Review – Twelve o’ Clock High

A good war movie is a tricky bit of timing. Pictures made while the war is still going tend to present a nervously rosy view of battlefield success. But get too much distance on the experience and gritty revisionism tends to take over. This production came out four years after the end of World War Two and seven years after the events depicted, timing that allowed it to be unusually honest about the experiences of American bomber crews flying the first daylight missions over Germany. Gregory Peck takes the lead as a wing commander plagued by the challenges of balancing the need to wage war on the Nazis with the heavy toll – physical and psychological – imposed on his men. By modern action movie standards this is a bit “talky,” but it works quite well as a portrait of the human cost of technological warfare. Worth seeing