Waste of time

Let's be realistic.

Good idea lost in the noise

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Rock Hudson does a bit of stretching in his acting resume in playing a tough as nails Colonel who takes over a Strategic Air Command base and tries to whip it in shape. There's a guy over him who's tougher, a general played by Kevin McCarthy who just flunked the previous base commander in a surprise inspection and that's why Hudson has the job.A few years earlier James Stewart who was in the Air Force and retired as a Brigadier General in their reserve did a film about the Strategic Air Command entitled just that. Stewart was way too close to the subject to make a really good film about it. This film is far better and has a more objective point of view.Anyway Hudson moves bag, baggage, and pretty British wife Mary Peach from London to San Francisco. And Hudson thinks it's fortunate that an old pal from the Korean War Rod Taylor is his executive officer. That soon changes however.A lot of the plot of A Gathering Of Eagles is taken from the John Wayne/ Robert Ryan World War II film Flying Leathernecks. In that one Wayne takes over command of a group of Marine aviators with Ryan as his Executive Officer. If you've seen that one, you know what happens in this film.Hudson and Taylor as the clashing military officers fill their roles out quite well and look very official in their Air Force uniforms. Also pay attention to Barry Sullivan as an alcoholic officer whose problems bring the problems of Hudson and Taylor to a head.A Gathering Of Eagles is a good service film and a nice recruiting film for the Air Force.

This movie nailed the way it was in the peacetime Air Force, especially in the old Strategic Air Command. It shows the "duty first" attitude that helped our country win the Cold War, and drives home the tremendous stress all of us were under during those hard years. Since retiring, I learned to stop trying to explain to civilians what my service was like. Now I just tell them to see this movie, it's that realistic. On the downside, some of the acting is stiff and two dimensional. In the same way John Wayne's Green Berets was criticized for being propaganda, this movie also showed all the characters as too good to be true. There were a few human problems for the Rock's new wing commander character to fix, such as the soft colonel played by Rod Taylor, the maintenance colonel who was "too dedicated" to delegate, and his own civilian wife who lacked his commitment to the mission. Get past all that, view this movie more as a documentary to learn what it was like to live on a SAC base during the Cold War.

I'm more than a little amused by the current-day huffiness about smoking and other 21st century mores superimposed on a flick made more than 40 years ago. The movie is well-made, well-acted, and authentic--although the script is a little hackneyed. But that's mostly because it's a remake, not just of "Twelve O'Clock High" as pointed out elsewhere in comments, but also of "Above and Beyond" (the scenes between Hudson and Peach virtually mirror those between Robert Taylor and Eleanor Parker), screen-written by Sy Bartlett's collaborator on TOH, Beirne Lay Jr.Where it fell flat was that it attempted to counter two books that soon after (as a result of Hollywood reaction to the Cuban Missile Crisis) became doomsday movies--"Fail-Safe" (the premise of which was then and eventually was proved by time to be totally false), and one of my personal favorites, "Dr. Strangelove etc". AGOE got caught in the anti-militaristic paradigm shift started by the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Kennedy Assassination, and ended by the Vietnam War.I was a dependent on an Air Force base when I first saw this movie at the base theater (and at a SAC base when I saw Strangelove), and my friends and I thought the flick was a riot--the depiction of base housing in this and "X-15" were unlike anything we ever lived in!!!! (Jimmy Stewart's first set of quarters in "Strategic Air Command" was closer to the mark.)It's a good flick--not great, but interesting and representative of its time.

Forget the technical aspects of explaining what the function of these fliers are. It was a tedious explanation at the beginning of the flick and was as confusing as Price Waterhouse's explanation of voting procedures at the Oscars each year and as boring and difficult as Ethel Weintraub's chemistry class at Erasmus Hall H.S. in Brooklyn.The film begins to take shape when it discusses the human element. Rock Hudson portrays a hard driven commander who pushes his men to the limit so as to prepare our people in aviation for a war emergency.In the process of doing this, Hudson ruins the life of veteran Barry Sullivan. The former feels that Sullivan can no longer cope with the difficulty of the job and forces him into retirement. This retirement causes Sullivan's son to leave Stanford and the Sullivan character placing a bullet in his body in a suicide attempt. Rock, as Col. Caldwell, ameliorates the situation by visiting Sullivan in the hospital and gets him to say that he will strive for excellence in his new position in civilian life.Hudson also tries to get rid of Rod Taylor as he believes that the latter has become too chummy with the men.It is while Hudson is visiting Sullivan at the hospital that a simulated emergency occurs which tests the strengths of all.Mary Peach plays the British wife of Hudson. Her performance is not peachy-keen. When she first walks off a plane to meet her husband in an early scene, you would think that Queen Elizabeth was playing the part.A good film relating to working with men in a difficult but often unexplained task.Rod Taylor and Mr. Hudson can't be commended for their excessive smoking in this film. Is this what our army brass has come to?