Regular readers of my posts on film will probably notice two polemics I feel strongly about. First, I heartily resist the notion that commercialization in itself means inferior culture, or that Hollywood is aesthetically worthless because it makes crowd-pleasing, escapist or otherwise generic material. If you’ve studied Classical Hollywood (1920-1960), it’s hard not to appreciate what Thomas Schatz calls the "genius of the system." Second, I lament the loss of classicism in film style today, in the face of an aesthetics of ennui and of looseness initially borrowed from the art cinema and the Hollywood renaissance but now degraded into cliche.
These both were in the back of my mind as I watched Twelve O’Clock High this week. It’s a 1949 war movie produced by 20th-Fox and directed by (now mostly forgotten) Henry King. In some ways, it’s typical of the postwar war dramas, half-cynical, half-patriotic, with just enough injury and death to provide conflict but mostly confined to a few side characters; in Fox manner it was given the prestige treatment of high production values and star presence (Gregory Peck), and a focus on the emotional dynamic between the men as much as the action itself. At times, the emotional relationship become almost sado-masochistic in its oscillation between paternalism and authoritarianism. Really, it’s astounding.
But the film is also a reminder of how amazing stylistically even a generic, unpresupposing, film like this could be. Take one shot that occurs after the beloved lieutenant discovers he’s been relieved of his post:
The shot lasts twenty seconds, which wouldn’t be extraordinarily long in a film like You, Me and Everyone We Know, but in the context of a faster cutting pace, the length gives narrative pause to the action, inviting reflection and building emotional tension. The action is carefully blocked, first putting Lt. Zimmerman and the door so closely in the foreground, then expanding into deep space as the door opens on the despairing Lt. Wilson. From then on, first the Doc appears to block the space, then the door shuts again, frustrating the spectator in her/his desire to know. Zimmerman finally exits as the shot pans right. It’s a simple but not simplistic shot - powerful and economic in its storytelling.
I could list more standout scenes, such as a baseball toss that expands a series of spaces into a shocking low-angle framing of the watchtower. But that would be almost beside the point. The scenes are so powerful because they find aesthetic form - framing, blocking, editing and camera movement - to serve narrative ends. That’s something that so frequently gets lost in our extemporaneous, steadi-cammed contemporaneity.
Somewhat related, I just discovered an excellent film blog, Self-Styled Siren, containing a good reflection on Dodsworth, which is a film that’s grown on me. Given that Twelve O’Clock high borrows so freely from William Wyler, the original himself deserves mention.
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