HIGH NOON
Directed by: Fred Zinemann - Written by: Carl Foreman - Starring:Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly, Katy Jurado, Lloyd Bridges, Thomas Mitchell,
Lon Chaney Jr., Harry Morgan, Lee Van Cleef, Sheb Wooley, Robert Wilke - Awards: Gary Cooper - Best Actor; Elmo Williams, Harry Gerstad - Film Editing;
Dimitri Tiomkin - Music Score; Dimitri Tiomkin - Music (Song)
Released: I952

Perhaps the best of all westerns, with first class writing, top actors in all parts, Oscar winning editing, music and song. A movie so well known in the world that the Polish Solidarity movement used an image of Gary Cooper with the tag-line “there’s a new marshal in town” during their revolution. The story is simple - a town marshal must face a cruel outlaw and his cohorts when the noon train arrives. The time is about I0:45. He spends the rest of the film in real time seeking help from the townsmen to form a posse.

There was a lot of disagreement when the film came out about what the film “really” meant, but that doesn’t seem so important now. High Noon illustrates the well-known proverb about the triumph of evil occurring when enough good men do nothing. In the film, the townspeople disagree about the definition of evil, which is a rational, important and useful debate. That debate takes place in the church. Some fear to face it, some only care about their careers, some don’t want the publicity, a gunfight in town will be bad for business, and the marshal’s new wife (Grace Kelly) is a Quaker and abhors all violence. It adds up to: "Let's leave the whole thing alone. It's you they're after, not us." I don't know how this film played in the UK, but it must have seemed eerily like I940 in feeling, when they stood alone against the German war machine.

The Greeks had some ideas about what makes good drama; Unity of time, of place and action. High Noon takes place in real time, and parses out the minutes by cutaways to clocks until we’re hooked on the suspense. The whole story takes place in two square blocks of a small town, which is it's weakness; it's visually pretty boring. Countless later TV westerns were cut from the same cloth, and on the same set.

The shabby mise-en-sene isn't important; there are a score of characters in this production, all waiting for that train. They don't just wait, though. The coming of the big heat exposes all the faultlines, jealousies, and hatreds in the town. Most of the townsfolk and his wife want Cooper to get out of town and avoid a fight. He thinks that running won’t work, because the bad guys will hunt him down. He makes his own, rather selfish decision (if you think about it) to fight it out in the town, which we see is full of children playing. In a fine series of shots we see him in his office writing his last will, cut to: the clock is almost at noon, next we hear the whistle of the far-off train still miles from the train station; quick cuts to the various main characters in town who’ve also heard it.

Gary Cooper carries this movie in a fine performance, which won him an Oscar. A good part of the film is in close-up on his face; he had twenty years experience to draw on when he mastered the subtlest moves of his expression to say much more than dialogue can tell. A surprise is Katy Jurado as Coop’s ex love interest. She steals every scene in which she and Grace Kelly are paired. Too bad that in movies of that period, a Latina could only be a mistress, never a wife, for a white star. That, and she looks like she’d be a handful. But she conveniently departs town and leaves the field to the doughfaced Ms Kelly. The fact that Ms Jurado wasn’t even nominated for an Academy Award is a travesty (She did win a Golden Globe).

We’d like to celebrate those unsung (by the Academy anyway) performers, the bad guys. Actor Lee Van Cleef is infused with bad guy appeal, slits for eyes, ferret face, malevolent demeanor. This was his first film appearance, but he was busy for many years after as a western bad guy, eventually appearing in the Italian westerns starting with the seminal The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of I966 (The movie that started Clint Eastwood on his film career). Bad guy number two was Robert Wilke, who from this movie onwards was typecast as the scowling grinch. But he had a long career; he got knifed in The Magnificent Seven (I960; and played a supporting role in Days of Heaven (I978). Number three, Sheb Wooley, was a genuine westerner who appeared in scores westerns, but his claim to fame is the novelty hit song Purple People Eater (I958) which he wrote and sang. He had a role on the hit TV series of the I960s, Rawhide, along with Clint Eastwood.

Despite a great performance by the aging Cooper as the existentially tormented marshal, these bad guys are almost as interesting. The film's opening shot shows them meeting up outside of town. They swagger and posture in the saloon, and then they they take up lounging at the train station, they're a lethargic force of evil, with time weighing on their minds.

High Noon is an exceptionally good western and ranks high on most "best" lists. It set a standard that most later westerns couldn’t reach, although it started a stampede of me-too's and boosted the popularity of westerns for another few years.


Notes:
(a) Henry Fonda in the running to play the marshal, but he was graylisted at the time.
(b) The story goes that screenwriter Carl Foreman was literally evicted from the set by producer Stanley Kramer for fear of blacklist reprisal.
(c) Howard Hawks wrote the screenplay for Rio Bravo starring John Wayne as an "answer" to High Noon.
(d) The real train station was in Jamestown, California, on the Sierra Railroad, one of the few steam trains still existing. That's why the train station is out of town.
(e) That High Noon lost in the Best Picture category to The Greatest Show on Earth is usually seen as one of the biggest upsets (and one of the worst choices) in the history of the Academy Awards. This loss is often cited as due to bias against westerns on the part of the Academy. Ironically, despite severely disliking the film, it was John Wayne who picked up Gary Cooper's Academy Award, because Coop wasn't at the Awards.
(f) Coop extended his career by means of a face lift, one of the first in the business to have one.
(e) The genre of the "Western" got a new lease on life during the early fifties. Competition with the new medium of television forced the studios to start working in the wilds. Television's big drawback being that the cameras were studio bound.

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