Title: High Noon
Rating: 2 Stars
This is such an interesting film to me. It’s considered, along with The Searchers and Shane, as one of the great Westerns.
It stars Gary Cooper as Marshal Will Kane. Immediately after his wedding to Amy (Grace Fowler), he turns in his marshal badge. Technically his replacement isn’t due until the next day, but the townspeople tell him it’s OK to knock off a day early and to head out of town to start a new life as a peaceful shopkeeper.
As he’s heading out, he hears that the notorious outlaw Frank Miller, who’d previously terrorized the town until Kane had captured and sent him to jail, has been paroled. He has sworn revenge both on the town and on Kane and appears to be heading back to town to face Kane.
Kane leaves town but his conscience gets the better of him. Despite the protests of his Quaker wife Amy, he comes back to face Miller and his gang. He spends the rest of the film trying to find some townspeople to deputize to help him take on Miller. For various reasons, no one in the town is willing, so he must face the Miller gang alone in a final shootout.
There’s several things going on here that I found interesting. First of all, this was written in 1951. I’ve written about this before here. This was during the height of McCarthyism and the HUAC hearings. Seeking to identify the communists running amok in Hollywood, many people were called to testify and ordered to name names. If you refused to name names, you were blacklisted. If you named names, you were considered treacherous and would be ostracized by the Hollywood community.
In this environment, seemingly unrelated films were made that danced around this subject. Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront was about the bravery of testifying. Dalton Trumbo’s Spartacus was about the bravery of refusing to.
High Noon’s screenwriter, Carl Foreman, was called and refused to testify. He was blacklisted and ended up moving to Britain because he knew that he could no longer work in Hollywood.
Understanding that makes the film’s themes more obvious. Even when everyone is telling Kane to run away and leave town, Kane is steadfast and grimly determined to do what he thinks is right, even at the cost of his own life. Kane looks with contempt upon the townspeople as they come up with various increasingly pathetic excuses to avoid facing Miller’s gang. It’s obvious that if they all simply stood together and fought as a unified force that Miller’s gang would stand no chance. However, with each person thinking of their own self interest, individually they lack the courage to do what is transparently the right thing.
What is the right thing for Kane to do here? Sure, he was the marshal, but he’s not one anymore. He married his wife knowing that she was a Quaker. Not only is she a Quaker, but having personally seen her brother shot dead, she has a special hatred of guns. It can only be assumed that his retiring from the lawman’s life implied that he made some kind of commitment to her. This is the nineteenth century, so he and his wife should be able to disappear pretty easily into the West. After all, there is no Facebook or Google Maps. He literally married her and promised himself to her a mere hour ago or so.
Is his now expired vow to the town somehow stronger than his marital vow? Or could it be that he only begrudgingly gave up the gunfighter life that he really loves just because his wife demanded it and he happily took up the opportunity for gun play once it presented itself again? Will this be a pattern for the two of them going forward?
How about Amy? As mentioned, she is a Quaker who has a personal hatred of guns. However, at a critical time when Kane is in danger, she picks up a gun and shoots one of the bad guys in the back. Is this a heroic moment for Amy? Is her love of Kane greater than the devotion of her religion? What does that say about Kane that literally in their first hour of marriage, the pacifist Amy is already shooting a man dead?
It’s an odd film to be considered a Western classic. For the bulk of the film, nothing really happens. It’s mostly conversations that Kane has with various townspeople to get them to join him. One person agrees but once he understands no one else is joining, promptly bails. Kane is laughed out of the bar. The people that want to help him is a one eyed drunk and a fourteen year old boy, both of whom he sends away. His deputy actually does appear competent, but they get in a fight and Kane knocks the deputy unconscious.
He breaks into a church service to recruit deputies. This somehow devolves into some kind of town hall debating society where the pros and cons of helping Kane are discussed. Keep in mind that Miller’s gang is literally in town as this is going on. They are waiting for Miller’s train, whose arrival is imminent. I’m not really sure if this is a Robert’s Rules of Order kind of moment, but nope, we have to have extended discussion. This gets ludicrous. One person stands up to say that this is really the fault of people up North and they should handle it. Ummmm, the gang is in town, plans to shoot Kane dead and then terrorize the town as it used to, and you want to wait for the appropriate authorities?
Let’s talk a bit about Grace Kelly. When filming starts (in 1951), Kelly is 21 years old. Gary Cooper is 50 years old. The character Kane is supposed to look beaten down, so they’ve done nothing to make Cooper look younger. He looks every bit his 50 years old. The age difference is problematic, but shockingly enough, is par for the course for Kelly’s career.
Kelly was only active in film a couple of years before retiring at age 26 to become the Princess of Monaco. Most of her films had relationships with much older men. In addition to High Noon, in Rear Window, she was 24 and Jimmy Stewart was 48. In To Catch A Thief, she was 25 and Cary Grant was 51. In Dial M For Murder she was 24 and Ray Milland was 47. In her Oscar winning role in The Country Girl, she was 24 and Bing Crosby was 51.
Could studio executives really not imagine Grace Kelly actually being with a man her own age?
The film was OK. Knowing the background behind it makes it more interesting. Having seen it a couple of times, I guess that I’m just having trouble understanding how watching an increasingly frustrated and sweaty man walk around town trying to drum up a posse makes for a classic Western.
dorkenstein 