For Fans of Gregory Peck

Every generation produces courtroom dramas and principled-lawyer stories, and most of them glance back at Peck's Atticus Finch without quite landing. The performance works because Peck plays the man's doubts as carefully as his convictions. He is not a saint presenting a closing argument. He is a father explaining something terrible about the world to a child he loves, and hoping the explanation holds. That combination of legal seriousness and domestic tenderness is what makes the film, half a century on, feel personal rather than historical.

There is no battle for the audience's sympathy in Twelve O'Clock High. Peck's General Savage is right to demand more from his men, and the film is entirely honest about the cost that demand exacts on him. Business school programmes have screened it for decades, and rightly so: it is less a war picture than a study in what it takes to hold a group of people to an impossible standard, and what that kind of holding destroys in the person doing it.

Peck took The Omen in 1976 when his status as an A-list leading man had softened, and he brought the same composed professionalism to Robert Thorn that he had brought to Atticus Finch. The result is one of the few prestige-actor-in-horror films that actually improves the genre entry. His reluctance to believe what the evidence shows him is entirely plausible because Peck plays it as a man's genuine philosophical crisis, not as a plot device. The film holds up; he is the reason.

Roman Holiday is remembered as an Audrey Hepburn film, and it is, but it is also the performance that proved Peck could do something neither Ahab nor Atticus ever required: charm without armour. He plays the journalist Joe Bradley as a man with a scheme who slowly finds himself ashamed of it. That quiet internal reversal, never announced, just gradually visible on his face, is harder to achieve than any courtroom monologue. The film is the clearest evidence that Peck's gravity was a choice, not a limitation.