Western RoundUp: High Noon

High Noon (1952)

I’ve seen High Noon (1952) multiple times over the years, including a memorable theatrical screening at the FilmEx festival when I was in my teens. The FilmEx screening, which took place in Century City, California, was part of a 50-hour movie marathon honoring the 50th anniversary of the Oscars!

That said, despite my love for Westerns and its vaunted reputation, High Noon has never been a favorite of mine and consequently I hadn’t seen it for roughly two decades. I was thus very interested to take a fresh look at the film via the new Special Edition Blu-ray just released by Kino Lorber. I find that sometimes seeing a film in a new context, including having viewed many more movies in the intervening years, provides an interesting new perspective.

As many will already be aware, High Noon tells the tale of Will Kane (Gary Cooper), who has just married a young bride, Amy (Grace Kelly), and retired as the marshal of Hadleyville, New Mexico.

Will and Amy are on the point of leaving town when Will learns that Frank Miller (Ian MacDonald), who Will sent to prison, has been inexplicably pardoned and is on his way to town to exact his revenge on Will. Members of Frank’s gang (Robert J. Wilke, Lee van Cleef, and Sheb Wooley) are already waiting for Frank at the train station.

The town judge (Otto Kruger) immediately hightails it out of town, and Will initially agrees to leave with Amy as planned. However, he feels that dealing with Frank is his responsibility and heads back to town, despite Amy threatening to leave him. Will’s concern that they would forever be looking over their shoulders for Frank to show up in their new town also fails to move Amy.

Amy, we learn, became a Quaker pacifist after her father and brother were gunned down, but she eventually has second thoughts about abandoning her new husband after a heartfelt discussion with Will’s former lover, Helen Ramirez (Katy Jurado).

Meanwhile Will is shocked when no one in town will help him, as the clock ticks ever closer to noon…

High Noon received six Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director (Fred Zinnemann). Cooper won the Best Actor trophy, and the film also won its Editing nomination, with Elmo Williams and Harry Gerstad taking home Oscars.

As implied by its Oscar nominations and wins, the film is nicely crafted, running a well-paced 85 minutes; a running time under an hour and a half is always a plus for me. I’ve enjoyed the film enough to go back to it every now and then — always hoping that this time I’ll end up loving it, yet it never quite happens. I wouldn’t precisely say I dislike it, as it has a few positive aspects, but my issues with it if anything have become more strongly felt with the passage of time.

It’s been said in many quarters that High Noon is a film for people who don’t like Westerns; being a Western fan I can’t say if that’s true, but I did feel that, other than the actors, it may have been made by people who don’t like Westerns.

The film is curiously lacking in joy, with a sour, negative tone. I revisited this film exactly a week after seeing the new restoration of John Ford’s masterpiece, The Searchers (1956), and was struck that although the Ford film is about a very, shall we say, complicated man and the film goes to some very dark places, it’s also awe-inspiring; The Searchers deeply moves the viewer with its powerful story and great beauty.

I never get those feelings from High Noon, despite being prepared to love it because of its great cast of familiar faces. As I’ve analyzed it, I feel that it’s actually kind of a self-consciously, deliberately nasty movie, and a key flaw is that not one male character in it is admirable.

I include Will Kane in that assessment. On the one hand I do appreciate his sense of responsibility to the town, but I felt he didn’t simultaneously show enough responsibility and concern for his wife. One might blame his not taking time to hash things out with her at length due to the ticking clock — indeed, “I don’t have time” becomes his somewhat whiny refrain over the course of the film — but he showed far too little concern for his brand-new wife’s feelings.

And as the film goes on, Kane’s character begins to seem negative right alongside the townspeople hiding in their homes. It certainly seems that Kane has never actually been a leader, because not one person will follow him, least of all his feckless former deputy, Harvey (Lloyd Bridges).

The movie expands on a theme seen in at least one film on Wyatt Earp, that once a town has been cleaned up, the citizens begin to resent it, including sometimes the negative financial impacts. That discomfort seems to be part of the explanation here, but it’s not explored in enough depth to help us understand what’s going on, and it becomes tiresome simply watching people turn down helping their former marshal.

The ladies are a different story and part of what makes the movie worthwhile, despite its deficiencies. Although the movie starting at the moment of Will and Amy’s wedding robs us of much background and character development for the relationship of Will and his (much) younger bride, Amy’s reactions are reasonable and understandable, especially after she explains her pacifism to Helen. And after struggling over what to do, I find Amy’s ultimate decisions admirable.

Katy Jurado, I commented on Twitter recently, is a “goddess” in this film, so compelling that I honestly find her the main reason to watch; indeed, I think she deserved a Best Supporting Actress nomination. Whether she’s sharing scenes with Cooper, Kelly, or Bridges, she commands attention.

Though one might question why such a smart woman has been having an affair with Harvey, the overall picture of Helen is of an intelligent, ethical woman. Her discussions with Amy are for my money the best scenes in the film, and I also really love the small, almost throwaway scene in which Helen decides to sell out and leave town, as it illustrates her business savvy.

Left unanswered for the viewer is why Helen and Will broke up, though one might infer she was not the “kind” of woman a man like Will married in that era, whether due to her business or even her ethnicity. Their brief exchange in Spanish — which I was able to understand due to many months of Duolingo — was moving.

Among the female characters, let us also not forget the wonderful character actress Virginia Christine, who has a scene in which she tries but fails to rally fellow churchgoers to Kane’s side.

The screenplay by Carl Foreman was based on the story “The Tin Star” by John W. Cunningham. Much has been written over the years analyzing High Noon and its screenplay as political allegory, but I choose not to go there in this piece; that’s a complicated discussion which deserves more words than I have room for here. I find it sufficient to judge High Noon simply as a Western among other Westerns and say that for me it comes up short.

The musical score is Dimitri Tiomkin, with lyrics for the title song by Ned Washington; Tex Ritter is the singer. Days later the music is still reverberating in my head!

The black and white cinematography was by Floyd Crosby. A fun bit of trivia is that he was the father of David Crosby of Crosby, Stills and Nash.

Supporting cast members not already mentioned above include Thomas Mitchell, James Millican, Lon Chaney Jr., Harry Morgan, Eve McVeagh, Ralph Reed, Lee Aaker, Jack Elam, and John Doucette.

Kino Lorber’s fine print is from a new HD master from a 4K scan of the original 35mm camera negative. In addition to the Blu-ray I reviewed, it’s also being released by Kino Lorber in a 4K edition.

This Special Edition Blu-ray release comes with a reversible cover and cardboard slipcase. The nice selection of extras includes not one but two separate commentary tracks, one by Alan K. Rode and the other by Julie Kirgo. Although I haven’t yet listened to these tracks, I’ve heard many other tracks over the years by both Rode and Kirgo so am confident saying they will each be worthwhile.

The disc also includes half a dozen featurettes; the trailer; and a gallery of trailers for seven other films available from Kino Lorber. Kino Lorber has done its usual stellar job, and this is an excellent way to see High Noon.

If nothing else, High Noon is a thought-provoking film, and I welcome discussion pro and con in the comments.

Thanks to Kino Lorber for providing a review copy of this Blu-ray.

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– Laura Grieve for Classic Movie Hub

Laura can be found at her blog, Laura’s Miscellaneous Musings, where she’s been writing about movies since 2005, and on Twitter at @LaurasMiscMovie. A lifelong film fan, Laura loves the classics including Disney, Film Noir, Musicals, and Westerns.  She regularly covers Southern California classic film festivals.  Laura will scribe on all things western at the ‘Western RoundUp’ for CMH.