High Noon

This western classic, an unusual Best Picture nominee, is perhaps most noted as the focus of 1001 ideological arguments. Make those ‘Hollywood’ arguments, where the only real ideology is what makes money and who gets to keep their job. It’s a solid picture made by ‘committed’ producers and directed by a major talent. They were probably more surprised than anyone when it became one of the biggest hits of 1952.

Stanley Kramer’s message-laden oater has seen several good-quality Blu-ray releases. Olive Films gave us a perfectly good Signature Edition eight years ago; several of its excellent extras have been ported over to this new release. Kino has added a couple more, giving new viewpoints through which viewers can ponder the purported Parlor Tricks and Proper Ganders of Stanley Kramer’s blacklist-era western hit.

High Noon in 4K Ultra-HD has a distinct edge over Blu-ray, a quality difference that will be best appreciated by viewers with high-end systems and large monitors. Editor Elmo Williams’ clocks and Dimitri Tiompkin’s music hold this picture together. Good ol’ Tex Ritter’s vocal of “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin” is billboarded throughout, keeping time with its scritchy-scratchy rhythm.

Feisty independent producer Stanley Kramer established his brand by courting the image of a liberal firebrand, with bold movies about race (Home of the Brave) and disabled veterans (The Men). With writer and co-producer Carl Foreman, Kramer formulated a western with similarly undisguised Social Comment. Procuring the services of Gary Cooper can’t have been cheap, but the movie overall was relatively inexpensive. It became one of the most popular pictures of 1952 and took home four Academy Awards. Viewers were taken by Coop’s performance as a Marshall caught between his duty to his badge and to his new bride, played by the just-blossoming Grace Kelly. Fred Zinnemann’s precise direction leans on expressive mini-montages synchronized to soundtrack music that emulated a ticking clock. The show is a satisfying Shoot ’em Up, with an ever-rising curve of suspense and tension.

Carl Foreman’s script immediately frames High Noon as yet another Kramer Western Union picture. Newly retired Hadleyville Marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper) weds Quaker Amy Fowler (Grace Kelly), but just as they exchange vows the word arrives that criminal Frank Miller (Ian MacDonald) is coming in on the Noon train, hot for revenge on the community that thought they were sending him to jail forever. Knowing that the vindictive Miller won’t go away, Kane resolves to face him head on, and goes to the community for support.

But Kane finds himself isolated and abandoned by his friends and neighbors. Judge Mettrick (Otto Kruger) doesn’t share Kane’s sense of responsibility, and flees without a moment’s thought. Deputy Harvey Pell (Lloyd Bridges) is bitter that he hasn’t been promoted to Kane’s job, and refuses to help his former boss. The old Marshall (Lon Chaney Jr.) can’t help because he’s crippled with arthritis. Kane’s effort to raise a posse fails because the barroom crowd are mostly friends of Miller, and see his return as a good thing. Kane’s appeal for deputies at the local church collapses into petty complaints and blame-passing.

Holding to her pacifist principles, Amy demands that Will let someone else deal with the situation, and decides to desert him when he insists on a showdown. She becomes convinced that her husband still yearns for his old flame, the wealthy Mexican businesswoman Helen Ramirez (Katy Jurado). Amy doesn’t realize that Helen is also packed to leave town, on the same train bringing Frank Miller.

High Noon is a high-toned grand statement about civic responsibility, made just loose enough to encourage a wide range of interpretation. But that dimension wasn’t part of its public profile in ’52. Audiences were more interested in the new star Grace Kelly, who was being given a massive publicity push. The other buzz centered on Tex Ritter’s hit song, which is threaded into the fabric of the movie. The plaintive vocal returns whenever Marshall Kane goes walking through town, looking in vain for help.
In 1952 the majority of Hollywood’s output was still in B&W, but more westerns were being filmed in color — “A”-budget studio pix with stars like  Errol Flynn,  James Stewart and  Randolph Scott. The public would soon come to expect big color vistas of Big Sky scenery.

Stanley Kramer had yet to produce anything in color. His relatively small-scale picture compensates with expert craftsmanship, deriving its power from its editorial design and direction. High Noon is a movie of cuts, not sustained shots. Elmo Williams’ Oscar-winning editing is dynamic, almost ostentatiously so. As the hour for the Noon train approaches, time becomes an automatic suspense machine. The seconds tick away, aided greatly by Dimitri Tiomkin’s insistent music score.

The cuts keep pace with the music, creating a flat ‘metronome montage.’  A series of close-ups take an inventory of nervous faces, waiting for the Noon train whistle.  ^*  Every character nervously checks their clock or pocket watch. The pattern is finally broken by a crane shot revealing Marshal Kane standing alone in the dusty street.

Film theory students at UCLA in the early ’70s studied the movie’s frequent cutaways to clocks, and discovered that they do indeed keep a rough approximation of Real Time, staying within a couple of minutes of a ‘control’ clock. It was once frequently claimed that the Real Time clock motif was added in post-production, after a discouraging preview. But many shots of the clocks we see are part of mastershots with dialogue scenes, proving that director Zinnemann was purposely doing a Real Time experiment during filming. Perhaps the post-production claim refers to added shots of clocks that were added in the final cut.

Wow: a western with coherent, complex women characters. 

An assertively feminist group in the UCLA critical studies program lauded the formulation of the film’s two female roles, as going against the ‘traditional’ norm for the genre, with its racist/sexist bias. Grace Kelly’s Waspish Amy is the  ‘Clementine Carter’  character, a principled white Easterner who does not intend to surrender her refined moral values to the violence of the West. Katy Jurado’s Helen Ramirez is the alternative ‘dark woman’ or Mexican girlfriend. The stereotypical norm was still operative through the 1950s — Native American and Latin women were habitually typed as governed by ‘primitive emotions.’  To mollify the American South, the taboo against ‘miscegenation’ prevailed. Even in a so-called progressive  James Stewart western, an Indian princess romantically linked to a white hero must die before their union can be consummated.

Katy Jurado’s Helen Ramirez is the strongest, most independent character in Hadleyville. She tolerates no guff from punk Lloyd Bridges (always excellent as a jerk) and even tells off La Princess Grace in no uncertain terms. Amy Fowler may be a socially correct choice for a bride, but the worldly-wise Helen Ramirez possesses an unqualified capacity to love. Were Will Kane not so conventional in his thinking, marriage to Ramirez could be a great adventure. For further instruction on the fierce spirit of the Latin feminine ideal, see Katy Jurado in Budd Boetticher’s superb  Bullfighter and the Lady. Had Kane committed himself to the soulful Helen, she’d have found a way to have Frank Miller quietly eliminated during his train trip. No muss, no fuss.

But the issue that has stuck to High Noon is its relation to the controversial Blacklist. Hollywood reactionaries were quick to claim that pinko filmmakers were undermining American values. The story that stuck was that Howard Hawks and John Wayne hated High Noon’s ‘Un-American’ finale, in which Marshal Kane throws his badge of office into the dirt, a statement of contempt for the town that wouldn’t back him up. The original quote may be apocryphal, but Wayne proudly stated that he made 1959’s big hit  Rio Bravo as a direct riposte to High Noon. Wayne’s character in Rio Bravo is a professional who would never ask the community to help him do his job.

“It’s the durn Deplorable Gang back again, Margaret!” 

As much as the Wayne-Hawks position is conservative posturing, defending High Noon’s argument is not at all easy. Carl Foreman’s messages are ladled on with the subtlety of a shovel. To support its social argument, High Noon depicts Hadleyville as a rotten place filled with rotten citizens. Democracy doesn’t function because people are basically selfish and cowardly. The judge skedaddles, symbolically taking his American flag and scales of justice with him. The salooon crowd is firmly on Frank Miller’s side: they want a thuggish strong man to Make Hadleyville Great Again.

Save for Kane, the only decent citizens in town are either crippled or under-aged. The church congregation is a worst-case scenario of Bad Civics in Action. The preacher condemns Kane from the pulpit because he’s ‘a man of violence.’ Instead of trusting Kane’s judgment, his friend Jonas (Thomas Mitchell) performs a public intervention, to deter Kane from his ‘personal’ problem.

Kane meekly accepts little crucifixions in every scene, with a queer combination of pride and humility. When he needs to rally the church congregation, he instead offers a feeble three-word speech:  “I need help.”  Kane sits silent while nabobs tell him his own business. Kane can’t even do some simple arm-twisting to secure the support of his own deputy. Only Helen Ramirez has a legitmate excuse not to come to Will’s defense:  “He is not my man.”  No, the drama is rigged so that Kane face his fate alone. Yet after all the posturing, Kramer and Foreman make no particular statement beyond a murky, ‘A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.’

Grand liberal message?  No way. High Noon is actually a better fit as a conservative fantasy about America failing to stand up to outside threats. Good ol’ Kane (General MacArthur and Co.) is going to be stabbed in the back by liberal politicians and dupes inadvertently aiding the Bad Guys. High Noon’s supposed pacifist argument takes a conservative turn as well. Quaker Amy Fowler has married a frontier lawman, yet assumes that he’ll become somebody different with a wedding vow. A crisis proves Amy to be worthy after all, but only after her Christian pacifism is given the Bum’s Rush. Conscientious nonviolence is a frivolous illusion promoted by misguided folk that have never had to fight to protect their loved ones. Good one, Amy — you’ve earned your man the American Way, by killing for him.

Everyone forgets the next train arriving at Hadleyville, a slow freight dispatched to haul away 20 tons of excess Social Comment. 

The end of High Noon presents the stickiest puzzle. Kane tosses his star in the dust, rejecting his ‘friend’ that show their support only after the fight is won. But Kane is also turning his back on some good people, like the boy who so badly wanted to help. Are the people in the next town going to be any better, or will they also be unworthy of the ethically superior Mr. and Mrs. Kane?  The message of High Noon is confused, to say the least. Viewers report being moved by what it has to say, yet often can’t come up with a coherent answer for what that message might be.

The best way to enjoy High Noon is to keep all the political fussing compartmentalized. We love the film’s crisp editing and clear action. We like to read nuances into the Kane-Ramirez relationship, and to critigue Amy’s lack of understanding for the husband she expects to turn from hawk to dove overnight. The Dimitri Tiomkin music is always a kick, as is that dry, unaffected Tex Ritter song. It’s also fun to see eternal bad guys Lee Van Cleef and Robert J. Wilke near the beginning of their careers. We love the perennial western heavies, the ones always gunned down by the hero, in picture after picture after picture.

←  Mad Magazine recognized the trend represented by High Noon. One of its cartoons depicted Will Kane shooting a hole through his pocket watch, as if he had a neurotic aversion to the existential tyranny of Time. In the early Mad spoof  Hah! Noon!,  Kane solved his little problem with ‘Killer Diller Miller’ by calling in a thousand National Guard troops, complete with tanks and artillery. Another vintage Mad comic ribbed the obvious doubles for Bridges and Cooper in their big barn fight, with an all-time favorite Western gag line:  “Now my stuntman’s going to give your stuntman the beating of his life!”

High Noon has been a profound influence on the western genre. The old Gunsmoke TV series was basically a spinoff, and eclectic-minded directors have frequently revisited its situations. Sam Peckinpah’s  The Wild Bunch riffs on the kids whose play is obsessed with gun violence:  “Bang! You’re dead, Kane!”  Sam Fuller’s  Forty Guns does a wild and wooly number on the final ‘Drop yer gun or she’s dead’ dilemma. Sheriff Barry Sullivan resolves a standoff by purposely shooting hostage Barbara Stanwyck so he can get a clean shot at her captor. And Sergio Leone turned the first reel of his  Once Upon a Time In the West into an extended parody of High Noon’s opening. Three gunmen wait at a train station, passing the time by intimidating the telegraph clerk.