Henry King was a successful but rarely artistically accomplished movie director. From the time of the silents through the mid Fifties, which is an eon of changes through the talkies and then Technicolor, from slow and leisurely storytelling as in the black and white “State Fair” to the lavish melodrama of “Love is a Many Splendored Thing”, King’s movies made it at the box office but did not have the acclaim that was associated with the first rate directors like Wyler and Wellman and Ford. His movies were workmanlike but, to tell the truth, fell dead. Whether when it was a color musical such as “Carousel”, its boxy pacing and sets did not make Shirley Jones and Gordon Macrae soar. They both seemed doughty even though they were young and fresh, as Jones had shown a few years before in “Elmer Gantry”. The big interest in King’s “State Fair” was the pig. There was, however, an exception, when King seemed to go beyond himself, for reasons unclear, whereby he put it together so that the script, the cutting, the scenery and the acting made one movie spectacularly effective, ever a tribute to the mysteries of art. Here is the one that seems to me to be far above the rest of his oeuvre: “Twelve O’Clock High '', made in 1949.
The movie is organized as a play. There are few sets: of the Quonset hut where the American Air Force officers live in the remembered 1942, the office where the general of the Eighth Air Force wing commands, a mansion where the senior general lives, the boxy control tower off the runway and also a lot of dialogue, sharp and snappy and confrontational, that moves the story along, as the general tries to rally his fliers so that they will feel less sorry for themselves because so many of them die, thinking instead that tight flying will lose fewer planes than will be the case if the fliers feel sorry for themselves.That is the message: keep a firm upper lip when men go down, which lasts till near the very end of the film, when Gregory Peck’s General Savage has endured just too long and sits frozen and silent in his chair, waiting for his other planes to make it home. There is just one battle, the climatic one, where the movie shows actual combat footage rather than just planes going off or coming back to that runway, as if the emotions of the movie had to be established so that the aerial battle is already experienced before it is seen as happening. And the whole of the movie is set within a framing device. The lawyer, played superbly by Dean Jagger, who served as the executive officer in charge of the paperwork needed to keep a command functioning, was a retread from World War I. He travels to London on business a few years after the war and finds the mascot drinking cup in a shop that had served during the war to notify the complement that a mission was about to go underway. Homberg on his head, he bicycles to the field where it had happened, now windswept and only a memory, something like “Gone With the Wind”, only just a few years ago when there were heroes and death associated with the now quiet countryside outside of London. Maybe the frame was to provide some more visuals to a playlike movie, but it also did capture a moment of sorrow and memory.
The putative excuse for all the strain and sacrifice was precision daylight bombing which in 1942 was one of the only resources that the AAF could attack against the Germans and Germany. In fact, that was mainly horsepucky, however much at the time there was the belief that the Air Force could be decisive in defeating the Germans. As a matter of fact, the Germans did not decrease their industrial production until 1945, when allied troops took over the factories, which had kept on producing even if bombing meant that there were no roofs left on the buildings. American air staff insisted that bombing would cut off the German supply chains and so needed ever more accurate and, therefore, lower level bombing, whatever the casualties, to get the job done. Later military analysts say that the real contribution of precision bombing was that it used up German planes and crews and so left little German air cover over the Normandy Invasion, which was really the key battle which could and did win the war. The talk about maximum effort was just the film’s dramatic excuse, the premise, so as to expose the emotional tensions between the fliers and their commanders and how they coped with creating a cohesive unit by applying the lesson of tough love, then as now the pretext for Stoicism and death. Maybe it wasn’t necessary, but it seemed so at the time and Gregory Peck uses his hard nosed and clearly pained expression to convey that moment of excellence. You had to be there, and King made the film work.
So why did it work? I suggest that it is because the movie is so spare, so focussed on the psychological strain of the military events it portrays, and yet as distant as if it were as old as the Trojan War. That made use of closeups and very expressive character actors alongside Peck, and the microcosm of an airforce base when the war seemed on the brink of failing is more effective than the case of other war movies which use film more lavishly with reconstructed battles, and even of “Command Decision”, another movie about precision bombing that would make the difference in the war, and was also presented as a play beefed up to being a movie, that time with Clark Gable as the Air Force General, Gable always an overinflated actor. “Command Decision” also brandished a lot of generals to give the impression that this was the way the military really was, humane and sparing of sacrifice, rather than the sometimes petty and grandiose people that year later, in 1970, were finally commemorated in “Patton”, a screenplay written early in his career by Francis Ford Coppola. I always say, the writers are what make a film work. Gore Vidal, who was a scriptwriter, said the same thing. You can assign a script once completed to any one of the stable of directors on contract so that they can grind it out.
A test case of the Vidal thesis is a film director, Joe Sargent, with few credits to “lead” the production of “MacArthur”, a biopic from 1977 that also starred Gregory Peck, a long time favorite (along with Tyrone Power) among King’s actors. Peck was an actor often portrayed as military or naval heroes. He portrays Horatio Hornblower in the C. S. Forrester movie of 1951 about the Napoleonic Wars, sailing vessels afterwards out of fashion for a few generations before being reintroduced in “Master and Commander”in 2003. A nice moment in the Hornblower film occurs when Virginia Mayo for force of circumstances is added to the fighting ship and then nurses the wounded sailors and at Hornblower’s instruction kisses a dying midshipman on the lips because the midshipman’s mother had done that just before he embarked on the warship. Was this a touch of the script, the director or Peck’s conscientious deadpan observation that made the moment poignant?
What “MacArthur” and many others could have shown was that once the basic filmcraft had developed in the late silent era, a journeyman director could deploy film resources so as to be effective in a film, both entertaining and illuminating of what was being portrayed. Not that there weren’t new developments in filmmaking once the talkies started. Orson Welles is famous for using his odd angles, cameras set in a trench, to give unusual effects, and also to have a long single shot for dramatic purpose, as when the camera moves up the balconies of the opera house in “Citizen Kane” to show Kane’s wife engulfed by her experience but also because the unbroken take was an aesthetic accomplishment.. Directors of the late Forties and early Fifties gave an added realism by filming, as it had now become available, to outdoor sets, and so “Street Scene; was in the grimy New York City sceone, and King’s own “The Prince of Foxes” places a movie about the Borgias in the actual Italian palaces and churches to provide a kind of verite. Woody Allen also added something to the already established picturesque in“Roman Holiday '' by giving unusual still lives or picture postcards to interesting places in New York, Paris, Barcelona, and even what is the rather drab London architectural scene. London never looks magical.
The available techniques made “MacArthur” watchable even if pedestrian. A slightly different angle showed the march of cadets at West Point behind the opening credits to be fresh and engaging, however many times has this scene been filmed. An actress with an interesting face and veryfew spoken words, so many such actresses available in Hollywood, made a tender moment or two between the general and, as he said of her, “the general’s general”. Much was done in quoting events from history. There is the long tunnel that was known as the final base of the fortress of Corregidor, and the mist filled and mined waters when Macarther was rescued from the Philippines, an already storied bit of movie lore shown by Robert Montgomery in “We Were Expendable”. There was an FDR wearing his cigarette holder and Truman with his staccato voice and the arrival of the Independence, the precursor of Air Force One, at his meeting with MacArthur at Wake Island, Every audience remembers when the visuals in the movie get cited, and a maybe fuzzy memory about the events that took place when MacArthur was relieved by Truman and came home for parades and a speech to Congress.
It is very difficult to assess the relative importance of the various elements that go into the art and entertainment of film. I have suggested, though, that most film directors are less important than filmmaking itself and that the script is what holds the proceeding together, just as it was De Ponte who made Mozart become a part of the canon of world consciousness rather than just a composer, however great at that. I must also include this third element, the actor, as providing a major element in turning film into art. Far from audiences during the silent era becoming surprised that the other elements of film production would become nameworthy, it was the actors and not the directors and the scriptwriters, that became stars, the central focus of movies. It may have seemed superficial to look at what was on the screen rather than what was behind it, but I think the audience was correct in its judgment of the relative elements of filmmaking. The actors are a key to making films work. Film actors are very different from and have to meet higher demands than are placed on stage actors. Richard Burton was an accomplished stage actor when he learned from Elizaabeth Taylor not to overdo it because the camera will notice small gestures and expressions while stage actors often have to boom out their voices, as Burton did, to make an actor noticeable. The screen actor is on full display, naked, as it were, on the screen, for all their quirks and strengths. It takes a lot more nerve than it is to be a screenwriter.
Gregory Peck was very capable of revealing himself. Though always as the cerebral and measured person which suited the public perception of what a military figure should be, he was able to use his expressions to convey anguish, thoughtfulness, and any number of other emotions to the point that every moment of his and he filled most of the screen for most of his films, remaining the film’s central interest, always dramatic and changing. I am particularly taken with “The High Country”, from 1958, when Peck plays an Eastern sea captain who moves West and the ranch hands make fun of him as being not tough enough, and Charleton Heston steals his girl, and the two of them have a useless and long lasting fist fight with one another over her, only another woman recognizing his merits as judicious rather than cowardly. It is reminiscent of an earlier Wyler film, “Jezabel”, from 1938, where a pre-Civil War duel, equally pointless, also takes place. Burl Ives for a moment in “The High Country'' seems to steal the show from Peck by playing the father of a brood of ruffians holed up in a canyon. Ives was a folk singer turned actor who had a lead role as Big Daddy in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”
A decade before Ives played his typical role as someone irascible there was an even better character actor. Orson Welles is known today as a premier and original film director for four major and lasting films like “Touch of Evil” and most importantly for “Citizen Kane”. Welles, however, was also a spectacular actor who made a movie he was in as a Welles movie even though he did not direct it. They include, in the late Forties, “The Stranger”, “The Third Man” and my favorite, “Tomorrow is Forever”, from 1946, where Welles plays an old German man come to the United States before the Second World War, the young man who had been lost in the First World War but the true father of the Claudette Colbert who had remarried and made a new life, now wondering whether nis son would now have to again go to war as his father had. Welles in the role portrays poignancy, persuasiveness, stoicism and the edge that makes the banked embers that made the character all alive when he was young. Welles ages from the still handsome Harry Lime in “The Third Man” to the make up old man in “Tomorrow is Forever” to the beefy old man as Wolsey in “A Man for All Seasons”. That is in itself a career. The same ability to age as a star could be said about Gregory Peck or about John Wayne or Henry Fonda or Jack Nicholson, though not of Charlton Heston, who never seemed to age. Each one of those character actors who became stars displaying the particular character and mannerisms that made each of their own movies a chapter in the life of a movie star, from young man, as was John Wayne in “Stagecoach” in 1939 to the lumbering fat old man in “True Grit” in 1969. These actors and actresses, character actors or leading stars or both, should not be dismissed as celluloid fantasies. They play as real in our imaginations as the people who live in their real lives among us, the fictional ones competing with and complementing the real ones, often finding real husbands and wives disappointing in comparison to those who take part in their fictive roles. It is the marvelous Jean Hagen in “Singing in the Rain'' who is false to proclaim at a movie opening that film stars add luster to their humdrum lives. Rather, they are ways to embellish, to elaborate, their personal lives so that real life is thicker, more complex than it might only seem to be if it was not enhanced by movie magic. After all, Hamlet is more familiar than most of the people we meet in real life, and have learned from him throughout the course of our lives. I don’t know about heroism, for example, if not for the World War II movies that made people better and so I understood the bravery whereby my uncles fought in the war or survived in the Holocaust.