Reviews

Film review: Twelve O'Clock High

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I’m sure every one of you has seen the movie Twelve O’Clock High already, but I never saw it until last night. I know I write too much about movies in this books blog, but I want to meditate on the film a little bit, particularly as an exercise in storytelling. It’s a superior example of the art.

What you’ve got in Twelve O’Clock High is two layers of story going on at one time. There’s the surface story—the sort of thing a small boy watching it would come away with, and then there are the truths the story conveys, buried under the surface but identifiable if you’re looking for them.

The surface story is pretty simple. The 918th Heavy Bombardment Group, based in England at the very beginning of American participation in World War II, is suffering heavier than average losses. The men, and their commander, Col. Keith Davenport (Gary Merrill), think they’re jinxed. Their commanding general thinks the problem is more practical, and sends in hard-nosed Brig. Gen. Frank Savage (Gregory Peck) to whip the unit into shape. This he does, through hard—sometimes cruel—discipline. As the men learn to repress their individual fears and concerns and operate as a group, they manage to achieve their goals and lower their losses.

But that’s not the real story. The real story is what’s going on inside the men. I don’t mean any disrespect to John Wayne (frankly I think John Wayne could have handled the Frank Savage part just fine), but you understand what I mean when I say this isn’t the typical kind of war movie we associate with John Wayne. Gregory Peck’s Gen. Savage sometimes pushes the men too hard, and he’s not as confident as he seems. There’s a splendid little moment when his adjutant, Lt. Col. Stovall (Dean Jagger) says, “You know the difference between Col. Davenport and Gen. Savage? Gen. Savage is about this much taller.” In the end, Davenport’s and Savage’s roles get very neatly reversed.

Because the real message here is that war is impossible. Fighting in a war is like walking a tightrope while carrying ever heavier burdens, while crosswinds change at random. No man can bear the strain indefinitely. The strongest iron breaks at last, through constant fatigue.

A friend of mine who’s a combat veteran says this is the most realistic war movie ever made. That’s remarkable when you think that it was made in 1949, taking into account all the special effects advances that have been made since then, and changes in audience toleration for on-screen gore. What sets Twelve O’Clock High apart is outstanding storytelling, a profound understanding of the human heart.

Blogs, Socials, Writing

Blogging Ain't About You

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Jeff Goins writes, “When I first stated blogging, I was pretty proud of the fact that my writing was being published to a small audience and that they were actually reading it. It felt good to be acknowledged. Really what I was, though, was an insecure writer clinging to every pitiful page view.”

Ouch.

Authors, Poetry

Anne Overstreet's "Surviving the Open Heart"

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Jeffrey Overstreet’s wife, Anne, has a debut volume of poetry on the shelves at all the best bookstores near you. It’s called Delicate Machinery Suspended: Poems. Here’s the poem that contains that title.

The hotel fan’s one long drawn exhalation

disturbing the heat that has settled like dust

across the room, the square-cornered chair

the unsteady spool of table. You are broken

into pieces and lie scattered …

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Goofing

Political noodling

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In case you’re a visitor to Brandywine Books, I need to make it clear that two political posts in one day is a great rarity here. One political post in a day is a rarity. Phil and I generally eschew political comments (we don’t even have a Politics category), in favor of the far less controversial subject of religion.

But I’ve been worried the last few days. First President Obama (peace be upon him) visits Cannon Falls, Minnesota, just up the road from Kenyon, my home town. The next day he’s in Decorah, where I spent a year at Luther College sometime around the Coolidge administration. It began to look as if he were stalking me. Perhaps he finally figured out that my tin foil hat prevents him from controlling my mind with his delta rays, and he’s trying to follow my trail instead. About thirty years in my rear view mirror, but that’s civil service work for you.

However, I remember that one of my high school classmates actually graduated from Luther College. So it’s probably him the president is stalking.

Whew. That was close.

If I understand the news reports correctly, a lot of people are saying Michele Bachmann isn’t qualified to be president, because she opens her mouth to eat a corn dog.

I have to assume that sophisticated, civilized people who attended Ivy League schools have some superior method of eating their corn dogs. If anybody knows what it is, I’d appreciate hearing about it, because I always end up dripping ketchup on my shirt.

But Rep. Bachmann’s campaign is over anyway, it seems to me. She confused the anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death with his birthday.

You can get away with a lot in American politics, but I’m pretty sure messing up your Elvis essentials takes you beyond the pale.

The nice thing about being beyond the pale, though, is that you can eat your corn dog any bloody way you like.

Non-fiction

Vapid Speech from the Highest Office

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I wish I could link you to the great interview Ken Myers recorded with Elvin Lim, author of The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush, because it’s worth the time to listen to Lim’s essential argument. Presidential rhetoric has been leaning strongly toward emotional appeals to common sense and away from what may be called intelligent reasons.
“[S]uch appeals rest on reductive and oversimplified reasonings that are often false in significant ways. Persuasion based on such emotional appeals is necessarily shallow and often does not do justice to the issues at stake,” states the brief summary of the interview on the Mars Hill Audio Journal site.
Presidents have become too powerful, Lim states, due to their appeal to extra-constitutional authorities, particularly the perceived electoral mandate from the most recent election. The White House should instead discuss policy with Congress like adults, something many on both sides claim to want, but fewer actually support.

Fiction, Non-fiction

Spoils of the weekend

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It was one of the most exhausting weekends I’ve had in a long time, involving considerable interaction with other human beings, always a workout for me. But nevertheless it wasn’t a bad weekend. Two things that happened, in particular, pleased me inordinately.
First of all, I got this link from my friend and sparring partner, Ragnar. They’re going to do The Long Ships as a movie again. In fact, they’re going to do two movies and a TV miniseries. They’re going to do it in Sweden, and if the Swedes are to be believed (always, ahem, a gamble), they’re going to do it right this time. Continue reading Spoils of the weekend →

Fiction, Reviews

Killing Floor, by Lee Child

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After my unpleasant experience with Philip Kerr’s Field Gray, I was in the mood for something less ambitious and more fun. I found it in Lee Child’s first Jack Reacher thriller, Killing Floor.
Child, an English television writer who does a very creditable job portraying American characters and settings, knows a few important truths about thriller writing. He knows that “movie logic,” the phenomenon that allows movies to get away with a lot of unlikely or impossible story elements because “I just saw it right there,” also works—to a certain extent—in action novels. The very unlikely coincidence on which this book’s plot pivots doesn’t bear close examination, but Child treats it matter of factly and keeps the interest up, and most readers come along for the ride. I know I did. Enjoyed it too.
His hero is Jack Reacher, a former military policeman who was raised a Marine brat. Having left the Marines, he is now traveling the United States, getting to know the country of which he is a citizen, in which he has never actually spent much time. And so, purely on a whim, he gets off a bus and walks to a tiny town called Margrave, Georgia, where he is immediately arrested by the police. A man has been murdered, and the stranger is a natural suspect. By the time Jack’s alibi has checked out, he’s met a very attractive lady cop he wants to know better, and come to feel a certain responsibility for a fellow prisoner, a rich man who doesn’t know how to handle himself in lock-up. But when he learns the identity of the murdered man, Jack’s course of action is decided. He has an obligation.
Fortunately for the good guys, Jack’s a very dangerous man—the very kind of man you want around when you’re up against a murderous, amoral conspiracy.
Killing Floor has all the virtues—and some of the faults—of an inspired first novel. Some of the detective work seemed a little too neat to me, and one of the big mysteries probably won’t be as much a mystery to readers today as it was when the book was published, more than a decade ago. But I took it on its own terms and had a great time. I’m already reading the second Jack Reacher novel, Die Trying, which starts with another coincidence almost as dubious as the one that kicks off this book.
Jack Reacher has some similarities to Stephen Hunter’s Bob Lee Swagger, but the classic character he reminded me most of was John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee. Travis McGee, although he had a permanent address, lived on a house boat, and so was metaphorically adrift in the world. Jack Reacher is literally rootless, describing himself at one point as a hobo. The two have similar attitudes, and even resemble each other.
Killing Floor is recommended for grown-ups.
Update: Endorsement retracted. The reasons may be found here.

Authors, Poetry

Speaking the Simple Truth

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The next U.S. Poet Laureate has been announced. It’s Detroit-native Philip Levine.

John Thomas reports: “On the announcement of his being named U.S. Poet Laureate, Librarian of Congress James Billington said, ‘Philip Levine is one of America’s great narrative poets. His plainspoken lyricism has, for half a century, championed the art of telling The Simple Truth — about working in a Detroit auto factory, as he has, and about the hard work we do to make sense of our lives.'”

Here’s a bit of Levine’s work:

The new grass rising in the hills,

the cows loitering in the morning chill,

a dozen or more old browns hidden

in the shadows of the cottonwoods

beside the streambed. I go higher

to where the road gives up and there’s

only a faint path strewn with lupine

between the mountain oaks. (Read on …)

Fiction

Fighting Back Hard

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Speaking of bullies and rioting in the streets, there’s a movie in production about a black power group targeting and killing abortionists for the industry’s focus on the African-American community. Alfonzo Rachel praises it here, saying pro-lifers who decry any story depicting violence against abortionists are missing the larger point.

Gates of Hell by Molotov Mitchell is riddled with true statistics about the practical genocide against black families through abortion. That’s the ugly part of this story, less than the fictional violence.

One pro-life advocate argues Gates of Hell “is a vigilante apologia, and I genuinely fear that it will whip up young black men and lead some to violence.” I doubt it, in part because it doesn’t appear this movie will be widely released, and of all the movies with black men shooting each other, I wouldn’t bet this one would inspire violence more than any of them.

Now that I’m thinking about it, what movies have been made about terrorism or murder for a good cause. Is Death Wish the only type of this, a personal revenge storyline? Maybe the others are all war movies.