High Noon (1952) - Fred Zinnemann

Amidst the A-List are a number of Westerns.  It is that genre that is so quintessentially American and at it’s best is a perfect setting for allegory and parallels with modern times.  High Noon was one of those classic Westerns that embodied this perhaps more than any other, at least until Johnny Guitar made their red allegory about as subtle as an Adam Sandler movie.  It was also one of the first Westerns that was designed as a serious artistic picture with designs on Oscars rather than amusing 10 year old boys.  For these reasons it’s decades ahead of it’s time and fits quite snugly into our modern world of revisionist Westerns hell bent on showing “grit” or how things “really were” back in the old West.

For what it’s worth, and this is my review for my blog so my opinion rules here, I think High Noon is a solid second tier masterpiece.  Now if you skimmed that sentence you noticed the word “masterpiece” and probably scratched your head at “second tier”.  For example wouldn’t these terms be mutually exclusive?  That’s like calling someone a great sidekick or even the smartest moron.  It isn’t a bad term in those regards so I should perhaps explain what I mean here.

In the world of film there are those good films, the great films, and the really, really great films.  That top level is reserved for a handful of films and that can be as wide as you wish to define it.  That may mean the top 20 or so films, or your top 100, or even more.  The next level could be those films that are fantastic but clearly not as great as some others.  This is like saying Rear Window is a great film but not as good as Psycho.  Well High Noon is a good to great film but not as good as say Unforgiven, The Searchers, Once Upon a Time in the West, and some others.  It is a flawed film so saying it’s perfect would naturally defeat the purpose of me calling it a flawed film just now, so read on.

There are some good things to admire about the film and I feel it is only fair to start there, who wants to jump headlong into bashing criticism?  Well for starters there is Floyd Crosby.  He was the director of photography here (Cinematographer for those who have to look up what that is), and he was a veteran of the game.  He first gained widespread recognition as the DP for F.W. Murnau’s final film Tabu (1931) which was co-directed by Robert Flaherty.  In the two decades since his breakthrough, which earned him I believe the first Oscar given out to cinematography he gained some experience but most of his films were indistinguishable.  Granted he did his time in the army during WWII so that explains at least part of his gap in productivity, but in a lot of ways High Noon was a coming out party for him.  By 1952 almost all Westerns were filmed in color so the chance to shoot the old west in black and white was an appealing one, and Crosby made the most of it.  In case you were wondering, yes Floyd was David Crosby’s father.

Mr. Crosby at his finest

What is amazing despite the universal praise he has gotten for the film, is that it wasn’t even nominated for best cinematography.  This is more amazing when you consider back in 1952 they had separate categories for black and white and color.  That isn’t to take away from the great work of Robert Surtees in The Bad and the Beautiful, which won best black and white cinematography along with four other Oscars that year, but it seems a rather drastic over sight.  Crosby employs the still fashionable deep focus photography early on showing the various members of the community present at Will (Gary Cooper) and Amy (Grace Kelly) Kane’s wedding.  Always present is a clock in the background which seems to loom larger and larger in the frame as the time ticks closer to noon.  As the whistle blows signaling the arrival of the train in one of the films best remembered shots we see a lone Kane on the deserted streets as a camera pans up to show his isolation in a crane move reminiscent of Gone with the Wind.  It’s said that he and his camera operator were nearly run over by the approaching train trying to get a low angle shot of it arriving at the station, but what’s a film without suffering for a art?

The other really great thing about the film is the acting.  Gary Cooper was never much of an expressive actor, and was always revered as the “strong silent type” an archetype of hero that kept his emotions to himself.  He’s given a tall task of conveying the simultaneous dread as well as the futility of his search for help.  Cooper won his second of two Oscars for his performance here and it far surpasses his work in Sergeant York for which he won his first Academy Award back in 1941.  All the performances however are great as we see everyone in town give their reasons for sticking to themselves, Zinnemann makes a point of showing how everyone has very justifiable reasons.  The only people who unquestionably want to help Kane are a one eyed drunk with something to prove and a 14 year old boy whose eager to show how mature he is.  Kane’s one legitimate deputy Harvey Pell (Lloyd Bridges) quits because he feels personally insulted that he wasn’t appointed Kane’s replacement.  So here is a marshal whose supposed to be on his honeymoon, whose relieved of his job as law keeper sticking around for a fight no one wants him to have with no help.  Thus begins the problems.

The plot is decidedly banal.  Carl Foreman’s script, from a John W. Cunningham story goes through painful detail to show how isolated Kane is.  Since the film was produced by one shameless liberal (Stanley Kramer is the modern archetype for all of Hollywood’s liberal tendencies today) not to mention Foreman and director Fred Zinnemann were well known liberals the film wears it’s ideology on it’s sleeve.  Seen by many as an indictment of the ordinary citizens that wouldn’t stand up to the tyranny of McCarthyism witch hunts.  There are others who viewed it as a justification of the US involvement in the Korean war.  The whole town banded together to put Frank Miller (Ian MacDonald) behind bars five years ago and now no one seems to be too interested in helping lock him up a second time.  This could be seen as the US patriotic entry in WWII and the overall reluctance to get tangled up in Korea several years later.  I think this allegory might be reaching a bit, and I don’t necessarily think the filmmakers were out to make a pro-war picture.

John Wayne famously hated the film, as did director Howard Hawks and the two made the film Rio Bravo in retaliation in 1959.  Today amongst critics the Hawks film is by far the better respected film, but popular opinion is still strong with High Noon.  As recently as 2007, the AFI voted it the 27th greatest American film ever made.  The children of Stanley Kramer have thus rejoiced.  Wayne’s claim was that any real cowboy or lawman would simply stand up and fight the gun men.  Most likely the town would rush to help in order to maintain law and order.  In Wayne’s world of Westerns, things were simpler, there wasn’t as much necessity for motivation and psychological makeup.  Hawks agreed that Kane would simply meet his attackers head on and relish the opportunity. 

Now I’m not saying whose right or wrong in this regard.  I just feel like the device of having everyone abandon him seems deliberate, and the character of Kane seems really bad at getting help.  He basically turns away anyone willing to help him, and gives up trying after the first sign of opposition.  However the politics of the film, which are still the most debated aspects are hardly what’s wrong with the picture, to me there are two other much more grating flaws for me personally.

A bear with a dog mask

The first one is the presence of Helen Ramirez (Katy Jurado).  Now let’s take a quick moment to forgive the comically grotesque features of Ms. Jurado who was a passable actress in a few films, notably My Darling Clementine to look at her character.  Why the hell is she in the movie?  Ok her and Kane had a history together some time ago and?  She’s a silent partner with a business man in town, and the saloon that Kane walks into where he finds some of Frank’s old friends has the name Ramirez over the door.  She also goes by Mrs. Ramirez in the film.  So well who the hell is Mr. Ramirez?  There’s no mention of her ever being married, why her and Kane split up, and why everyone seems to think they’ve each carried a torch for each other.

I mean for Christ’s sake have you seen Grace Kelly?  I mean look at her, there’s a picture of her below, seriously take a good look at it.  Has there ever been a more beautiful woman to appear in a movie before?  Hell I wonder if there has been a prettier lady to walk the earth.  How could anyone anywhere think that she could be jealous of horse face Katy Jurado?  I can only suspend disbelief for so long.  Sure there’s some racist implications, that Mrs. Ramirez has been around the block a few times and she’s probably a demon in the sack because she’s Mexican, but I don’t buy it and neither should you.  Her relationship with Harvey also makes little sense, especially how quickly she’s willing to dismiss him.  Oh and what history does she have with Frank Miller because she clearly needs to get out of town?  Simply put her character confounds me and there’s just far too much about her we don’t know to bother figuring it out.  Seriously her only redeeming quality might be the fact that she is the one who puts the idea of helping Kane fight into Amy’s pacifist Quaker head. 

Yeah seriously you might as well give her wings and a halo

My other main flaw has nothing to do with anything that happens on screen.  No this isn’t some personal vendetta against the filmmakers but composer Dimitri Tiomkin.  There was a practice back in the days of Westerns to write a theme song based on your film.  They all had one, even The Searchers, perhaps the idea was to get a hit song from a hit movie, or maybe it was just an unwritten rule that you had to have someone singing a hokey ballad over the opening credits of your Western in order to remove all doubt what genre it was.  The ballad of the film was sung by Tex Ritter and it is AWFUL.  I mean it’s bad, really bad, and rather than just subject us to it for the opening credits in a distracting painfully corny way, it is repeated over and over again.  Tiomkin builds his entire score around it and it keeps popping up in seemingly inappropriate places, because really the only appropriate place for a song this bad is in hell.  What’s more mind blowing is that Tiomkin won an Oscar for his work here.  Yep that’s right a fucking Academy Award, and Floyd Crosby wasn’t nominated.  Good lord someone was hitting the bong really hard when they were casting ballots back in 1952.  To make matters worse the aforementioned song “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin” won an Academy Award for best original song, did people in the 52 have such awful taste in music?  

These flaws should be considered minor, and really they are.  I mean Mrs. Ramirez is just someone to chew up some screen time.  We can wonder about her past, or choose to completely ignore it and wait for the inevitable showdown.  She isn’t a despicable character, and seems one of the few strong willed people in the film, in fact probably the strongest willed character.  So feminists may point to her as a powerful woman who won’t take shit from a man, who owns her own business, etc.  So yeah, girl power or something.  I also know I should block Tiomkin’s involuntary abortion to my ear drums out, but well these things can get on one’s nerves.

So these “minor” things are what make the film a second tier masterpiece.  This won’t pop up on my top 100, and even the review in the NSFC book essentially lists it as very overrated.  It lost the best picture race that year to Cecil B. DeMille’s much lauded The Greatest Show on Earth, a film that isn’t nearly as awful as it’s reputation would have you believe.  Then as now many people believe the reason for this was political, preferring to give the Oscar to the shamelessly right wing DeMille over Kramer and Zinnemann.  The fact that it’s still considered a masterpiece by some means it has had some legit staying power.  There is much to like about the film, and the final shootout is great.  It also does a great job of showing two women who aren’t just helpless victims in the male dominated world of the old West.  It’s problematic at best, but deep down inside there’s still a great film in there somewhere, even if you didn’t get that impression from my review.