A Film Canon

This WWII drama is a textbook study in leadership, taking the disorientation, uncertainty and demoralisation endemic to the early period of American daylight precision bombing as the pretext for an elaboration of both the necessity and difficulty of "group integrity", a paradoxical position embodied in General Savage's (Gregory Peck) response to having maximised the efficiency of a problem squadron - namely, to deflect his men's desire to display their gratitude into preparation of his second-in-command for exactly the same task; leadership as anticipation of imminent self-elision, or redundancy. Unsurprisingly, this impossible ideal - culminating with Savage's recommendation that his men "consider themselves dead" - is mitigated by his eventual breakdown, and subscription to the anxiety about frames of reference (psychological, military, personal) that he was called in to remedy; a disruption that, while entirely implausible in itself, nicely qualifies his ethos with a recognition that the 'group' may be a nuanced, or heterogeneous, phenomenon - or, rather, may consist of a mingling of smaller groups, and sympathetic constellations - without degenerating to the individualism that impeded the squadron in the first place. That said, Savage's basic viewpoint is affirmed by the extent to which the film instantiates the very disappearance that he sought, never really disclosing the aftermath of his (equally implausible) recovery, nor his subsequent involvement with the war, and so fusing him with the spectacle of the abandoned airfield that brackets the narrative. It's this that briefly subsumes King's more propagandistic imperatives into a technological sublime, according to which the cold, dehumanising waste becomes war's most compelling aesthetic quality, viscera is both peculiarly foregrounded and designified (particularly in the opening return of a bomber, which is the most gruesome depiction of its kind in cinema to date) and, above all, conflict is abstracted into a series of spectacular air sequences whose irrealism is only reinforced by the opening disclaimer that they were shot by the US Air Force and Luftwaffe.