Twelve O'Clock High

I couldn't find a good trivia question to preface this one. Winner of the 1950 Oscar for Best Supporting Actor (Dean Jagger), it was also nominated for Best Picture and Best Actor (Gregory Peck).

In the midst of World War II, the American war effort seems to be falling apart. Key to American success is a series of daytime bombing runs, a highly dangerous prospect for the pilots involved. Morale is down, and so is discipline. As a result, casualties and losses are up. Enter General Frank Savage (Gregory Peck), a hard-nosed, heartless flight commander who expects more from his soldiers than they think they are capable of. Savage sets out to revitalize the war effort, not by easing up on the men and allowing them to rest and recover, but by being even more strict. Regulations are upheld to the letter, to the extent that men are demoted for wearing their uniforms wrong. The flyers are retrained on the basics, relearning how to properly fly in formation. They are told to think of themselves as already dead, in order to think about their duties rather than their families or the idea that they might get home again. He even renames one of his bombers The Leper Colony, placing the worst of the worst in his group in that plane as punishment/incentive to improve. The pilots initially all request transfers, and Savage meets with resistance from above, but eventually the men begin to take pride in themselves and their effort again.

Peck excels in this role, tough enough to be believed as somebody capable of turning his soldiers around and enforcing discipline, but betraying just enough humanity in his private moments to keep the audience from feeling that he is just a heartless robot. Though he played a part in removing his predecessor from duty for becoming too close to his men to be an effective leader, Savage eventually finds himself in the same position, struggling to send men to possible death because he knows them too well, taking too many missions himself to keep from having to send others on them.

Jagger won his Oscar playing Harvey Stovall, Savage's right-hand man, a veteran of World War I now confined to a desk. I'm not really sure why he won the award here. He was good, but not particularly memorable, not a stand-out role. I don't mean to take anything away from Jagger, or to suggest that he didn't give a capable performance, but even knowing his character's name and that he won the Oscar, it took me well over halfway into the movie before I could even identify which one he was, and, having just finished watching the film, I am already hard-pressed to remember anything that he actually did in it.

Movie trivia question: This Oscar-winning heist film was the inspiration for the TV show Mission Impossible... and for a real-life jewelry heist which occurred a few weeks after the film was released.