High Noon
Fred Zinnemann (1952)
I’ve never had a good visual memory. Only one image has always stayed with me from films seen in early childhood: a rip high in the left-hand sleeve of Gary Cooper’s shirt in High Noon. I’m not sure when the film was first shown or when I first watched it on the BBC. I am sure I saw it a few times as a child and I think we watched it more than once as a family. My parents and my brother were keen on Westerns generally but this one seemed to be regarded as somehow exceptional. The conviction that we all got into it is thanks chiefly, though, to another firmly lodged recollection. This amounted to confusion around the main female names in the cast. I remember being taken with, yet worried by, the Mexican woman played by Katy Jurado. Although Grace Kelly, as Gary Cooper’s sweetheart, didn’t make such a strong impression, I got it into my head that the actress playing the Mexican – or the dark woman, as she was to me at the time – was called Grace Lamoore. Where did that come from? My sister, I think: she may have seen Road to … pictures, and mixed up Katy Jurado’s face with Dorothy Lamour’s (not hard to understand why). One way and another, High Noon holds a special place in my memory – and everything led up to that torn shirt, the result of a bullet grazing Marshal Will Kane’s arm in his climactic shootout with the Miller gang.
Fred Zinnemann’s film is famous for various reasons. The story (more or less) observes the classical unities of time, place and action. It runs eighty-five minutes, immediately before and just after the hour of the title. It’s set in and on the outskirts of the (fictitious) frontier town of Hadleyville in New Mexico. It’s concerned with Will Kane’s discharging what he sees as a moral obligation to confront Frank Miller (Ian MacDonald), an outlaw whom Kane brought to justice but who is unexpectedly released from jail, and Miller’s partners in crime. In Kane’s mind, the imperative is undiminished by the fact that he has, technically, already stepped down as town marshal (his successor in the job will arrive next day). What’s more, Kane, at the start of the film, exchanges wedding vows with Amy Fowler and is about to leave town with his new bride. While the narrative may be Aristotelian in structure and the central man’s-gotta-do-what-a-man’s-gotta-do theme seems quintessentially Western, High Noon‘s meaning has also been interpreted as urgently contemporary. Carl Foreman’s screenplay was based on The Tin Star, a short story by John W Cunningham, but the dictates of Will Kane’s conscience and his desertion by men he thought were his friends, so that he faces his enemies alone, resonate with Foreman’s own recent experiences when called before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
A former member of the Communist Party, Carl Foreman declined to identify fellow ex-members or suspected current members of the Party. As a result, HUAC labelled him an ‘uncooperative witness’ and he was blacklisted by Hollywood studios. The controversy also brought to an end his professional partnership with Stanley Kramer, the producer of High Noon. The politically fervid atmosphere of early 1950s Hollywood helped ensure the film was highly contentious on its original release and, for some, that’s how it stayed. In a 1971 Playboy interview, John Wayne deplored High Noon as ‘the most un-American thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life’. This didn’t stop Wayne, the first in a series of actors to be offered and to turn down the lead role, from accepting the Best Actor Oscar on behalf of the absent Gary Cooper, his friend and fellow conservative. Although termed a ‘friendly witness’ by HUAC, Cooper didn’t name names and later came out against blacklisting, in sharp contrast to Wayne. In the aforementioned Playboy interview, he also said that he would ‘never regret having helped run [Foreman] out of the country’.
Even though Foreman himself endorsed the allegorical school of thought[1] about High Noon, its story is also subversive of the traditional screen Western ethos. Once he and Amy are married, Kane carefully removes his badge of office and hangs it on the wall. He puts the badge back on when he learns that Frank Miller is arriving on the noon train. After the shootout, as he and Amy prepare for a second time to leave Hadleyville, Kane looks with contempt at the gathering townspeople who, in his hour of need, were conspicuous by their absence: the only citizens willing to stand alongside him were a fourteen-year-old boy and the town drunk (both offers responsibly declined). Before he drives off with Amy, Kane throws his tin star to the dusty ground. Adherents to orthodox Western models of male courage also deplored what they considered the emasculation of the protagonist. According to Howard Hawks, in Joseph McBride’s Hawks on Hawks (1982), ‘I didn’t think a good sheriff was going to go running around town like a chicken with his head off asking for help, and finally his Quaker wife had to save him’.
It’s the blend of valour and vulnerability that makes Will Kane a compelling character and Gary Cooper plays him memorably. Cooper had just turned fifty, looks all of that and wasn’t in great health, suffering from back problems and an ulcer. Though still handsome, he’d lost his former bloom and didn’t attempt to disguise this. He wore no make-up but the lack of vanity in the performance goes deeper than that. The actor’s self-exposure fuses affectingly with his character’s predicament, intensifying Kane’s fear and doubt. In the early wedding scenes with Grace Kelly, Cooper has a charming mix of easy romantic intimacy and modesty. Later on, as the story darkens, the combination of determination and tiredness in his face ensures there’s no hint of overblown rectitude in Kane’s lonely stand. Thanks to what Manny Farber described as his ‘beautiful rolling gait’, Cooper’s movement achieves a similar effect.
In some other respects, High Noon now seems (perhaps always did seem) emotionally forced. Nearly every one of the eighty-five minutes contains Dimitri Tiomkin’s famous theme music. The matching theme song ‘Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin’ (formally ‘The Ballad of High Noon’), with music by Tiomkin and words by Ned Washington, is excessively in evidence too. Sung by Tex Ritter, it plays over the opening sequence, as members of the Miller gang (Sheb Wooley, Robert J Wilke and, in his striking screen debut, Lee Van Cleef) head into town to await the arrival of their ringleader. Washington’s lyrics are nothing if not explicit in setting out the moral dilemma that Will Kane will face. They’re a bit clumsy and Tiomkin’s melody is a bit corny yet the music gets to you. The chaste, resolute Amy and the seen-it-all, melancholy Helen Ramirez (Grace Lamoore) are the standout supporting characters, and not only because they’re just about the only women in the film. As usual, Grace Kelly is limited but she’s quite vigorously virtuous. The deliberate, eloquent Katy Jurado makes an impact even now. Among the men, there’s good work from Lloyd Bridges, as Kane’s bitter, brittle deputy Harvey Pell, and Otto Kruger, as the judge who put Frank Miller behind bars and who now leaves town without delay.
Even though Fred Zinnemann went on to better things (and very quickly: The Member of the Wedding and From Here to Eternity both opened in the space of the next twelve months), his direction of High Noon is often unobtrusively impressive. Repeated shots of clock faces and swinging pendulums add up to too many time checks but Zinnemann doesn’t rely entirely on these to build suspense. Moving the action round the town, he creates a strong sense of place. The camera is always at just the right distance from the characters to express the moral landscape too – with clarity but without grandiosity. Floyd Crosby’s black-and-white photography doesn’t stint on shades of grey. After Kane’s fistfight with Pell that sees them both sprawling in the dirt, Gary Cooper’s white shirt is eye-catchingly grubby. Until, that is, the arrival of the upstaging gash in the sleeve.
21 March 2019
[1] ‘What it was about at the time was Hollywood … and no other place but Hollywood and about what was happening in Hollywood and nothing else but that’ (quoted in Jon Tuska, The Filming of the West (1976)).