September 2005

High Noon

• Starring: Gary Cooper, Thomas Mitchell, Lloyd Bridges, Katy Jurado, Grace Kelly, Lon Chaney Jr., Harry Morgan, Ian MacDonald, Lee Van Cleef, Sheb Wooley
• Directed by: Fred Zinnemann
• Theatrical release: 1952
• DVD release: 2002
• Video: Fullscreen
• Sound: Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo
• Released by: Artisan Entertainment

We live in an odd time for movies. Hollywood seems convinced that there are only two types of moviegoer: teenage boys looking for maximum mayhem and a little T&A; and the fictional chick, as an adjective modifying flick. The outcome is that most films today fall flat in either action or character development.

There was a time when it was enough that a movie told a direct story with good acting and visual interest. If its moral was broad enough to touch a large audience, it was all right that it was simple and plainspoken. Like High Noon.

High Noon is about Will Kane (Gary Cooper), a town marshal and a good man who must face a quartet of bad men, the Miller gang. He looks for help from his friends in town, but all turn their backs on him. Each has a good reason, but all leave him alone. As an added pressure, he has just married Amy (Grace Kelly), a sweet Quaker girl who abhors violence and wants him to run. His friends would rather see him run, too -- they’re afraid they’ll get hurt in the crossfire. But Kane knows that if he runs, the Miller boys will hunt him down. His only choice is to stay and fight alone.

High Noon makes no attempt to ascribe Freudian antiheroics to Kane, nor does it spend a single moment explaining the motivations of the bad guys. This story is strictly good vs. evil. Sometimes a steak tastes better with no sauce.

Director Fred Zinnemann had made more than 30 films when he began High Noon, including a few A-level projects with some of Hollywood’s top stars. He had even won an Oscar for a documentary short he had shot about pediatric hospitals in Los Angeles. Like John Ford and Howard Hawks, Zinnemann’s goal was to connect with an audience, to tell a story and leave viewers pleased that they had spent their money and time seeing one of his films. Film students seldom wax rhapsodic over "the Zinnemann touch." He was happy to be invisible.

I wish some of today’s students would watch a little more carefully. Here are two quick examples. Notice the camerawork 21 minutes in, when Kane confronts his Deputy, Harvey Pell (Lloyd Bridges). In two minutes, Zinnemann uses 12 camera angles to create a rhythm to increase the sense of foreboding as Kane begins to realize that his support in town is evaporating. At 68 minutes into the film, the clock showing two minutes before high noon, the camera lurks over Kane’s shoulder as he pulls out two sheets of paper and a pen. We watch as he writes "Last Will and Testament." In the next two minutes, Zinnemann crashes through every story thread, reminding us of all the foibles, side issues, and problems that have led to Kane’s having to face the Miller boys alone. It’s a breathtaking, virtuoso piece of directing. I’d love to see more economically incisive storytelling like this coming from today’s directors.

Four actors help bring High Noon to life. Gary Cooper’s portrayal of Marshal Kane is now iconic -- his walk down the dusty main street, in black felt Stetson and striped string tie, is up there with Clint Eastwood’s "man with no name" and John Wayne’s Ringo Kid. Coop took home an Oscar for his work, and you can see why. From the first scene, of his and Amy’s wedding, a thousand conflicting emotions are visible on his face. Within Cooper’s laconic acting style there was plenty of room to emote.

What most people don’t know is two other things that added to the depth of his performance. First, it was decided to forgo any makeup on Cooper’s face, accentuating his wrinkles and giving him a tired look. He was 50 at the time, but looks much older in the film. Second, he suffered all through the filming from a bleeding ulcer. Some of those pained expressions weren’t too hard to muster.

Lloyd Bridges does a spectacular job as a dull, stupid, fatuous jerk. He gets everything wrong, is a coward when bravery is called for, an adversary when an ally is needed, and finally lets his foolish desire for advancement cause the loss of his woman, his friends, and his self-respect. Sounds like a great role, doesn’t it? Bridges handles it with incredible grace.

The two women in Kane’s life perfectly embody the dichotomy between the virgin and the trollop. Grace Kelly, in her first film role, is a meltingly lovely girl who turns into a staunch, straight-backed pacifist when her husband of only ten minutes is threatened. Later in the film, she turns out to be made of even tougher stuff than anyone realized. Helen Ramirez, played with doe-eyed sultriness by Katy Jurado, is the saloon girl who once loved both Kane and the man coming to kill him. Tough as nails -- and still in love with Kane -- she is truly the whore with a heart of gold.

What finally takes High Noon into the realm of all-time classics is the story. Apocryphal, mythic and archetypal as a single combat warrior takes on a greater force to save his community, his family, and his way of life. What makes High Noon timeless is the fact that every male has had to go through it.

Every man has had to face a tormenter and deal with it. We all had to face them in school, and most of us have had to face them in our jobs. I have a nine-year-old nephew who is facing a bully at school right now. It’s a scary thing, but he either has to stand his ground or face nine more years of torment. At some point, we have all had to pluck up our courage and face a bully down. Like Kane, we know on a primal level, whether it happened at school or at work, that running away will only delay the confrontation. It’s better to face it now and get it over with, one way or the other.

All of us hope to go through the experience as seldom as possible. And while not many of us have had to face our tormentors with guns, we all know the feeling in the pit of our stomachs when we finally had to get within an arm’s length of our foe and be willing to go to war. The writer, Carl Foreman, perfectly captured that feeling. Then, to ratchet the tension up a few more notches, he made the confrontation unfair, and had everyone desert the hero in his time of need.

Foreman could relate. High Noon became his story.

High Noon was tested and pulled back, with several additions made before full release. First, they added more shots of clocks for tension. Second, they added more close-ups of Coop, to allow him to let us know what was going on inside his head. But most importantly, they allowed Foreman to add more scenes where the townspeople abandoned Kane.

In Foreman’s mind, he was Kane. High Noon was turning into his personal allegory about the McCarthy hearings and his treatment at the hands of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

The times were strange. Congress had passed the Internal Security Act of 1950, a law intended to assure Americans’ homeland stayed secure by authorizing such things as emergency concentration camps. Truman vetoed it, but, as a sign of the times, Congress overturned the veto. By the following year, Senator Joseph McCarthy was leading the House Un-American Activities Committee and he went on a rampage against Hollywood.

Between the original filming of High Noon and its opening, Senator McCarthy had called Carl Foreman to testify in front of the committee, demanding as he always did, that Foreman admit he was a communist and name names of other communists. Foreman would do neither. McCarthy had him blacklisted in Hollywood and his career was over. Just like that.

Foreman couldn’t believe that the Hollywood community, and all the other bailiwicks that McCarthy was attacking, wouldn’t stand behind him to fight the bully. So he wrote about it in High Noon. The pen ended up being mightier than the sword.

After Foreman was blacklisted, he left for England. He took some solace in being nominated for Best Screenplay, his third nomination in four years. While in England, he worked anonymously on scripts, including one that would have won him an Oscar in 1957, for The Bridge on the River Kwai. Later, he formed his own production company and made the classic The Guns of Navarone. Eventually, the Academy saw the error of its ways and awarded Foreman the Oscar he deserved for Kwai. Posthumously.

In the rush to the political right during the early 1950s, the realization that High Noon had been written by a communist meant that, even though it was nominated for Best Picture, it would lose to a trumped-up tart of a film, The Greatest Show on Earth. Truth be known, there were two films that year that I couldn’t have decided between: High Noon and The Quiet Man. Both are classic, simple, direct, and filled with true characterizations. The Greatest Show on Earth wouldn’t have been the greatest show in Peoria in 1952.

In all, High Noon was nominated for seven Academy Awards and took home four: for Best Music, Best Song (Dimitri Tiomkin’s haunting "Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darlin’"), Best Editing, and, for Cooper, his second Oscar for Best Actor.

History has been good to High Noon. The American Film Institute lists it as No.33 of its 100 Greatest American Films. And no matter which party is in control, it is the most popular movie at the White House, where it has been screened more often than any other film. Makes you wonder if our presidents see themselves as Will Kane. And wouldn’t Carl Foreman be excited to know that, 53 years on, more than half of those years having seen Republicans in the White House, his little film remains No.1?

Artisan’s DVD is mastered from the original film negative and looks just fine. I’d love to see what the Criterion Collection might have done with it, but overall, the DVD captures the sun-baked, overdeveloped look that Zinnemann was going for. The extras are good ideas gone south. Including interviews with the children of Cooper, Foreman, Kelly, Zinnemann, and Tex Ritter (who sang the theme song) looks better on paper than it turned out. The commentary track is befuddled, and the making-of documentaries add little to what we know.

Still, this DVD belongs in every serious collection. It is quintessential American filmmaking, a manifesto on character and grace under pressure. We all should watch it every few years, to remind ourselves what it feels like to face an intimidator with dignity and courage.

...Wes Marshall
wesm@hometheatersound.com

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