Courtesy of hddb.net
Since the beginning of Blu-Ray, it has been quite tricky to get any of the major studios to release their classic films in high definition and in a quality worthy of the medium. 20th Century Fox has finally started to pick up the slack this year with numerous big-ticket releases, such as All About Eve and The Hustler.
One of their quieter releases was 1949’s Twelve O’clock High, a brilliant war film starring Gregory Peck and directed by Henry King. It came out in May, timed right for Father’s Day. The film tells the story of General Savage (Peck), who takes over command of one of the first bombardier groups in Europe after the declaration of war on Germany. The company is tasked with bombing runs during the day, which makes their missions even more dangerous. While this might seem like your standard gung-ho post-WWII war film; that could not be further from the truth. In fact, there is so little action that it might make today’s audience squirm.
Twelve O’clock High is all about the acting. It’s a very talky film, but Peck and a fantastic supporting cast (including Gary Merrill, the director in All About Eve, and Millard Mitchell, the studio head in Singin’ In The Rain) are so engrossing that the lack of action isn’t even noticed. Still, there is an action sequence, close to the end of the film, which shows the company going head-to-head against the Luftwaffe during their first mission behind the German border. This is where contract-director Henry King gets to flex his muscles. By intercutting real footage of dogfights with scenes of characters constantly wiping off the sweat from their foreheads and being unsure of themselves, the audience can truly appreciate the danger they were constantly flying into. The real drama comes at the very end, though, where Peck cannot get into his plane for the final mission. It reveals what the film is really about. These men were under such tremendous pressure and stress, that one day, it would have to boil over and be dealt with.
Fox’s presentation of the film is about as well-done as one could expect. The video quality reveals just how close 1080p high definition can bring you to what the film looked like in 1949. They have given us two different audio tracks – a boosted 5.1 stereo remix and the original mono track. Bonus features are dragged over from the 2-disc DVD. Unfortunately, most of these are related to the actual war effort (in case you don’t get enough of that on the History Channel), with just an informative half-hour documentary on the making of the film. Finally, there is also a commentary with three film historians who go into much more detail than the documentary.
War films just aren’t made like this anymore. Mostly, they just get distilled into cut scenes for video games filled with shaky-camera syndrome and faceless characters we never get to know that well. (I’m looking at you, The Hurt Locker). The closest our generation will get to a film like this is Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line. Twelve O’clock High is a great film and Fox’s Blu-Ray is not to be missed. More features on the making of the film and regular features like a trailer and stills galleries would have been nice, but just seeing a film like this reach Blu-Ray with such a great transfer makes up for that.
9 Golden Eggs
