presence in Europe at this stage of WW2, when they begin slacking off.
Their previous commander is one of Peck’s best friends, but the dude empathizes too much with his boys and basically lets them walk all over him. Peck is this man’s opposite, who is, to a fault, strict and cold.
The morale is low, each bombing run heavy with casualties. These kids are essentially guinea pigs as the brass tests out low-flying daylight bombing runs. These kinds of runs are extremely accurate, but very dangerous. The lower they get, the easier they are to hit by anti-aircraft guns and during the day time they can see their targets better… but that goes both ways.
It’s actually kind of a shock when Gregory Peck shows up to take over command and turns into a huge prick because the first time we meet him, he’s all smiles and happiness. He’s a believer in tough love, I guess, but it starts the second he drives up to the base.
The MP waves him in, seeing it’s a military car and Peck gets out and dresses this guy down for not checking his ID and you can just see this poor bastard shrivle in front of the deep-voiced, intimidating Peck.
And he doesn’t stop there. He goes in and demotes a sergeant to private for not wearing his uniform as he types away at paperwork (only to give him his rank back, then take it away and give it back again… it becomes a thread in the movie) and then, to top it all off, gives a lengthy tongue-lashing to Hugh Marlowe’s Lt. Col. Ben Gately, who Peck believes has gone yellow. Instead of “passing the buck” and transferring him out, Peck instead puts him in charge of his own plane of rejects. Peck names this plane The Leper Colony and anybody who is a fuck-up or an underperformer is put under Gately’s command.
But over the course of the movie the men begin to respect him and he them, all building to a final 10 minutes where Peck is literally crippled by emotion, everything he’s kept buried deep and out of sight essentially tripping a fuse in his brain and putting him into a deep shock.
We go up in the air with the pilots only once, about an hour and forty minutes into the movie and that is odd, to say the least. It’s great footage, but since it is cut together from actual air-fight and bombing run footage from both the US Air Force and the German Luftwaffe it’s not the most dynamic dramatically edited material in the world.
The filmmakers were smart to have an announcement at the beginning of the movie announcing this was real footage because that knowledge really does make this run incredibly fascinating.
Would I have loved Howard Hughes-like epic aerial battles? Sure. Would they have made the movie better? That’s a tougher question to answer. I think they would have made the movie easier and more fun to watch, but that would also have taken away what has made this film a classic and kept it alive (it’s still shown to new recruits at the Air Force and is considered by most war pilots to be the most accurate accounting of what it’s actually like to fly during wartime).
Of special interest here is the performance by Dean Jagger, for which he won the Oscar for best supporting actor, a right-hand man to Peck who kind of acts as his Jiminy Cricket. For whatever reason the only person Peck allows in to see his human side is Jagger and in many ways it is Jagger’s influence on Peck that gets him to open up a little bit with his crew.
There’s a great warmth to the black and white photography by Leon Shamroy (THE KING AND I, PLANET OF THE APES) that is hard to explain, but it keeps Peck from really looking like a bad guy. He never comes off as menacing. Also keep an ear out for Alfred Newman’s great score!
Final Thoughts: An extremely solid film that is about as close to being a war hero pilot as any of us are going to get. It’s funny that John Wayne turned this down because this movie reminded me a lot of John Wayne’s FLYING TIGERS. In fact, that’d be a great double feature. Flying Tigers is a bit more fun, definitely more Hollywood (love story included), but there’s a bigger emotional punch to TWELVE O’CLOCK HIGH.
Here’s what we have lined up for the next week:
Friday, November 28th: GENTLEMAN’S AGREEMENT (1947)
Saturday, November 29th: PANIC IN THE STREETS (1950)
Sunday, November 30th: THE HOT ROCK (1972)
Monday, December 1st: WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? (1966)
Tuesday, December 2nd: THE DAY OF THE DOLPHIN (1973)
Wednesday, December 3rd: CARNAL KNOWLEDGE (1971)
Thursday, December 4th: THE CINCINNATI KID (1965)
Alright, next up is another Gregory Peck vehicle 1947’s GENTLEMAN’S AGREEMENT which was directed by Elia Kazan and won the Oscar for Best Picture. See you tomorrow for that one!
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
