The airfield had been hastily built for the group’s B-17s on prime agricultural land near the town of Diss. My search for the Eighth Air Force had led me to Thorpe Abbotts, the wartime base of the 100th Bomb Group (Heavy). bomber bases in rural East Anglia, the dead flat, eastern bulge of England that sticks out into the North Sea like a cannon’s mouth aimed at Nazi Europe. The Army Air Forces positioned most of its U.K. That feeling of déjà vu haunted me in 2006, when I went to England in search of the Mighty Eighth. Twelve O’Clock High is a memory film that creates a sense of place and time so strong that viewers might believe that they’d been there before through the flashback memories of Harvey Stovall, a supporting character played by Dean Jagger, whose performance won the film’s second Oscar. Still, he declared, Twelve O’Clock High might be “the best movie ever made about the Air Force.” As technology and strategies changed along with Air Force command doctrine, Correll wrote, the movie fell out of official use. Correll, writing in a 2011 issue of Air Force Magazine. The SAC top brass admired the film’s endorsement of hard-nosed leadership, which would be essential to Air Force commanders in waging future nuclear warfare, according to John T. So when a shaken character needs steadying, his buddies offer him a smoke, not a brandy.)Īt the time of the movie’s release, the newly independent Air Force was dominated by the “bomber generals” of Strategic Air Command-men like Carl Spaatz and Curtis LeMay, themselves commanders in the Mighty Eighth. (One of the few objections the Air Force raised with the screenplay was that there was too much drinking. Where it was a real hit was with the Air Force, which used it for years as a training film in leadership courses. It won two Academy Awards, although few would remember Twelve O’Clock High today for winning “Best Sound Recording” of 1950. The $2 million movie was a success in its day but not a blockbuster, grossing $3.2 million in its first release. When Twelve O’Clock High was in production 16 years earlier, he was just emerging as a major star, but you can see the flinty core of Atticus in General Savage. Peck is best remembered today for his role as Atticus Finch, the heroic lawyer (and single parent) of 1965’s To Kill a Mockingbird. The film has lived on in part because of Gregory Peck’s riveting performance as Frank Savage, the pitiless general sent to whip a demoralized Eighth Air Force bomb group into shape. It was shot in black and white with shadows so stark that it often resembles the noir detective films of the period more than it does other war movies. The climax of the picture takes place in a desk chair, not a cockpit. Most of the drama is on the ground, inside command offices, officers’ quarters, and briefing halls. Based on the wartime experiences of Beirne Lay Jr., a former Eighth Air Force staff officer and bomb group commander, Twelve O’Clock High portrays the crushing weight of command in dire straits. Army Air Forces heavy bombers were suffering appalling losses. Without long-range escort fighters and with little combat experience, U.S. The story is set during the early days of the American strategic bombing campaign in 1942 and ’43. Its subject is the brutal psychological cost of warfare. There’s aerial combat (including actual footage from American and German gun cameras), but Twelve O’Clock High does not focus on tactics or strategy. It’s about an Eighth Air Force B-17 bomb group based in England, but the viewer doesn’t go along on a raid until the last 25 minutes of the picture. It isn’t a satire on the absurdity of war like the Vietnam-era release Catch-22. It isn’t a rousing patriotic adventure like Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo or a thoughtful examination of the return to civilian life like The Best Years of Our Lives. But Twelve O’Clock High is different, even from the others that have endured on artistic merit. It throws me because I grew up in the cinematic backwash of World War II, a period that produced dozens upon dozens of unmemorable war movies. I’ve seen it five or six times since-remastered for DVD, through online streaming, and on the old-movie cable channel. The first time I saw this classic end to end was probably in the 1980s, on a scratchy cassette via my tape-eating VHS recorder. I am not old enough to have seen Twelve O’Clock High in its initial public theatrical release in 1950.
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