Twelve O'Clock High (1949)

Directed by Henry King

What does it require to be someone in a position of high authority? How do you get the best from the men you lead? In Paradise Lost, as we saw yesterday, Satan enjoys the lordliness of it all, but it’s an odd kind of leadership that sweeps your followers straight into hell. Yet the true leader cannot be a merely nominal one, either. He must be both higher than his men and therefore more fully responsible for, subordinated to, the work to be accomplished. And here’s the crux of our Film of the Week, Twelve O’Clock High.

The year is 1942, and the Germans are in the ascendant.  You are American fighter pilots, based in southern England.  You are the only American presence in the theater of northern Europe, and you’ve been flying at night, bombing German installations in Denmark and the Netherlands, but never getting too close to Germany itself, and thus not accomplishing a whole lot.  Still, the missions are dangerous. Many of your fellows never come home.
Why are you fighting?  You don’t think about it.  Your commanding officer, Colonel Keith Davenport (Gary Merrill), is a brave man, and he identifies with you, so that when you get the feeling that you are a “hard luck” outfit, he has not the heart to argue about it.  It is a job to tear your guts out.

But if the 918^th Airborne is to succeed, if it is to help turn the tide of the war, you cannot have men who think they cannot win.  You must somehow learn to love by setting your love aside.  So a new man is placed at the head of the outfit, a rugged, no-excuse-taking, relentless taskmaster, General Frank Savage (Gregory Peck).  As he has said to his friend, Colonel Davenport, if you identify yourself too closely with your men, you will lose the capacity to command them.  And sure enough, the first time Savage appears on the post, and the gatekeeper passes him by without checking his credentials and without saluting, he makes the driver come to a sudden halt, he gets out of the car, and gives the guard a dressing down.  “Get a good look at me,” he says.  “If you or any other man on this post passes by me, even if I’m a block away, without a salute, you won’t know what fell on you.”

The film is Twelve O’Clock High (1949), the most unusual and cerebral war movie I’ve ever seen.  If you are looking for Top Gun special effects, this is not your film.  We see no airborne action at all until well into the second half, and most of it is footage saved by the American and German armies – it will hold you spellbound, precisely because it is not choreographed.  You see the tail gunner open to the air and death.  You see the bombs dropping.  You see the planes in terrifyingly close formation, and you can almost feel the wind whipping the wings.  But your interest will not be in the mechanics.  It will be in the men who are there, and in these men not as Hollywood characters – for Twelve O’Clock High avoids all the pleasing cliches, the southern farm boy next to the Italian son of the Bronx, the sensitive boy in spectacles next to the football player – but as men, simply men, about whom you know next to nothing, except in their roles at war, and in their fears, their skill, their hard-learned obedience, their exhaustion, their survival, and their death.

You’ll think that General Savage is there to whip the crew into shape, and sure, that’s a part of it, but his command is tenuous, and every single pilot has requested a transfer out of his outfit.  He has called one of them, a foot-dragging lieutenant colonel (Hugh Marlowe), “yellow,” and ordered him to paint the words “The Leper Colony” on his airplane, “because in it you’re going to get every deadbeat in the outfit.” I am sure that many men in the audience in 1949 had some memory of such a confrontation, some knowledge that in war, one kind of human thing to do is at odds with another thing, perhaps less obviously human; and knew that General Savage was a gift to this outfit, a gift they did not at first know how to appreciate.

In Twelve O’Clock High, we see that General Savage’s demeanor toward the men is, in part, an act.  It is not that he is insincere.  But he must walk a tightrope between failure because the men hate him, and failure because he dares not risk being hated so much.  And he is not a hateful man.  The film shows us many a conversation between him and his adjutant, Major Stovall (Dean Jagger, who won and deserved an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor), wherein we see that the general wants and needs friendship as much as anyone.

The emotional climax of the film comes as a shock.  No spoilers here.  It is well prepared for by a series of tense dramatic scenes, characterized not so much by action as by human faces and few words.  We know that Colonel Davenport has been tried beyond the bounds of a man’s endurance; all we need is to look into Gary Merrill’s expressively ugly and masculine face to read the signs of depression, grief, and futility. 

Twelve O’Clock High, then, is less about war, though it certainly is about that, than it is about men, men in their friendships and their duties that are not always in accord with those friendships, men who lead because they must, and men who share in the leadership by sometimes hearty, sometimes agonizing, obedience.  It is a fallen world we live in, and sometimes nothing but such agony will serve, and triumph.

The only free version of the movie we could find this week is missing the credits at the beginning. Our music-loving subscribers will note the understated and tense soundtrack by Henry T. Moulton, who for it won his fourth Oscar of five. (He was nominated eleven other times!)

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