Western RoundUp: High Noon | Classic Movie Hub Blog

High Noon

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 quite 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 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
including 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 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.

…

– 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.