How others will see it. Those courageous American airmen: risking their lives, driven to exhaustion, watching their comrades get shot down. And it never ends. If you survive one Russian Roulette bombing raid, you go on another the next day, and so on, and so on.
How do the men take it? Well, for one, they've got little choice, or its shame and military prison. But they don't like it, and their nerves are frazzled. Heroes emerge, and they're gonna show them Nazis they've got what it takes.
War is hell. It's not a cliche in this film. For the pilots, it almost is hell, as much as anything that can be dished out on earth outside of a concentration camp. Such a situation is ripe for drama, and with a stellar cast and studio money behind it, how can Twelve O'Clock High go wrong?
I suspect that most viewers of the movie are men, rather than women who wish to scope tall and manly Gregory Peck. Those male viewers have likely seen plenty of war movies. They know all the formulas, and they embrace them, because it reinforces their values and beliefs. Or else they wouldn't enjoy Twelve O'Clock High, which confirms most if not all of the military wartime sterotypes.
How I felt about it. The film was lost to me long before Peck has a dramatic nervous breakdown, and sits frozen in a chair until he is revived by his men making it back to the base from another day of obliterating German factories.
Which is much easier to defend than what the Americans did to Japan toward the end of the Pacific theater war. Japanese cities were bombed to cinders, killing millions of Japanese citizens. No Hollywood big-time movie will be made about those bombing raids. "Gentlemen, our mission today is to firebomb Tokyo. The women, children, and elderly who live there are our enemies, and must be destroyed."
I am guilty of being negative. And I am not a complete pacifist. Yes, German industry had to be bombed. It had to be done. That meant pushing American fighters to the end of their wits and lives. The problem I have with the movie is not its story, but with the way it is told.
Is discipline everything? Can a plow horse be whipped into passing a thoroughbred? Does testosterone, and its demonstration, provide good leadership, or merely plausible drama? Are the sacrifices of men to be extolled, or avoided?
If you want truthful answers to these questions, no need to watch Twelve O'Clock High, which dishes out the same old glop. I'm sorry, but that's how I see it.