High Noon: Standing up to evil
The Gary Cooper film is known as a classic Western, but it had its roots in anti-Communist paranoia.
What if the omnipresent ticking clock that pervades High Noon is in fact the doomsday clock, counting down to nuclear Armageddon?
After all, while the film is set in the years following the Civil War, it was released in 1952 at the zenith of the Red Scare in the United States, when Senator Joseph McCarthy’s maniacal anti-Communist star chamber reigned supreme. At the same time, nuclear-fueled tensions with the U.S.S.R. were high.
But cleaving High Noon from its extratextual context is almost impossible and highly unnecessary. More than most crowd-pleasing films, it can be read on almost a purely allegorical level. The movie addresses Cold War anxiety through the use of the classic and wholly original American artform, the Western.
Genre can be useful way to comment on the ills of contemporary society without resorting to a polemic. The best examples are typically found in science fiction. Think of the original Planet of the Apes as a thinly disguised parable on civil rights or The Matrix as a warning about institutional control. But Westerns also served this function well and none did so better than High Noon, which, at its heart, was a clarion call to stand up against the abuses of McCarthyism.
Also, it has Grace Kelly.
The plot of High Noon is as straightforward as can be. U.S. Marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper) is getting out of the game while the getting’s good. He’s cleaned up the town of Hadleyville. Once populated by bandits and desperados, it’s been civilized. Prosperity has arrived. And Kane is ready to marry the comely Amy Fowler (Grace Kelly!), skip town and settle down somewhere running a general store.
Gary Cooper running a general store? The townsfolk can’t believe it. And sure enough, word comes that the vicious killer Frank Miller has been released from jail on a technicality (thanks Biden!) and is on his way to Hadleyville to settle scores with Kane, who sent him up the river in the first place. Miller’s gang is already waiting for him, strutting around the train depot in a manner that undoubtedly inspired the similar and more iconic opening sequence in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West.
Kane feels compelled to wait for Miller and take on him and his gang, even as the townspeople implore him to leave, telling him it’s no longer his fight. But for Kane, it’s the One Last Job, the task he must perform before he can find peace. As all good movie-goers know, once the hero has One Last Job to perform, the more likely it is they will get offed in the process.
The film moves in real time, as Kane attempts to round up deputies among the town’s citizenry to help him beat back Miller and his gang after he arrives by train. Hence the ticking clock. But there are few takers. Kane is first deserted by his callow young deputy, played by Lloyd Bridges, who is having an affair with a former flame of Kane’s, Helen Ramirez (Katy Jurardo), but others will soon follow suit.
Director Fred Zinnemann and screenwriter Carl Foreman adroitly and methodically show how the so-called pillars of the respectable frontier town: the judge, the pastor, the saloon-keeper, are now unwilling to put skin in the game to help Kane. They’d rather make a deal to keep peace. Good and evil to them are abstractions, things to be commoditized, where Kane holds a more binary view. Today, we might balefully call them “sheeple.” My more cynical self tells me that in our modern world, half of town would side with Miller and think Kane is the bad guy.
Kane’s wife Amy (Grace Kelly!) is a Quaker and a pacifist and she, too, urges him to jump town, to not fight, and threatens to leave Kane there alone to face his death. All of it is remarkable to witness. Just a few years after Americans of all classes and creeds banded together to battle Germany and Japan, the idea of self-sacrifice for the greater good was being edited from the national character. And that a certified screen symbol for integrity such as Gary Cooper is the one being ignored — and even mocked — makes the story doubly shocking.
There were reasons for the filmmakers’ bleak view of humanity.
In 1951, the year before High Noon was released, Foreman was called before the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) as part of a renewed probe of possible Communist infiltration in Hollywood. Foreman admitted that he had been a member of the U.S. Communist Party a decade earlier but had become disillusioned and quit.1 He refused to identify others in Hollywood he knew to be affiliated with the party. Other creatives in the industry agreed to play ball with the committee to save their careers, sometimes naming names that destroyed their friends and peers.2
For his resistance, Foreman was blacklisted from the industry and forced to sell his financial stake in High Noon, for which he was also producer. He emigrated to Britain and ended up writing the script for (the very great) The Bridge on the River Kwai without being credited on screen. The blacklist was finally broken for good a couple of years later when Kirk Douglas insisted that writer Dalton Trumbo, another blacklist victim, receive screen credit for Spartacus.
Given that context, High Noon takes on a new meaning: A prosperous town is descended upon by a malevolent force that forces the citizens to take sides. Most of them refuse to fight back, fearful of the repercussions and leaving a few brave souls to fight alone against overwhelming odds. Incidentally, the director Zinnemann viewed the film instead as an allegory for the failure of Europe, from which he had emigrated, to stand up to Fascism.
The movie’s portrayal of the town’s fecklessness, along with the relatively passive hero played by Cooper -- at odds with the traditions of the Western -- outraged Hollywood conservatives such as John Wayne and director Howard Hawks. Hawks would respond by directing Rio Bravo in 1959, which places brotherhood and sacrifice at the center of another ticking-clock scenario and features Wayne in the lead role.
For writers like Foreman, 1952 meant the walls were closing in professionally. For the American people, they were closing in existentially. The Soviets had detonated their atomic bomb in ’59; they would test a hydrogen bomb in ’53. Even as America began to enjoy a massive economic expansion in the years after the war, there was too much fear and dread below the surface to ignore entirely. The clock ticked and ticked.
Would all of them have ultimately grimly faced the moment, like Will Kane, when their fates would be decided in an eyeblink? Fortunately they never had to, but these were perilous days.
WHERE CAN I WATCH IT: High Noon is rentable on all major platforms. Just don’t order a case of the terrible seltzer beverage instead.
HEY ISN’T THAT: Yes, one of the townsfolk is Harry Morgan, who gained fame late in his career playing Col. Potter on “M*A*S*H,” but who made a long living as a character actor in Westerns such as these. Fans of the genre will immediately recognize hawk-eyed Lee Van Cleef, who would become a go-to favorite of directors such as Sergio Leone.
ARMAGEDDON INDEX: 0/10 for obvious reasons.
PERSONAL NOTE: After a hiatus in which I was recovering from hand surgery, made a trip back home, and had to deal with various Trump-related things in my day job, Nuclear Theater is back. And none too soon for my personal sanity. I’ve grown to really appreciate this outlet and the people who read and subscribe to it. There’s going to be a fun summer of content, so stay with us and tell your friends.
BONUS FEATURE: I’m not sure I’ll ever cover another Western on Nuclear Theater. It’s a genre that means a lot to me. Along that line, here is a list of my top five Westerns:
5. SILVERADO (1985). Yes, I realize it’s not a great film, but for my younger self, it was a bit of a gateway drug. For some reason, I hadn’t grown up on the Clint Eastwood Westerns such as A Fistful of Dollars and The Outlaw Josey Wales. And I appreciate the way Lawrence Kasdan brings a modern sensibility to the genre, mainly though the presence of Kevin Kline, a cowpoke who really likes his horse and his hat. A great cast with Danny Glover, Scott Glenn, Linda Hunt and a young Kevin Costner.
4. RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY (1962). A great entry in the “aging gunfighter” subgenre. An early work by Sam Peckinpah, who would go on to direct legendary Westerns such as The Wild Bunch, it features Joel McCrea and the great Randolph Scott as two washed-up cowboys who get ensnared in a plot to steal a gold shipment.
3. SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON (1949). This film gets less attention than other John Ford Westerns that starred John Wayne, but it’s as rich as any of them. Wayne, in one of his great performances (he had several in his long career3) plays an aging calvary officer with One Last Job before retirement, trying to keep peace in the post-General Custer landscape. The film is basically an ode to tradition, ritual and service, all key Ford themes, stirringly portrayed among the peaks and crags of Monument Valley. Shot in Technicolor, it’s one of the most painterly movies ever made.
2. MY DARLING CLEMENTINE (1946). Another Ford film, this one quite the opposite of Yellow Ribbon. It’s the oft-told story of the gunfight in Tombstone at the O.K. Corral, with Henry Fonda in the Wyatt Earp role. The climactic battle is almost beside the point, however, as the movie is more about the romance between Earp and a visitor from the East named Clementine Carter (and who history says never existed). But it’s also shot like a love story between Ford and the Monument Valley he cherished. Roger Ebert once noted that a town dance sequence in the film featuring an ebullient Fonda marked the arrival in the West of civilization better than a thousand lines of dialogue ever could.
1. ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1968). This may be my particular idiosyncrasy, but there are some films that on first watch seem so perfect, so remarkable that I am reluctant to watch them again because I fear the spell will be broken. Or at the very least, I want to preserve that same joy of discovery so that the magic of the film never dissipates. Sergio Leone’s film is one of those. I may have only seen it all the way through once. But I remember that I watched it over a week’s time, rewinding and moving forward again so I could absorb every scene fully and be entirely enmeshed in its world. The film is poetic in style, brutal in its violence, and transporting in its presentation. The Ennio Morricone score will make your heart soar.
Honorable mentions: Unforgiven (1992), The Searchers (1956), Red River (1948), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), The Naked Spur (1953), The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976).
What are some of yours? Comments or suggestions: nucleartheater@gmail.com or below:
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Membership in the Communist Party in America had become fashionable among a certain set of artists and creatives after the Russian Revolution and as the Great Depression made people question the value of unchecked Capitalism. But the abuses of the Stalin regime in the Soviet Union (and its non-aggression pact with the Nazis) led to an exodus.
Most notable may have been director Elia Kazan, who would go on make On the Waterfront, a movie about a longshoreman who testifies about his corrupt union.
Just to name a few: Red River (1948), The Quiet Man (1952), The Searchers (1956), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), The Shootist (1976). Wayne has been hit with the same bad rap that a lot of movie stars get — that they were just playing themselves. The man knew how to shade his persona.
A couple of recent Westerns come to mind. 3:10 to Yuma (the remake) and Hell of High Water. Also the remake of True Grit. Is Crazy Heart a Western?
1) Once Upon a Time 2) Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid 3) The Good, The Bad and the Ugly 4) Tombstone 5) Magnificent Seven