High Noon

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Template:Infobox Film High Noon is a 1952 western film which tells the story of a town marshal who has just married a pacifist Quaker woman. Upon giving up his office immediately after the wedding, he must take on a gang of outlaws led by Frank Miller, a man he personally arrested and sent to the gallows, but was instead paroled by a corrupt administration. The entire town deserts him.

The movie was written by John W. Cunningham (story) and Carl Foreman, based on a pulp short story, The Tin Star. It was directed by Fred Zinnemann, a controversial choice, since the producers were uncertain that an Austrian Jew would be able to direct the quintessential American genre: the Western. Zinnemann himself was highly influenced by the books of Karl May that he had read as a child. Writer Carl Foreman was also the producer of the film, but he was uncredited because he was blacklisted by the MPAA.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

High Noon is a generally praised but somewhat controversial western. It is set in the town of Hadleyville after the American Civil War and focuses on Will Kane (Gary Cooper), a marshal who feels obliged to face down a bunch of bad men coming into town. Cooper's character is betrayed by all the "good" men in town who won't take up arms for a good cause. It is often interpreted as an allegory of the contemporary failure of intellectuals to combat the rise of McCarthyism. However, the film has also been embraced by conservatives who admire its emphasis on duty and courage.

There was some controversy over the casting of Gary Cooper in the lead role. Although he had already won an Oscar for his performance in Sergeant York, he was considered too old for the part, and was, in fact, thirty years older than Grace Kelly, who plays his wife.

In the film, Kelly was a young woman who wants her husband to leave town and has a religious aversion to violence of any kind. Still, she stays with him when he fights — and even kills one of her husband's assailants herself.

Image:Kelly&Jurado.JPG

One of the interesting techniques used in filming High Noon was to have the sequence of events occur in "real time." When a clock is shown in a scene, an event the audience expects to occur at another given time will occur that number of minutes later in the movie.

Another effective technique is the crane shot, just before the final gunfight. The shot backs up and raises, and we see Will totally alone and isolated on the street. The entire town has deserted him.

The director intended to capture the atmosphere of old Civil War photographs, with an austere gray sky as a backdrop. (This effect results from the fact that early film emulsions were most sensitive to blue (and uv) light; Zinneman's attempts to reproduce this effect in the film were one of the reasons he strongly opposed its proposed colorization). Despite the constraints of a limited budget ($750,000) and only 32 days to film, he was able to obtain this even though most of the film was shot on a Hollywood lot by taking advantage of the smog in Los Angeles to darken the sky.

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Awards

High Noon is consistently on the Internet Movie Database's list of top 250 films, was #33 on American Film Institute's 100 Years, 100 Movies, and has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.

The movie won Academy Awards for Best Actor in a Leading Role (Gary Cooper), Best Film Editing, Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture (Dimitri Tiomkin), and Best Music, Song (Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington for High Noon (Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin'), sung by Tex Ritter). It was nominated for Best Director, Best Picture, and Best Writing, Screenplay.

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Remakes

  • A made-for-TV sequel, High Noon Part II: The Return Of Will Kane (produced in 1980, 28 years after the original movie was released), featured Lee Majors in the Cooper role.
  • The 1980 science fiction film Outland borrowed from the story of High Noon for its plot. The movie starred Sean Connery.
  • The Miami Vice episode "The Afternoon Plane" borrowed both plot and characters directly from the movie.
  • In 2000, High Noon was entirely re-worked for cable television with Tom Skerritt in the lead role.
  • Some speculate that High Noon provided inspiration for Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai.
  • John Wayne was offended by the film and mistakenly believed that Cooper's character ground his badge underfoot at the film's end. Wayne's film Rio Bravo was reportedly made as a counterpoint to High Noon.
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Trivia

  • High Noon is the film most requested for viewing by American Presidents.
  • High Noon transpires virtually in real-time, which is in contrast to, for example, The Searchers. In one of many departures from the traditional western, there is little action until the final 10 minutes. The only exception is a fistfight between Kane and his former deputy, Harvey Pell. Otherwise, the film is comprised of mainly Kane’s failed attempts to rally the townspeople to his cause. High Noon's tension mainly comes from Kane’s desperation, which is aided by the editing. The frequent shots of various clocks with the hands approaching noon increase the unbearable tension.
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Cast

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External links and references

de:Zwölf Uhr mittags es:Solo ante el peligro fi:Sheriffi (elokuva) fr:Le train sifflera trois fois he:בצהרי היום pl:W samo południe sv:Sheriffen

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