"12 O'Clock High" was a very fine film indeed.

Stim - Brilliant! (your comments on The Hobbit) Having given what you said some consideration...I think you're absolutely right in what you say, comparing "The Hobbit" to the LOTR trilogy. They'd have had to make LOTR into about 10 full length movies to get in all the less action-oriented stuff, the humour, the songs, all that other more subtle stuff that was in the books. Maybe they should have...

Regarding the Orcs. Okay...maybe Tolkien saw them as having been "created" by magic specifically to BE evil...therefore they are only 2-dimensional creatures with no natural characteristics. If so, it makes them unrealistic as a race of beings, and it's Tolkien's error. He was, after all, symbolically playing out the great struggle of his own time (WWII) in his story about good and evil in Middle Earth...so it seems that the Orcs and Goblins were intended to represent the legions of the Fascist powers in WWII. Well...the young men who served in German, Italian, and Japanese forces were not evil monsters created by some wizard in a castle. ;-) They were perfectly ordinary young men of their time, born into unusual political circumstances, and like the soldiers in all the other countries who fought, they went to war for the usual reasons: duty, honour, country, tradition, patriotism, loyalty, obedience to authority...and because it seemed completely unavoidable at the time.

So they were real people, just like us, serving a very bad and misguided political system that ruled over them. Like us, they experienced love, hope, and every form of human idealism.

If there really were a race of Orcs or Goblins, I expect that they too would turn out to be quite complicated beings, much like us, and not simple cardboard cutouts of pure evil. And that's how I'd have looked at it, if I were Tolkien. But since he didn't write it that way, the movies have depicted the Orcs much as Tolkien would have wanted, I guess.