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High Noon
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Genre | Westerns |
Format | NTSC, Black & White, Multiple Formats |
Contributor | Carl Foreman, Jack Elam, Lon Chaney Jr., Gary Cooper, Fred Zinnemann, Katy Jurado, Grace Kelly, Stanley Kramer, Lee Van Cleef, Lloyd Bridges, Otto Kruger, Thomas Mitchell, Harry Morgan See more |
Language | English |
Runtime | 1 hour and 25 minutes |
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Product Description
This groundbreaking western was voted at the 33rd greatest film of all time by the AFI (100 Years 100 Movies). Gary Cooper won the Oscar for Best Actor in this classic tale of a lawman who stands alone to defend a town of cowardly citizens against a gang of killers seeking revenge. In one of the greatest showdowns in cinema history, Coopers Sheriff Will Kane stands to lose not only the town, but also his bride, Grace Kelly. The stellar cast includes Lloyd Bridges, Thomas Mitchell, Katy Jurado, Otto Kruger, Lon Chaney, Henry Morgan, Jack Elam and Lee Van Cleef.
Product details
- Aspect Ratio : 1.37:1
- Is Discontinued By Manufacturer : No
- MPAA rating : NR (Not Rated)
- Product Dimensions : 0.7 x 7.5 x 5.4 inches; 2.72 ounces
- Item model number : 887090037006
- Director : Fred Zinnemann
- Media Format : NTSC, Black & White, Multiple Formats
- Run time : 1 hour and 25 minutes
- Release date : July 17, 2012
- Actors : Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly, Thomas Mitchell, Lloyd Bridges, Katy Jurado
- Producers : Stanley Kramer
- Studio : Olive
- ASIN : B007Y1NR1W
- Writers : Carl Foreman
- Number of discs : 1
- Best Sellers Rank: #19,216 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
- #350 in Westerns (Movies & TV)
- Customer Reviews:
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I heard about this classic western movie my entire life and only tonight did I watch it in its entirety. It's possible that I may have seen the movie as a child but had forgotten it.
Most reviewers describe the movie as a courageous, lonely town marshal standing up to a gang of four thugs, the leader of which is a vengeful gunman who was inexplicably pardoned while serving a life sentence for murder; returning to wreak revenge upon the marshal who arrested him. In the course of the movie, the townspeople, meaning the men, are described as cowardly and refusing to stand with the marshal.
When I watched the movie tonight, it's not that simple a case of outright collective citizenry cowardice as most reviews describe.
The men in the saloon are largely low-caliber men to begin with, many of which bore grudges against Marshal Kane in the past. One interprets that once upon a time gunman Frank Miller and his gang ran the town with lawlessness but with vice and excitement, probably gambling and other unmentionable pleasures. Marshal Kane cleaned up the town with the help of several citizen deputies and indicted Miller for murder. But the cleaned up town didn't sit well with citizens who previously benefited from Frank Miller's lawless, free-for-all town. Kane would get no help from the saloon's good-for-nothing patrons.
It's the church scene which proves the historic explanation of the townsmen's cowardice is not cut and dried.
When Marshal Kane first implores the congregation for help, about six to seven men stand up and walk-forward, ready to help Kane.
However, bickering breaks out among the congregation. One of the more eloquent town leaders calls for order and helps lead a open forum discussion of the town's citizens sitting in the pews. It appears the congregation is split almost evenly between helping Kane and not.
It is the eloquent town leader who tilts the balance. He launches into what seems to be praise and support for Marshal Kane but suddenly his speech turns on a dime where he convinces the good townspeople in the congregation to sit tight and do nothing. If Marshal Kane agrees to leave town, there will be no violence and no negative publicity about the town to ruin its chances of progress and advancement. Kane is stunned, taken by surprise at the sudden change of the town leader's support, and he is unable to respond to it other than leave the church in disgust.
Others back away from helping Kane. The ambitious young deputy quits when Kane refuses to name him as successor marshal. Kane's mentor, a retired marshal pleads convincingly that he is too old and decrepit to help him. The one deputy who did show up at the marshal's office, gets cold feet when he discovers no one else is helping and it will be only two against four, ruthless gunmen. He backs out.
Others who want to help Kane are useless. One is a town drunk and the other an earnest but too young, 14-year old boy.
Kane is at the point of despair but he musters his final courage and goes out to wait for the four gunmen striding into town. Kane is walking straight into the four men around the corner. By a stroke of luck, one of the gunmen breaks a store window to pilfer a woman's hat. The sound of breaking glass alerts Kane in time and he manages to conceal himself. This allows Kane to flank the four men and in a quick shootout kills one, lowering the odds, three-to-one.
Using his intelligence, Kane takes the high ground by climbing up into the hayloft of a public horse stable. When one of the gunmen charges in shooting (the young Lee Van Cleef), Kane has the superior tactical position of height and shoots him dead.
While the odds are down to two-against-one, it is no time for marshal Kane to celebrate. The two remaining gunmen include the leader.
Both gunmen eventually corner Kane in a saddle sales and repair shop, covering the entrance from opposite sides, trapping Kane there.
In a twist of the plot which has been greatly uncredited all these decades, marshal Kane's devout, reluctant Quaker wife, Amy, who had initially intended to leave him realizes her love for her new husband overshadows her devout, non-violence Quaker beliefs. She runs back into the town and hides in the marshal's empty office. From there she sees and shoots one of the two remaining gunmen in the back at near point blank range.
Alone now, the last gunman, the leader Frank Miller, is not deterred. He seizes Ann and forces Kane to exit the saddlery shop. Amy claws Frank's face, distracting him long enough for Kane to get in several shots, killing Frank immediately.
Marshal Kane knows his ultimate salvation has been through the help of his newlywed wife, who among everyone else, came through for him in the nick of time, killing one of the remaining two thugs. Kane passionately embraces Amy, who reciprocates.
As the townspeople come out to gawk at the dead Frank Miller laying on the dirt street just feet away from Kane and Amy, Kane pulls his marshal's badge from his shirt and throws it to the dirt, his job is now finished.
It turns out the 14-year old stable hand boy did not load Amy's baggage onto the departed train but kept it on the horse wagon. He brings the wagon up the the couple. They board the wagon with Kane at the reins and depart the town, this time finally for good.
My explanation shows that the plot was more nuanced than reviewers gave it credit for the last 69 years since the movie's debut. Very little was spoken or written about the marshal's wife, Amy, as if she was minimal to the storyline. As it turns out, Amy, played by the legendary Hollywood beauty, Grace Kelly, had a far more significant role in the storyline than publicly admitted. Perhaps at the time in 1952 she might have been credited but over the decades her role had been forgotten or minimized in the reviews.
When you include Mrs. Amy Kane, the movie's storyline takes on new dimension, one of selfless love triumphing over fear and reticence. Amy Kane acted against her newfound Quaker beliefs of absolute non-violence when her woman's instincts intuited that saving someone you love from evil men is greater than unquestioning conformance to religious belief and indeed she is proven morally and ethically correct in the end.
Without the good townspeople in the church convincing themselves it was better to do nothing, things might have turned out differently. Certainly it did not help that an influential town leader ended up speaking up persuasively against aiding marshal Kane. Had he not done so, Kane might have walked outside the church with six to eight men willing to help him, plus the one deputy waiting in the office.
The movie would have then turned into a simple Western shootout in the streets film, with Kane most likely prevailing through superior numbers. Nothing to it.
But then we wouldn't have the classic Hollywood Western, HIGH NOON, as it was and still is today.
The Stanley Kramer production, tightly directed by Fred Zinnemann and written by the blacklisted Carl Foreman, earned the hatred of 1950s McCarthyists, including John Wayne and Howard Hawks, who were so outraged they made Rio Bravo (1959) as a right-wing response. Wayne went further than that, teaming up with Hollywood Gossip mogul Hedda Hopper and the House Un-American Activities Committee to run Foreman out of the country. Foreman moved to England and never returned. Wayne forever boasted of forcing the writer into exile. Kramer, responding to accusations that High Noon was anti-American, tried to get Foreman's name taken off the credits. Gary Cooper intervened on Foreman's behalf, making Kramer's effort unsuccessful, but Kramer had better luck forcing Foreman to sell his part of their company. So much for loyalty under pressure: ironic, given the film's theme of civic morality.
The biggest offense of the film, for Wayne and his fellow extremist kooks, was the final shot of Will Kane supposedly dropping his marshal's badge in the dust and stomping on it. Wayne saw symbolism aplenty, but his faulty vision was filtered through a lens of Cold War paranoia and exaggeration.[1] Will Kane merely dropped the badge. He never stepped on it. The other offense was the portrayal of the townspeople as a greedy, self-cannibalizing lot, a hypocritical church community who argue their way out of communal (and personal) loyalty. Wayne and Hawks' Rio Bravo depicted, in sharp contrast, a town full of old-fashioned buddy-buddy camaraderie. If Wayne and Hawks were alive today they might have rethought their depiction, because High Noon could served as an apt snapshot of contemporary division. It's a good thing that actor/director team didn't live to see the 21st century, though, because despite the intent behind Rio Bravo, and despite its occasional tendency towards sentimental phoniness, it remains, along with High Noon, one of the standout westerns in the genre's greatest decade.[2]
One cannot approach High Noon without addressing its political themes, both within the film's text and those raised in its aftermath. Along with writer Formean, co-star Lloyd Bridges and cinematographer Floyd Crosby were also awarded with temporary blacklists until the FBI cleared them of Communist affiliations. The fifty-one year old Gary Cooper was engaged in an affair with his twenty-three year old co-star Grace Kelly (putting an end to Coop's affair with Patricia Neal.) Kelly's fling with the long established Republican protected her from McCarthyism's scrutiny. Cooper was friendly with the HUAC, and testified before them (without ever naming names), but he only did what was expected of him, then returned to his top priority of resuming his romance with a future princess.
Cooper was in Europe by the time the Academy Awards Ceremony rolled around and asked Wayne to accept the award of Best Actor on his behalf, should he happen to win. Of course, he did, and the Duke did a prompt, public about-face in his acceptance speech: "Ladies and gentlemen, I'm glad to see they're giving this to a man who is not only most deserving, but has conducted himself throughout the years in our business in a manner that we can all be proud of. Coop and I have been friends hunting and fishing for more years than I like to remember. He's one of the nicest fellows I know. And our kinship goes further than that friendship because we both fell off horses in pictures together. Now that I'm through being such a good sport about all this sportsmanship, I'm going back and find my business manager, agent, producer, and three-name writers and find out why I didn't get High Noon instead of Cooper."[3]
The speech renders Wayne a hypocrite, since seeing potential red from the outset, it was he who first refused the role of Marshal Will Kane, thus paving the path for Gary Cooper in the part.[4] Yet, despite Wayne's standing as a precursor of Rush Limbaugh's pharisaical aggression, he can, perhaps, best be summed up in an assessment I was privy to in a screening of Red River (1948). The host, an erudite writer, had this to say about Wayne: "I met the Duke's son Patrick. Unlike his dad, Patrick is a thorough gentleman; pleasant and courteous. Unfortunately, he also differs from his dad when it comes to acting because Patrick's a lousy actor. His dad was a great actor and that's not really up for argument."
However, as skilled an actor as he was, Wayne as Will Kane would have been a loose right-wing cannon. Gary Cooper's brand of authentic conservatism merged seamlessly with his marshal. Cooper's laconic, weathered portrayal of internalized integrity shines through Zinnemann's opulent artistry.[5]
Ronald Reagan and Dwight D. Eisenhower were among the film's fans. Reagan saw positive American values in the theme of an individual placing the safety of his peers above his own personal interests. When I first saw the film in my youth, prior to readings of political allegories, my interpretation of the film paralleled Reagan's.
If Wayne has come to embody our idea of the snarling, mythological Westerner, Gary Cooper is our moderate, amorous Rino cowpoke. We readily accept his pairing with Grace Kelly's Quaker Amy Fowler (the "darling Clementine" of the film's theme song). Amy is a model of another form of extremism. Amy's tragic past has rendered her a pacifist with a checklist, adhering to each dogmatic bullet point. Will cannot violate his conscience to succumb to any extreme ideology. We genuinely root for their reconciliation. Oddly, it is in its climax that we find High Noon is, in fact, a paradigm for conservative mythology. Once faced with physical threat, Amy's militant pacifism is, in fact, submitted as a futile, theoretical interpretation of Christian tenets. The townspeople, led by Mitchell, have their own ideological creeds, dictated primarily by the potential capital gains Frank Miller and his gang bring by their return to Hadleyville.
Katy Jurado's Helen Ramirez is the literary female counterpart to Kelly's pure Virgin Mary. Helen, the tainted Magdalene, is, of course, a necessary contrast, and she steals every scene she is in, despite Zinnemann's efforts to highlight Kelly. Not unexpectedly, there was rivalry between the two actresses on set. Lon Chaney, Jr. shines in his role as the arthritic former lawman and Kane mentor, Martin Howe. Chaney acts with such effective pathos that one wished producers had realized his greater potential as a character actor, rather than as a B grade horror star. Lloyd Bridges' portrayal of self-serving deputy Harvey Pell is less effective, occasionally stiff in line readings, and a noticeable case of miscasting. Lee van Cleef, debuting here, was originally cast in the role of Pell, but he would not surgically alter his nose, which producers thought "too villainous looking." Instead, Cleef was relegated to playing one of the thugs, setting him on the path to a wonderfully typecast career.
Editor Elmo Williams' work here is exemplary and, with much ballyhoo, he cut the film to play out in real time. Dmitri Tiomkin's score is perfectly synchronized, and Tex Ritter's theme song, which sold over a million copies, is so iconic that every singer tackling it since then has rendered a pale imitation.
Zinnemann and Crosby intentionally shot High Noon in stark black and white. Zinnemann valiantly fought to keep media mogul Ted Turner's filthy colorizing hands off the film. Alas, Zinnemann lost and Turner, with Republic Pictures, produced an asinine colorized version for television. Therein lies the difference between celluloid and the corporal world. In the latter, sometimes the bad guys win.
*Due to John Wayne's interpretation of this scene, he and fellow right wing extremist Ward Bond bullied Gary Cooper into backing out of a planned independent production company with Forman and producer Robert Lippert. [↩]
*The American Film Institute lists High Noon second in its list of top ten westerns. First is John Ford's The Searchers (1956) with Wayne. Two other films starring Wayne made the list: Red River at number five and Ford's Stagecoach (1939) at number nine. [↩]
*The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was as hypocritical as Wayne, awarding the Best Picture Oscar to Cecil B. DeMille's dreadful The Greatest Show On Earth (1952), in order to appease Joseph McCarthy and the right-wing campaign launched against High Noon. This snub is, justifiably, seen as one of the many examples of the Academy's irrelevancy. [↩]
*Gregory Peck was next offered the role after Wayne refused it. Peck also declined the part, feeling it too closely resembled The Gunfighter (1950), which he had just made. Peck later counted the decision as his biggest career mistake. However, Peck, ever the gentleman, admitted he could not have played the part as well as Cooper. Charlton Heston, Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, and Kirk Douglas were also offered the role and declined it. [↩]
*Zinnemann and makeup artist Gustaf Norin gave Cooper no makeup in order accentuate the actor's inherent sense of anguish. [↩]
** my review originally appeared at 366 weird movies
Top reviews from other countries
Ce film est génial d'être simple. La chanson de John william en français est belle, mais les paroles originales an anglais sont bien plus en accord avec le sens du film.
I do not know what fate awaits me
I only know I must be brave
And I must face a man who hates me
Or lie a coward, a craven coward
Or lie a coward in my grave.
Gilbert Verjans