High Noon
Western | 85 Minutes | 1952 | United States
(4/4)
Director: Fred Zinnemann | Producer: Stanley Kramer | Screenplay: Carl Foreman | Based on: ‘The Tin Star’ by John W. Cunningham | Starring: Gary Cooper, Thomas Mitchell, Lloyd Bridges, Katy Jurado, Grace Kelly | Music: Dimitri Tiomkin | Cinematography: Floyd Crosby | Editor: Elmo Williams
Will Kane (Gary Cooper), the marshal of a small frontier town in New Mexico Territory, gets married in a small civil ceremony to his beautiful young wife Amy Fowler (Grace Kelly), a Quaker whose imminent plans include a family and a convenience store someplace else. Fully intending to play the doting husband, to that end it is also Kane’s last day on the job, and he hands in his badge and the happy couple say their goodbyes and prepare for departure. But before they can leave, news reaches town that Frank Miller (Ian MacDonald), a vicious outlaw caught by Kane several years back, after having his death sentence commuted has now been released from prison, and will be arriving in little more than an hour on the noon train.
Miller’s gang of three loiter at the train depot, restlessly awaiting their leader and the trouble ahead. Meanwhile Kane determines that he cannot, will not leave town. His attempts to swear in special deputies largely fall on deaf ears: some of the patrons at the tavern were Miller’s buddies, or besides liked the air of lawlessness and lasciviousness which lingered when he was around, which at the very least was good for the tavern’s profits; at the church, the few men who are willing to stand alongside Kane are swiftly talked down, as even his best friend, the local mayor (Thomas Mitchell), determines that Kane should leave and allow tensions to pass. Amy – angered by what she sees as a choice for violence – says that she will depart on the noon train. Other friends take fright and hide in their houses, the churlish, childish deputy marshal Harvey Pell (Lloyd Bridges) hands in his badge ironically because he wants to be given more responsibility, and only Helen Ramirez (Katy Jurado), the store owner and Kane’s former lover, seems to have his back, but the slim odds and her history with Miller mean that she too plans for a way out.
Howard Hawks and John Wayne, who tended to see things in black and white, hated High Noon, incredulous at the idea of a supposedly well-respected marshal struggling to muster allies and deferring to his wife. Yet the politics of High Noon – directed by Fred Zinnemann, produced by Stanley Kramer who was famous for his message pictures, from a screenplay by Carl Foreman who was subsequently called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and blacklisted – remain surprisingly nuanced. On the one hand it is a conservative picture which prizes personal integrity and a civic sense of duty and places at its heart the fixity of marital bonds; on the other a liberal screed rightly taken at the time as an allegory against McCarthyism, which shows in practise just how tenuous our communities can be. It sought in a wider context to defend those accused of Communism, via the apotheosis of a distinctly American brand of individualism, albeit here one somewhat wary and wizened rather than rugged.
In a sense High Noon is not so far from other classic Westerns, like Stagecoach for instance, because despite the antipathy of the townsfolk, Kane could still have patched together a ragtag bunch of deputies had he so wished: at a word Helen Ramirez would have stayed and fought for him, Amy ends up coming through, Harvey Pell struggles with his conscience and makes a perverse attempt to do the right thing, one close friend almost stands his ground, and help too is offered by a man with an eye patch and a scrawny youngster. In Stagecoach the group are also outsiders, outlaws, gamblers, ageing drunks, a virtuous woman who must meet on the fringes of society with a woman scorned, only in Stagecoach the coach itself is a tether. Is it surprising that with only an hour’s notice and the whole of the town to hide in, here things swing the other way? As the arthritic former marshal explains to Kane, ‘It figures. It’s all happened too sudden. People got to talk themselves into law and order before they do anything. Maybe because down deep they don’t care’.
In other ways High Noon is a conundrum. Much of the film is painted in broad strokes, with passages of exposition outlining the overriding morals and themes, yet character motivations remain complex. Kane for instance refuses to leave town partly out of a sense of duty, partly because he worries about Helen Ramirez falling into the wrong hands, but also because he fears that Miller and his gang will keep coming after him, figuring if he’s going to make a stand then the town is his best bet. The opposite of an anti-hero, one of the most virtuous characters on film, he is nevertheless hesitant and anxious and sets about his task with a tangible sense of dread.
Formally, High Noon takes place in real-time, which means the hour and a bit between news of Miller reaching town and the train’s arrival. The format had been used for taut thrillers, but was a bold choice for a Western, a genre typically concerned with the passage of time, the arduousness of travel, wide vistas, mounting tension and a sense of place. High Noon is one long climax, a handful of rooms, a train depot, and the already empty streets. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the film also makes use of formalist montage. When Kane sits in his office hastily scrawling his last will, increasingly rapid cuts show Miller’s gang as the train hollers in the distance, the ticking arm of a grandfather clock, and the chair where Miller once vowed his revenge, which becomes a sort of executioner’s chair, a symbol for the fate which Kane fears now awaits him.
In the end High Noon is both quaint and compelling, the furore around its release laid to one side and its place at the very heart of the Western canon quietly assured. It features a great cast, curious and evocative because so many of its actors became associated with other roles and other types of film: Thomas Mitchell who had form from Stagecoach, but is perhaps best remembered today for It’s a Wonderful Life and Gone with the Wind; Grace Kelly, who was described as ‘mousy’ by Alfred Hitchcock here at the start of her short film career; Lloyd Bridges who would reinvent himself as a comedian; Katy Jurado as the utterly captivating Mexican outsider who has nevertheless won the community’s respect; plus a non-speaking film debut from a young Lee Van Cleef. It is propelled by a beautiful score, ‘The Ballad of High Noon’ which ostensibly refers to Kane’s wife, but becomes something more interior, an echo of Kane’s psychological self-preservation. And there are moments of levity too, as when Harvey Pell vacillates in the tavern and the song ‘Buffalo Gals’ asks ‘Won’t you come out tonight?’.
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