Making

Gary Cooper - High Noon (1952)

Carl Foreman, who wrote the script and is therefore worth listening to, claimed that High Noon was a political film: that Marshal Gary Cooper, abandoned by the townsfolk and (almost) by his bride (Grace Kelly) and waiting alone to confront the killers coming on on the noon train, actually represented the man of principle, deserted by his erstwhile friends and standing up to the House Un-American ctivities Committee. The director, Fred Zinnemann, said Cooper represented nothing of the sort; he merely represented a man prepared to do what a man had to do. Well, it doesn't really matter, I suppose, although Foreman himself was blacklisted by HUAC.

Nor does it matter that the story begins at 10.40 a.m. and ends at five minutes past noon, thus coinciding precisely with the film's running time. That's merely a gimmick, interesting but nothing to do with the quality of the picture. What finally makes High Noon a classic western is that it's so very well done, stark in its simplicity. Not only was Cooper perfectly cast as the troubled lawman torn between the call of duty and the natural desire to go away with his lovely young wife, but the trappings of production, direction and script were also sublime - the menacing shadows cast by the blazing sun, the tension emphasised by the ticking of the clock, the almost palpable loneliness of the marshal as he realises that the honest burgers are going to rat on him. Even the bathetic lyrics of Tex Ritter's song (He made a vow while in state prison/Said it'd be my life or his'n') were disguised by the darkly foreboding rhythm of the music.

The western is the twentieth-century equivalent of the morality tale, the struggle between good and evil, what is right and what is wrong, and the dilemma has rarely been so plainly, so agonisingly laid out as in High Noon.