High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! A Gathering of Eagles is a 1963 film about the U.S. Air Force during the Cold War and the pressures of command. The plot is patterned after the World War II film Twelve O`Clock High, which producer-screenwriter Sy Bartlett also wrote, with elements also mirroring Above and Beyond and Toward the Unknown, films written by his collaborator, Beirne Lay, Jr..