Courage and Cowardice in High Noon (1952)
They say good help is hard to find, but Gary Cooper’s frontier marshal in High Noon (1952) experiences a life and death example of how difficult it is to get people to show up for you, even when it’s in their own best interest to do so. The iconic Western has long provoked debate about its political message, which originated in the era of McCarthyism and screenwriter Carl Foreman’s confrontation with the House Un-American Activities Committee, and most fans of the Western genre already know that John Wayne and Howard Hawks so disliked the themes of High Noon that they made Rio Bravo (1959) as a direct rebuttal. Despite such well-noted disapproval, High Noon has aged beautifully and still offers a powerful narrative about how willingly “good” people abandon their obligations to one another when standing up means facing certain danger. It asks us, as viewers, to examine our own commitment to our principles and community and honestly consider what we would do if Will Kane came knocking on our doors to ask us for help in a desperate time.
Cooper plays the aging Marshal Will Kane, looking rather worse for wear and preparing to hang up his gun as he weds a much younger Quaker bride, Amy (Grace Kelly), on a hot Sunday morning in the frontier town of Hadleyville. News comes that a dangerous outlaw, Frank Miller (Ian MacDonald), is out of prison and arriving on the noon train that very day to avenge himself against Kane and everyone else he blames for his arrest. Kane’s friends urge him to leave town with Amy immediately, but Kane realizes that they will never be safe as long as Miller has a score to settle, and he returns to town with hope of raising the local men to stand with him against Miller’s violent gang. Unfortunately, nobody seems to share Kane’s concerns, and as noon draws near it looks like Kane will have to stand alone against four ruthless killers.
The narrative probes the nature of courage and cowardice through Kane’s interactions with his fellow citizens, showing us different facets of both traits. Kane himself is no glib action hero; he is a man past his prime, ready for peace and family life, and all too aware of the odds against him in an unfair fight against Miller’s gang. When he makes out his will just before noon, it’s clear that he does not expect to survive the hour, but that doesn’t stop him from doing what he feels is both necessary and right, even though the people he thought were his friends have abandoned him. His brash, ambitious deputy, Harvey (Lloyd Bridges), would rather fight with Kane than help him, and his mentor, Martin (Lon Chaney Jr.), pleads age and arthritis as his excuse. The same friends who stood with Kane at his wedding mere minutes before betray him. Sam Fuller (Harry Morgan) makes his wife lie to Kane about being at home, while the mayor (Thomas Mitchell) first praises Kane and then condemns him when Kane disrupts the Sunday morning church service looking for volunteers. Some of the townspeople at the church argue on Kane’s behalf, but none of them actually join him, and his only successful recruit eventually backs out when no other volunteers appear. They have plenty of excuses for their behavior, and they point a lot of fingers, but they waste Kane’s precious minutes with their useless words. Only a few individuals show themselves to be worthy of Kane’s regard, even if they are the least suited to the task at hand. A grizzled, half-blind drunk and a teenager both beg Kane to let them help, but Kane knows neither of them would survive the fight. Kane’s former lover, Helen (Katy Jurado), can’t protect him, but she despises the town for its cowardice and urges Amy to fight for her man. Luckily for Kane, Amy ultimately takes Helen’s advice, even though her Quaker faith opposes violence.
The citizens of Hadleyville offer all kinds of justifications for their cowardice, but the most specious is that this is not their fight, that it’s a private matter between Kane and Miller that doesn’t concern them. We know from the church debate that Miller’s gang once made Hadleyville unsafe for women and children, and we see at the train depot at the very beginning that men also fear Miller’s lackeys. Like Helen, we viewers can see that the town’s failure to support Kane now will mean the collapse of the whole community, with Miller and his friends returning the town to a violent, drunken state of chaos where lawless men are free to wreak havoc. The townspeople obey Miller’s will in advance out of fear that he will turn his wrath on them; they see him as an unbeatable strong man with armed thugs to do his bidding, and they refuse to risk their immediate safety to protect Kane or their own long-term survival. Although he is a marshal, Kane never presents himself as a figure of unquestionable authority just because he wears a badge. He does not issue commands because he understands himself to be a public servant and a member of the community, and Kane’s ethical perspective of the law also means that he cannot preempt it by arresting Miller’s gang before they actually commit any crimes. Over the course of the film, which unfolds in real time as the omnipresent clocks tick toward noon, Kane’s increasingly haggard looks convey not only his grief at facing death but his disillusionment as he comes to realize how little his supposed friends are willing to risk to help him or save themselves from a grim future under Miller’s rule. Because of their cowardice, High Noon has one of the unhappiest happy endings you’ll ever see in a film, but it challenges us to be better than the people of Hadleyville when the call for help comes to us, lest we betray the ideals we claim to cherish and the people who most embody them. If we let the Will Kanes of our own time be gunned down, there will be no one left to protect us when we inevitably become targets of the same violent men.
As a result of his refusal to cooperate with HUAC officials, screenwriter Carl Foreman was blacklisted in Hollywood and left the United States for England, where he wrote a screenplay draft for The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). He later wrote and produced The Key (1958), The Guns of Navarone (1961), and Mackenna’s Gold (1969). Gary Cooper won the Oscar for Best Actor for his performance as Will Kane, and the picture also won Academy Awards for Editing, Score, and Song. For more from director Fred Zinnemann, see From Here to Eternity (1953), Oklahoma! (1955), and A Man for All Seasons (1966). If you appreciate the way composer Dimitri Tiomkin uses the theme song, with lyrics sung by Tex Ritter, throughout the picture, listen to his other Western scores in Red River (1948), Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), and Rio Bravo (1959). High Noon is often included in lists of revisionist and psychological Westerns, so try pairing it with other, similarly thoughtful films like The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), The Gunfighter (1950), Shane (1953), or 3:10 to Yuma (1957).
…
— Jennifer Garlen for Classic Movie Hub
Jennifer Garlen pens our monthly Silver Screen Standards column. You can read all of Jennifer’s Silver Screen Standards articles here.
Jennifer is a former college professor with a PhD in English Literature and a lifelong obsession with film. She writes about classic movies at her blog, Virtual Virago, and presents classic film programs for lifetime learning groups and retirement communities. She’s the author of Beyond Casablanca: 100 Classic Movies Worth Watching and its sequel, Beyond Casablanca II: 101 Classic Movies Worth Watching, and she is also the co-editor of two books about the works of Jim Henson.
