Builders:
I had not seen the film in 30 years. In the middle of the night, fighting a round of insomnia, I stumbled over the beginning and watched it start to finish. It was much more powerful film than I had remembered. It dealt with a lot of uncomfortable topics for a film made just 4 years after the war ended.
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Dean Jagger and Gregory Peck. The film contains a particularly disturbing scene where Jagger is drunk and he says he can no longer remember the faces of all the men from the squadron who have perished, and to him they have all blurred to just one face and “it looks very young”. Jagger won the academy award for his performance. The film was well reviewed, Including by Curtiss LeMay, then head of SAC. LeMay said that he “couldn’t find much wrong with it.”, for him, it was a rave review.
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If you have not seen it, it has little flying in it, it is instead focused on the human element and cost of flying daylight bombing missions into Germany. It isn’t ‘nice’ nor uplifting like John Wayne movies. It is a harsh look at the brutality of command, navigators pressured to suicide, cowardice, fear, ptsd and many other unpleasant aspects of the work done by the 8th Air Force. People who like simplistic flying movies with lots of CGI action and uplifting moral messages, and story lines that have enough survivors to allow a sequel or franchise opportunity, 12 o’clock High will disappoint. If you like thinking films, make sure you see it.
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When watching, I kept thinking about the B-17s and other war birds that come to Oshkosh and do the flyby’s and pyro shows for the general public, and how this is billed as a ‘tribute’ to WWII aviators. Yes it is nice to see the hardware, but I suspect that the men who actually fought in those planes might rather have everyone watch this film to better understand the human costs of flying these planes on their intended missions, it might be a far better tribute to those men, to invest 2 hours to see something of how emotionally cruel the actual missions were, something the war bird show at Airventure does nothing to capture.
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