“High Noon,” with its iconic story of one man’s courage in the face of death, has long been a favorite movie of many viewers.
Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, despite their different political perspectives, have each cited the 1952 Western in which Gary Cooper stars as a marshal who stands up alone against a gang of murderers as one of their best-loved movies.
But “High Noon,” out on DVD this week in a two-disc Ultimate Collector’s Edition (Lionsgate, $19.98, not rated), has also stirred passions to a greater degree than almost any other Western.
Its left-wing screenwriter, Carl Foreman, said he wrote “High Noon” as “a parable about Hollywood and McCarthyism.” For that and other reasons, John Wayne, a staunch Hollywood conservative, called “High Noon” “the most un-American thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life.”
But as is clear from watching the movie from the distance of 56 years and viewing “Inside High Noon,” a 50-minute DVD documentary on the movie, the film lends itself to many interpretations.
At its core, “High Noon” is about Marshal Will Kane (Cooper) in the New Mexico territory, who on the day of both his wedding to his young Quaker bride, Amy Fowler (Grace Kelly, in her first major film role), and his retirement as a lawman, learns that a killer he had put behind bars has been pardoned and is seeking revenge against him. The killer, one Frank Miller, plans to meet three henchmen in less than 90 minutes when he arrives on the noon train, and then go gunning for Kane.
After being urged by his friends and bride to ride away before Miller and his gang arrive, Kane decides he must stay and fight. But as he tries to recruit a posse to stand with him against the Miller gang, he gets rejected everywhere he turns.
And his violence-hating wife says that she will leave on that same noontime train if he insists on remaining and fighting.
From Foreman’s perspective, Kane was standing in for himself and other blacklisted screenwriters, actors and directors who felt abandoned by their colleagues and their movie studios when the forces of the House Un-American Activities Committee and its right-wing allies in Hollywood tried to purge Hollywood of leftists.
