HIGH NOON: 4K UHD Blu-ray (Stanley Kramer, 1952) Kino Lorber

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 Saturday matinee theatrics. There had been others – most notably, John Ford - who endeavored to add girth, drama and ballast to 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, perennially infused with a streak of the adventurer’s spirit.  Zinnemann’s impressions are quite a departure, and, far less flattering. The townspeople who populate the remote outpost of Hadleyville in High Noon are collectively stricken with careworn ennui for their way of life. Their abject surrender of all that is good, merely to keep the peace, is hateful and an anathema to everything Marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper in a seminal role) has fought to preserve. Midway through Kane’s futile attempt to bolster a posse to help him defeat the evil that has returned to their small hamlet, enfeebled town prophet, Martin Howe (Lon Chaney Jr.) puts it thus to Kane, 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.”

Beneath the cordial – and collective – refusal of town council Kane has tapped to stand tall alongside him, there is more than just the fear of death. Indeed, there is 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 one man who put him behind bars in the first place. Encouraging Kane to hightail it out of town before the noonday train’s arrival does not gild the town’s gesture in magnanimity. In fact, it remains a rather opportunistic charade, a way for the town to kill two birds with one stone, sparing them the indignation of having to bury the man who defies their own frustrated lack of determination to invoke the change they wish to see, while saving face once Miller has returned, hopefully to divert him from exacting his reprisals on the rest of them.  How Neville Chamberlain can you get?!? 

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 reemerging nobility, miraculously untarnished by their time spent together, and, in fact, greatly suited to Amy’s temperament. Nice girls go straight at the altar. But bad girls can go anywhere they damn well please. Helen recognizes Kane will always be a man of integrity. Despite his flaws, he will make Amy a good husband. But can Amy do Kane justice as a wife? Helen respects Kane. In fact, she is probably the only person to fully empathize with his point of view – one outcast acknowledging another. Helen respects Kane tormented, nagging conscience. Yet, to remain in town 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 this small community to thrive.

The return of Frank Miller is hateful to Kane; bitterer still, if he chooses retreat now instead of confrontation. There is no easy way out. The town will surely suffer. And he and Amy will forever be 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 bond; the novice bride and worldly woman – partners in support of one man’s salvation. Neither is prepared to ‘like’ the other. And yet, each discovers something modestly rewarding about the other. Helen, Kane’s past, nobly steps aside to allow the girl from his present to enter freely and without reservations. What Helen vehemently resents is Amy’s Quaker naiveté; her, not being able to recognize the insurmountable odds set against the man to whom she has given her heart, if not her gutsy determination. “What kind of woman are you?” Helen proposes with dark and flashing eyes filled with hate 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 as the heir apparent to Kane’s mantel 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 by Miller’s early release from prison. Even as Kane weighs his options, Miller’s men are amassing at the depot.

High Noon raises a mirror apropos to modern times. It asks the harder question, of what value is freedom when those who would desire to reap its benefits are as morally disinterested to defend it from tyranny’s oppression?  Over the years, Carl Foreman’s screenplay has been reinterpreted as everything from a frank deconstruction of solitary man’s moral compass adrift in a sea of ambiguous hypocrisy, to a scathing indictment of post-war America’s blind arrogance to sacrifice principles, for anything that is available – and to be tolerated – in the here and now. 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 imploded under the weight of their own hypocrisy. 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, mostly over the casting of a middle-aged Gary Cooper, opposite a very young, Grace Kelly - twenty-two years Coop’s junior. In an era, unaccustomed to May/December unions, this one raised a few eyebrows with Hollywood’s self-governing code of ethics. Indeed, Coop’ was old enough to be Kelly’s father. The Code also took umbrage to the inference the marshal and his deputy had been regular patrons of the town prostitute. Despite these concerns, Foreman’s screenplay would remain relatively untouched by intervening hands and the code’s slum prudery.

To suggest High Noon was made under considerable acrimony from the Hollywood community is an understatement. Foreman’s blacklisting after he refused to name names during the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings in 1947 branded him as a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. Treated as a hostile witness, Foreman’s staunch entrenchment caused his business associate - producer, Stanley Kramer – to disengage from their professional partnership. Much to Kramer’s chagrin, as a signatory of 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 if he pressed the point of cancelling his contract. And while Zinnemann downplayed Foreman’s involvement on the project, it was later revealed Foreman had stayed on well into the picture’s production, often sitting on the sidelines while key scenes were being photographed.

High Noon ought to have starred John Wayne. Kramer had gunned for Wayne for this plum part. But Wayne, a died in the wool conservative, 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 also declined, though not out of support for HUAC (in fact, Peck resolutely opposed the blacklist), but rather because he felt the role much too similar to the lead 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 as Will Kane. Perhaps, Zinnemann was aware of Cooper’s ailing health – a bleeding ulcer and a bad back. This 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 a stunt double.

Principle photography on High Noon commenced in late summer 1951, utilizing Iverson’s ‘movie ranch’ in Oakdale California, a substitute for the Hadleyville depot, with respites at the Columbia Ranch and Columbia State Historic Park, where a facsimile of Hadleyville 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 at Paramount. Zinnemann asked cinematographer, Floyd Crosby to give the picture an overall look of sunbaked desolation – no pretty skies or expansive vistas. 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 run a parallel course. Zinnemann punctuates this ‘real time’ effect by frequently cutting away to a series of clocks. 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 yet made.

Our story begins with Marshal Will Kane’s marriage to 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. Alas, this dream gets deflated as Kane’s departure from Hadleyville is interrupted by news Frank Miller, the notorious outlaw Kane sent to prison, has been exonerated at trial and is now 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 is 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 to him for their counsel and protection. Alas, Harvey is little more than an opportunist. 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, town council agrees Kane should leave post haste. Kane and Amy are escorted to a waiting carriage. But as Kane punts the horses with a crack of the whip, putting considerable distance between themselves and Hadleyville, he begins to suffer a crisis of conscience. After all, he has left Hadleyville vulnerable to Miller. And 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. Kane bitterly informs Amy they must go back. Meanwhile, Harvey makes a play for the prostitute, Helen Ramirez. Despite her brittle exterior, Helen fell in love with Kane a long time ago – a love since refusing to die. She sees through Harvey and finds his ambitions shallow and disgusting.  Arriving back in town, Kane leaves Amy at the hotel, instructing her to take a room until he can settle his business with Frank Miller. However, Amy stands her ground. She tells Kane she intends to leave Hadleyville on the noonday train and if he is not at the depot, he need not bother to come for her later on – that is, if he is not shot dead first by Miller and his gang. Very reluctantly, Kane sacrifices Amy’s wishes to amass a posse to defend the town.  But Kane’s faith is to be shaken by the town’s complacency. He can find not a soul to stand with him against the man they all agree is the town’s arch nemesis. 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.

The town’s apathy sobers Kane. 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 men brawl until Kane leaves Harvey beaten to a pulp. 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, Amy waits until the last possible moment, then hurries 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, Amy manages to free herself and Kane shoots Miller dead. The town’s folk, emerge from their hiding spots and gather around Will and Amy. Alas, he no longer can look upon them as his fellow countrymen. Instead, Will begrudgingly casts his tin star into the dust before driving away with his devastated bride. There is nothing left for either of them in Hadleyville. For the very first time, Kane realizes it too.

Upon its release, there was no happy medium. High Noon received either very high praise or absolute condemnation. As if to reaffirm his 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 a rebuttal. 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.  More accolades were to follow. And the public, the final arbitrators in ‘what’s good’, showed their support at the box office. The Academy bestowed 7 Oscar nominations and 4 gold statuettes for Best Actor, Film Editing, Original Song – ‘Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling’, and score by noted composer, Dimitri Tiomkin. Today, removed from its timely hype, High Noon endures as a far more progressive western with much to say about society’s blindly ignorant acceptance of mediocrity – the lazy man’s escape from having to do the right thing, even when one of their own is willing to try.

High Noon represents a moral awakening, and, particularly from today’s vantage, a grave parable about the failure of an American community to defend itself, not because the odds are too great, rather, as the laziness to succumb to abject surrender is easier than to uphold the virtues and values Americans report to hold dear. In this penultimate moment of bittersweet acknowledgment (as Kane discards the symbol of that honor into the dust) High Noon achieves a fabled distinction for the reality of humanity’s collective apathy to do the right thing. The town’s moral lethargy has cost Kane and Amy everything. Will Kane’s contempt for the townsfolk as they gather to gawk in faux appreciation for his efforts sickens him. His stubborn morality forced Amy to forfeit her Quaker principles. And for what? For who? Can she ever forgive him? Can he ever forgive himself?  Despite its downtrodden finale, few westerns, and even fewer movies in general, have left us with such an indelible remorse for the hero who stands tall to defend that honor the rest of us process a desire to preserve, though are quite unwilling to sacrifice for, to make it happen. Kane’s decision to defend a people unworthy of his efforts leaves him a bitter and disillusioned man, his deflated patriotism as tarnished as his tin star.

High Noon arrives in native 4K from Kino Lorber in a fresh scan derived from an original 35mm camera negative. Comparing this to the previously issued standard Blu from Olive Media, the Kino 4K appears a notch darker in contrast. This helps to advance the overall quality of image detail. As before, digital clean-up somewhere along the way ensures this presentation is without age-related damage of any kind. And grayscale tonality is excellent. Film grain subtly advances. The Blu-ray appeared smoother. The overall higher resolution reveals itself, mostly in projection, where overall clarity, refinement and sharpness allow for a real pop that will surely not disappoint.  The 2.0 mono track is quite potent. Kane and Harvey’s barn brawl reveals some startling sonic resonance. Bearing in mind, the limitations of vintage Westrex audio, this sounds exceptionally solid. We get a pair of newly recorded commentaries; the first, from historian, Alan K. Rode, cribbing from the notations of Michael Blake, Glenn Frankel, director, Fred Zinnemann, producer, Stanley Kramer, and others. It’s a comprehensive listening experience. The other commentary belongs to historian/author, Julie Kirgo who focuses more on a general critique of the picture’s narrative construction. The rest of the extras are housed on a standard Blu-ray and are basically all ported over from Olive Media’s ‘signature’ edition from 2016. These featurettes are superficial at best. A Ticking Clock is barely 6-mins. of reflection on the film’s editing with Mark Goldblatt. There’s also 14-mins. with Michael Schlesinger and less than 10-mins. with historian, Larry Ceplair and blacklisted screenwriter, Walter Bernstein. Finally, there’s the tired and careworn, but fairly comprehensive ‘making of’ that was produced eons ago for Lionsgate and featuring Leonard Maltin.

Aside: 4 years ago, Eureka! put out its own jam-packed edition of High Noon, containing some fascinating extra content. If you own that disc, do not trade it in for this one because you’ll lose out on a great commentary from Frankel, and another, by western authority, Stephen Prince. You’ll also miss Inside High Noon – a fantastic hour-long doc on the making of the movie that’s never been included on any other home video release. Bottom line: whatever edition you aspire to own, High Noon is a ‘blue ribbon’ winner. Kino’s 4K slightly bests all previous standard Blu-ray editions in terms of image quality. Judge and buy accordingly.

FILM RATING (out of 5 - 5 being the best)

5+

VIDEO/AUDIO

5+

EXTRAS

3.5