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 su…