HIGH NOON: Blu-ray (Stanley Kramer, 1952) Eureka! Masters of Cinema
Often referenced as ‘the existential western’,
Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952) is a controversial classic that
arguably broke the mold and matured an entire genre from its cut and dry
Saturday matinee heroics. There had been others – most notably, John Ford - who
endeavored to add girth to the stories set against this stark and uniquely
American landscape. Yet, for all his lyrical tomes, Ford’s vision of the West
remained firmly anchored to an impossibly plainspoken sense of nobility; the
belief and promise of the frontier experience left intact for others to
discover, perennially infused with a streak of the adventurer’s spirit. Zinnemann’s impressions are quite different,
far less flattering and infinitely more bizarre. The townspeople who populate
the remote outpost of Hadleyville in High Noon are collectively stricken
with a chronic ennui for their way of life, tired, even of life itself, neither
seeking greener pastures beyond their picket fences, or perhaps unable to
acknowledge them as such from the vantage of abject surrender. Enfeebled town
prophet, Martin Howe (Lon Chaney Jr.) puts it thus to Marshal Will Kane (Gary
Cooper), who has come to seek his counsel and advice. “You risk your skin
catching killers and the juries turn them loose so they can come back and shoot
at you again. If you're honest you're poor your whole life and in the end, you
wind up dying all alone on some dirty street. For what? For nothing. For a tin
star. People gotta talk themselves into law and order before they do anything
about it. Maybe because down deep they don't care. They just don't care.”
And indeed, beneath the cordial – and collective –
refusal of each member of this town council Kane has tapped to stand tall
alongside him, there is more than just the fear of death; a sort of repressed
resentment for Kane’s principles, the law, and, its inability to keep a
desperado like Frank Miller (Ian MacDonald) outside their borders for good.
Better now to allow Miller his run of Main Street, so long as he keeps his lawlessness
confined to the saloon and his revenge limited to the murder of the man who put
him behind bars in the first place. Encouraging Kane to hightail it out of town
before the noonday train arrives does not augment this gesture with
magnanimity. In fact, it remains a rather opportunistic charade; a way to kill
two birds with one stone, sparing the town the indignation of seeing their hero
fall while saving face once Miller has returned; diverting his reprisals to
that desert pursuit of his arch nemesis far away from their town. The situation is further complicated by
Kane’s lingering affections for ‘business woman’, Helen Ramirez (Katie Jurado)
who astutely recognizes Kane’s recent marriage to Amy Fowler (Grace Kelly), not
as a reformation of his predilections repeatedly satisfied in her boudoir, but
rather, as an affirmation of Kane’s good ole boy reemerging, miraculously
untarnished by their time spent together and much better suited to Amy’s
temperament. Nice girls go straight at the altar. But bad girls can go
everywhere whenever they damn well please. Helen recognizes Kane will always be
a man of integrity. Despite his flaws, he can make Amy a good husband. But can
Amy do Kane justice as his wife? Helen respects Kane. In fact, she is probably
the only person to fully empathize with his viewpoint as an outcast – being
one, herself. Helen respects how much Kane is being torn apart by his nagging
conscience. He must flee. To remain behind is certain death. Alas, Kane cannot
abandon his principles any more than he will allow injustice to prevail where
only yesterday he planted the seeds necessary for the integrity of the law to
thrive.
The return of Frank Miller is hateful to Kane, but
bitter still if he chooses escape instead of confrontation. There is no easy
way out. The town will surely suffer; he and Amy, forever on the run looking
over their shoulders. It is this
backward slide from the respectability and security that Kane cannot abide. He
will not abandon Hadleyville even if its citizenry would prefer it.
Interestingly, Helen and Amy form a quiet, if unusual bond; the novice bride
and this experienced woman of the world – partners in support of one man’s
salvation. Neither is prepared to ‘like’ the other, and yet, each discovers
something modestly rewarding; Helen, Kane’s past, nobly stepping aside to allow
the girl of his present, to enter freely and without reservations. What Helen
vehemently resents is Amy’s naiveté in not being able to recognize the
insurmountable odds set against the man to whom she has given her heart but not
her gutsy determination. “What kind of woman are you?” Helen proposes
with dark and flashing eyes as Amy prepares to leave Will on the same inbound
train carrying Frank Miller to town, “How can you leave him like this? Does
the sound of guns frighten you that much?” to which Amy fervently replies, “I've
heard guns before. My father and my brother were killed by guns. They were on
the right side but that didn't help them any when the shooting started. My
brother was nineteen. I watched him die. That's when I became a Quaker. I don't
care who's right or who's wrong. There's got to be some better way for people
to live. Will knows how I feel about it.”
No one will take a stand against Miller; not Jonas
Henderson (Thomas Mitchell) – a devil’s advocate of a mayor; nor Judge Percy
Mettrick (Otto Kruger), nor even Kane’s own Deputy Marshal, Harvey Pell (Lloyd
Bridges), who would appreciate Miller’s complicity to expunge Kane and his
galvanized reputation as an impeccable lawman from the historic record. Harvey
fancies himself the heir apparent to Kane’s mantle of quality, though without
Kane’s inherent goodness, forthrightness or moral compass. He simply likes to
wear the tin star. The singular vote for
justice is Kane, craggy and careworn, impeccably crafted by Gary Cooper as a
quietly anxious, yet wholly sincere salt of the earth. Kane cannot conceive of
‘his’ town slipping back into the godless mire from which his earlier devotions
to it brought forth such prosperity. Yet, Kane is not driven by ego to keep
what is his, viewing progress as a communal effort for the benefit of all. In
his soul, Kane has remained the epitome of the weary idealist, despite every
fiber of his virtue now being tested with Miller’s early release from prison.
Even as Kane weighs his options, Miller’s men are amassing at the depot to
exact their revenge with relish.
High Noon is unequivocally an allegory for one man’s crusade
against villainy. But it also raises a mirror more apropos to the times in
which the picture was made, asking the harder question, of what value is
freedom when those who would desire to reap its benefits are equally as
disinterested to defend its cause from the oppression of genuine tyranny? Over the years, Carl Foreman’s screenplay has
been reinterpreted as everything from a frank deconstruction of one man’s moral
compass adrift in a sea of ambiguous hypocrites, to a scathing indictment of
mid-western American core values. This latter critique was enough to blacklist
Foreman from working in Hollywood under his own name for many years, even after
the McCarthy ‘Red Scare’ and witch hunts had died down. In reality,
Foreman’s adaptation of John W. Cunningham’s The Tin Star is very
faithful to its source. Even more ironic: Cunningham was never branded a
communist for his views. Yet, even before pre-production began, High Noon
garnered controversy over its central casting of the middle-aged Gary Cooper,
opposite a very young, Grace Kelly. This was Kelly’s first major movie role;
twenty-two years Coop’s junior, causing the Production Code to raise a few
disparaging eyebrows over their May/December marriage. Indeed, Coop’ was old
enough to be Kelly’s father. The Code also took umbrage to the inference both
the marshal and his deputy had been regular customers of the town prostitute.
Despite these concerns, Foreman’s screenplay would remain relatively untouched
by intervening hands and personal tastes.
To suggest High Noon was made under
considerable acrimony and the heavy weight of many personalized tensions is an
understatement. At the very least, Foreman’s blacklisting after he refused to
name names during the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings in
1947 had established him as a card-carrying member of the Communist Party.
Treated as a hostile witness by the committee, Foreman’s staunchly entrenched
views caused his business associate, producer, Stanley Kramer to demand an
immediate dissolution of their partnership. However, as a signatory to the
production loan, Foreman would remain under contract and continue to work on High
Noon, his last major writing assignment in Hollywood. Kramer would later
claim Foreman had threatened to falsely give his name to the committee, largely
out of spite. And while Zinnemann would downplay Foreman’s involvement on the
project, it was later revealed Foreman had stayed on as part of the creative
team well into its production phase; often sitting off to the side while key
scenes were being shot. High Noon ought to have starred John Wayne.
Indeed, Kramer had wanted Wayne for the plum part. For one reason or another,
Wayne turned the project down; perhaps, wary of Foreman’s involvement, or
simply to distance himself from any film that might hint at the spank of
communist propaganda. After that, the part of Will Kane was shopped around to
Gregory Peck, who declined it, not out of support for HUAC (in fact, Peck
resolutely opposed the blacklist), but rather because he felt it too similar to
the lead he had just played in 1950’s The Gunfighter. Miraculously, the
part was still not Gary Cooper’s for the asking. Only after Charlton Heston,
Kirk Douglas, Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift and Burt Lancaster all said ‘no’
did Cooper’s name get tossed into the mix. Today, it is all but impossible to
imagine anyone but Gary Cooper in the part. Perhaps, Zinnemann was aware of
Cooper’s ailing health – a bleeding ulcer and a bad back that made Coop’ very
reluctant to participate in the stunt fights with the infinitely more robust
and younger, Lloyd Bridges. Nevertheless, when the time came, Coop’ refused to
have his stunts done by a double.
Principle photography on High Noon began in
late summer 1951, utilizing Iverson’s ‘movie ranch’ in Oakdale California, a
substitute for the Hadleyville depot; also, the Columbia Ranch and Columbia
State Historic Park, where a facsimile of Hadleyville itself was erected out of
plywood. Exteriors of the town church were actually shot at St. Joseph’s in
Tuolumne City, but interiors were a full-size set built on a sound stage.
Zinnemann asked cinematographer, Floyd Crosby to give the picture an overall
look of sun-baked desolation – no pretty skies full of white fluffy clouds or
expansive vistas, scarred by blazing sunsets. To achieve this look, Crosby used
no filters to diffuse the natural light and also instructed that all prints
struck from this footage were to be made a few points lighter than normal,
affording the movie exteriors a very bleached-out appearance. For the first time in movie history, the
actual run time and that of the story being told on screen closely paralleled
one another; Zinnemann punctuating the effect by frequently cutting away to a
series of clocks telling the correct time. When the rough cut was assembled for
the studio brass, all concurred something special had been captured out there
in the tumbleweed. High Noon was shaping up to be a superior western
drama and quite possibly, one of the finest movies of any genre yet made in the
United States.
Upon its release, High Noon received high
praise and absolute condemnations from those in the industry as well as film
critics. There was no happy medium. One either loved or despised the results.
As if to reaffirm his own anti-communist slant in support of HUAC, John Wayne
went very public with his adamant declaration High Noon was the worst
movie he had ever seen; a sentiment echoed by director, Howard Hawks who felt
so strongly about it he made 1959’s Rio Bravo as something of a
rebuttal. With all due respect to Hawks and the Duke, their opinions may have
been more colored than clearly rendered on a judgement of something else beyond
the movie. And Rio Bravo, despite being a fine western in its own right,
is clearly no High Noon! Noted film critic, Bosley Crowther famously
labeled High Noon ‘a western for people who don’t like westerns’,
adding, ‘there is scarcely a false note in the production or casting’ and
citing Zinnemann’s direction as methodically tense. Indeed, more accolades were to follow, the
public showing its support at the box office and the Academy bestowing 7 Oscar
nominations and four gold statuettes for Best Actor, Film Editing, Original
Song – ‘Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling’, and finally, score by noted
composer, Dimitri Tiomkin. Today, removed from all its timely hype, High
Noon endures as a far more progressive western with much to say about the
mediocrities of life and the good that one individual can achieve – alas, to
what purpose when those he seeks to help are unwilling even to help themselves?
In the end, High Noon plays more as the parable it was conceived to be
rather than a subversive euphemism for political paranoia.
Our story begins with Marshal Will Kane’s marriage to
a lovely Quaker bride, Amy Fowler. A respected pillar of Hadleyville’s small
community, Kane has decided to hang up his tin star and honor his wife’s Quaker
principles by becoming a farmer. The two will live obscurely, but seemingly
blissfully. It’s a lovely fairytale; the dream deflated as Kane’s departure
from Hadleyville is interrupted by news Frank Miller, the notorious outlaw Kane
arrested and sent to prison, has been exonerated at trial and is heading back
into town to meet up with his gang and avenge his incarceration. Kane is urged
by Mayor Jonus Henderson to leave town immediately. There’s not a moment to
spare. But Kane is reluctant to flee
from this place he has worked so tirelessly to civilize. His former deputy (nee
acting Marshal) Harvey Pell is in even more of a hurry to see Kane go,
misperceiving that without Kane’s presence the people will naturally gravitate
their affections over to him for counsel and protection. But Harvey is a greedy
sort. He sees the post of Marshal for what he can get out of it, not what he
can put into it and give back to the community.
Nevertheless, the whole town council agrees Kane should leave post
haste. Kane and Amy are escorted to a waiting carriage. Alas, as Kane punts the
horses with a crack of the whip, putting considerable distance between
themselves and Hadleyville, he begins to suffer from a crisis of conscience.
After all, he has left Hadleyville vulnerable to Miller’s influence. And simply
by leaving town he has not prevented the maniacal Miller from seeking him out
on the open road. It’s no use. The hunter has become the hunted. Unable to
reconcile his former duties as marshal and the overwhelming sense of loyalty he
feels for the town, Kane bitterly informs Amy they must go back.
Meanwhile, back in town, Harvey makes a play for the
prostitute, Helen Ramirez. Despite her hard shell, Helen fell in love with Kane
a long time ago – a love that has since refused to die. She sees through Harvey
and finds his ambitions rather shallow.
Arriving back in town, Kane leaves Amy at the same hotel Helen is
staying at, instructing her to take a room until he can settle his business
with Frank Miller. But Amy stands her ground. She tells Kane she intends to
leave Hadleyville on the noonday train and if he isn’t at the depot by then he
needn’t bother to follow her later – that is, if he is not shot dead first by
Miller and his gang. Kane reluctantly leaves Amy behind to begin organizing a
posse to defend the town. Kane’s faith
in the town is shaken to its core when he quickly finds abject reluctance, even
cowardice prevailing in the face of danger. It seems the whole town would
rather complacently sit back and allow Miller and his gang back into their fold
than fight for justice on their own terms. Judge Percy Mettrick implores Kane
to leave before Miller’s arrival on the noonday. Meanwhile, Miller’s gang
comprised of his brother, Ben (Sheb Wooley), Jack Colby (Lee Van Cleef) and Jim
Pierce (Robert Wilke) has already begun to assemble at the depot.
This assignation sobers Kane up. He realizes how
foolish he has been in returning to face Miller alone. Nobody wants
bloodshed…but peace at what price? As a ‘last ditch’ effort Kane appeals to
Harvey to stand beside him. But Harvey reveals his truer jealousies toward Kane
now before ordering him to get out of town. Kane refuses. The two spar inside
an old barn until Kane eventually beats Harvey to a pulp – reaffirming for
Harvey what the town already knows to be true about him; that he will always
remain a pale ghost of the law in Kane’s shadow. Meanwhile, Amy confronts Helen
inside the hotel. Helen is cordial but hardly polite. The women exchange
glances, then words, and finally mixed emotions about the man they both so
obviously love. Helen agrees to take Amy to the depot to meet the noonday, but
chides her for running out on her husband – something Helen insists she would
never do. At the station the women see Miller’s gang. Fearful she has made a
terrible mistake in running away, Amy waits until the last possible moment;
then hurries back into town on foot at the first sound of gunfire. Will faces
down Miller and his men alone. He manages to shoot Jack and Ben dead, but is
wounded in arm. Forsaking her religious convictions to save her husband, Amy
takes up arms and shoots Jim in the back. Regrettably, Frank Miller comes up
from behind and takes Amy hostage. As he drags her into the middle of town to
lure Kane from his hiding spot, Amy manages to free herself and Kane shoots
Miller dead before contemptuously casting his tin star into the dust and
driving away with his bride. There is nothing left for either of them in
Hadleyville now and for the very first time, Kane realizes it too.
High Noon is an extremely sobering indictment on the failure of
a community to defend itself, not because the odds are too great; rather, due
to its own laziness to uphold virtues it knows to be true and sacred, though
mis-perceived as too difficult to defend. In hindsight, the picture casts a
fairly unflattering allegorical reflection on society at large, so eager, yet
so blind and hungry for the mirage of a virtuous and omnipotent authority to
sweep in and provide a safe haven for all, that in absence of such a myth it is
willing to accept even corruption itself, simply to fill the position with a
warm body. Zinnemann’s movie surmises people do not drink the sand from a
mirage because they are thirsty. They sip it because they lack the ability to
discern it from the life-giving waters. In this penultimate moment of surrender
(Kane casting his tin star into the dust where it belongs) High Noon
achieves a sort of fabled distinction no other western made before or since its
time has challenged. The town has cost Kane and Amy everything. And Gary
Cooper’s expression as he silently acknowledges his contempt for the townsfolk
gathered to gawk at the remains of the fallen sickens Kane. After all, he
nearly sacrificed his love and a good woman and for what? His stubborn morality
forced Amy to forsake her Quaker principles. Can she ever forgive him for being
compelled to come to his aid when no one else would, and thus betray a piece of
her own heart and soul, merely to protect those who have proven wholly unworthy
of the effort? In forsaking her devout religious beliefs, Amy Fowler has
forfeited her naive optimism about the world at large. In some ways, she has
suddenly matured to a lighter shade of Helen Ramirez; the remainder of her fresh-cheeked
bloom destined to rub off after the couple has shared their wedding night.
Yet, despite its downtrodden finale, few westerns and
even fewer films have left the viewer more remorseful and yet fulfilled and
rallying to a cause. We respect Kane’s decision to remain behind and stand his
ground even as we recognize (as he does in the end) it was the wrong decision.
We feel for Kane’s overwhelming sense of loss, his deflated patriotism and
dismantled faith in friendships as tarnished as his tin star. And we suddenly
recognize Kane’s abandonment of the town, as he has been abandoned by it, as a
tale as timeless as mankind itself: the rugged individualist standing on
principles alone for a committee of hypocrites who lack the initiative. These
are sobering revelations that flair up in our collective consciousness even as
Kane departs Hadleyville without a word spoken to the men and women whom he
considered friends only a few hours before, but now appear to him as less than
strangers along the open road to nowhere. Gary Cooper is the perfect western
hero for High Noon; aged and weather-beaten as the sagebrush, yet
staunchly refusing to bend. How much of Kane’s magnificence can actually be
credited to Coop’s acting style, as opposed to owed the cache of his built-in
star power is open for discussion. Nevertheless, there is greatness in Coop’s
performance, a peerless example of tragic disillusionment.
Like a good many westerns, High Noon plays off
the traditions and duality of good vs. evil. Unlike most, it is a far subtler
critique of where to draw the line, with alarming tonalities of morally gray
ambiguity frequently intruding. In many ways, Lloyd Bridge’s Harvey, not Frank
Miller, is the real nemesis of the piece: the antithesis of Cooper’s Kane –
egotistical, stocky, self-seeking and lacking in convictions beyond his own
greed. Harvey is attracted to Helen Ramirez; the woman Cooper’s Kane gave up
for Amy. Just as Amy represents the sort of woman Helen would like to have been
(and arguably, once was) Bridges’ Harvey presents a sort of fallen masculinity;
as Helen earlier tries to explain, “It takes more than broad shoulders to be
a man.” But the real evil descending on Hadleyville is not Miller or his
gang, rather, the loss of purpose and weakened resolve the whole town must
share in. There is little about the ending of High Noon to suggest
Hadleyville’s citizenry will rally together in Kane’s absence, despite being
reunited in their shame under the large-looming shadow of his bravery. Yet,
Kane’s heroics do not stir the town to do better or even reconsider their own
moral ambiguity. Rather, Kane’s absence has left an irresoluble void that
cannot – and probably never will - be filled.
High Noon has been afforded a 4K remastered 1080p transfer
from Eureka! Home Entertainment as part of their long-standing Masters
of Cinema franchise. This disc is ‘region B’ locked which means it will not
play in North America, unless you own a region-free Blu-ray player. The
remastering effort slightly bests Olive Media’s ‘Signature Edition’ Blu-ray
from 2016, also advertised as derived from a 4K master. Film grain is a
tad more refined and contrast is marginally improved on the Eureka!. But on the whole, these
differences are negligible at best, proving the lasting merits of Olive’s
edition. Both editions are the beneficiary of some modest clean-up that has
virtually eradicated all age-related scratches. Grain structure is fairly solid
on both releases, though arguably, minutely refined on Eureka!’s release. The
DTS mono audio sounds virtually identical to the previous release, which is not
a bad thing, but rather impressively rendered with Dimitri Tiomkin’s sparse
score and Tex Ritter’s lonesome title track exhibiting a nuanced freshness.
Eureka!’s release includes two newly recorded audio
commentaries; the first, by historian, Glenn Frankel, and another, by western
authority Stephen Prince. I think I prefer Frankel’s insight to Prince’s, but
they are both worth a listen. We also get a video interview with historian,
Neil Sinyard, plus the 1969 audio-only interview with Foreman, conducted by the
National Film Theatre in London. Also featured, The Making of High Noon
– the original, nearly half-hour documentary that aired on AMC, plus, Inside
High Noon (almost an hour) and Behind High Noon (barely
10 min.). Eureka tops out the extras with a trailer and collector’s booklet,
with essays by Philip Kemp and 2 archival pieces by critic Richard Combs, plus,
an article by Carl Foreman originally published in Punch Magazine in 1974. Lost
in this Brit-side offering are Olive’s extensive cornucopia of goodies: A
Ticking Clock – hosted by Mark Goldblatt that discusses the editing of High
Noon, A Stanley Kramer Production - Michael Schlesinger’s featurette
on Kramer’s role as producer, Imitation of Life: The Blacklist History of High
Noon with historian, Larry Ceplair and blacklisted screenwriter, Walter
Bernstein; Ulcers and Oscars: The Production History of High Noon
- a visual essay with rarely seen archival elements, narrated by Anton Yelchin,
and finally, Uncitizened Kane - an original essay by Sight & Sound
editor, Nick James. Bottom line: whatever edition you aspire to own, High
Noon is a ‘blue ribbon’ Blu-ray winner. We finally have one of cinema’s
rare treasures looking decades younger and more vital than ever before – and,
in two competing and comprehensively assembled packages with goodies to boot.
Wow and thank you!
FILM RATING (out of 5 - 5 being the best)
5+
VIDEO/AUDIO
Both editions 5+
EXTRAS
Olive 5+
Eureka! 4.5
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