Welcome back to the Oscar Film Journal, here at Enuffa.com!
Up until yesterday I had two years in Oscars history where I hadn't seen any of the Best Picture nominees: 1949 and 1956. I'm happy to say I've rectified one of those two by watching the 1949 war film Twelve O'Clock High, starring Gregory Peck and directed by henry King.
TOCH is based on a novel, itself loosely based on true events surrounding the earliest American aviary missions during World War II. Stationed in England, the 918th Bomb Group has been conducting raids on German-occupied targets in France, mostly without success and suffering heavy casualties. Major General Pritchard recognizes that a leadership change is needed, and assigns Brigadier General Frank Savage (Peck) to whip the unit into shape, boost morale, and hopefully turn their productivity around. Savage rules with an iron fist, demanding the members of the unit refrain from becoming attached to each other or even to surviving the war, lest their emotions jeopardize their mission. "Think of yourselves as already dead," he tells them, earning the unit's disdain and prompting a slew of transfer requests. But the unit's legal administrator Major Stovall (Dean Jagger, in a performance that won him a supporting Oscar) wants to see the mission succeed and agrees to stall the transfers until they've racked up some battlefield wins, banking that the requests will ultimately be withdrawn. Slowly the team comes to trust Savage and his methods, and they make major strides in slowing down German munitions manufacturing, via repeated air raids on Germany itself.
TOCH mostly plays out as a procedural, with a very matter-of-fact feel. Aside from a 1949 prologue and quick ending where Stovall visits the former site of the air base, there's no score, and much of the dialogue consists of formal exchanges between officers and men. The most engaging human elements of the story occur in the second act, as Savage and his men butt heads over base policy. The script strove for realism over sentimentality and emotion, an unusual approach for the time, but one that left me feeling the film was a tad dry and clinical. Until the later passages of the film we don't even see actual combat or training footage; everything is talked about but not shown. Most of the script could've easily been made into a stage play.
Still the cinematography by Leon Shamroy adds some atmosphere, bathing the various parts of the base in noir-esque lights and shadow. A few moments reminded me of Orson Wells films, others of later work by Stanley Kubrick, the use of deep focus and practical lighting creating an impassive observer's point of view.
The film famously made use of actual WWII combat footage in a third-act dogfight edited together with closeups and dialogue, serving as a sort of payoff to the long, slow burn. It's handled in an unglamorous way, breaking with the contemporary trend of depicting exciting World War II heroism. Instead this battle sequence is simply immersing us in what it was really like trading aerial machine gun fire with the enemy. In a subsequent scene Savage abruptly suffers a bout of PTSD, showing us the cost of the emotional detachment his assignment requires.
Apparently Strategic Air Command and multiple Air Force and Naval academies were so impressed by the film's accuracy some of them made it required viewing for trainees. To be sure, as an historical document it's painstaking in its precision, as a cinematic war drama it's perhaps too dispassionate to be a repeat watch. I would say I admired the film more than I enjoyed it.
I give Twelve O'Clock High *** out of ****.
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