High Noon (1952)
A convicted murderer wants revenge on Will Kane and he's gonna get it at 12PM.
Imagine it’s your retirement day. Now imagine that you’ve also just married Grace Kelly. Day’s going pretty good, right? Well, that’s just the morning for Will Kane (Gary Cooper). By noon, though, Frank Miller (Ian MacDonald), a man Kane once put away for murder who’s been freed, will arrive in town to get his revenge. Puts a bit of a damper on your big day.
Grace Kelly1 begs Kane to run—“you’re retired, Will! you just married Grace Kelly, Will!”—but he won’t, saying he must protect his town and finish what he started. And he continues to believe that even as a he discovers that no one in the town will stand alongside him to fight. Here’s what the cowardly judge says:
Look, this is just a dirty little village in the middle of nowhere. Nothing that happens here is really important. Get out.
But Will Kane disagrees. Duty, aging, and what it means to be a man: yeah, those are the themes of many Westerns, but this is the one that does it best. Kane loses everything in the hour before noon: his new wife, his deputies, his friends. He knows his life is probably next and approaches the inevitable with restraint and calm, all alone. It’s a magnificent performance, one rich with masculine grace and surprising vulnerability.
Then there’s a big dumb gunfight and Will Kane and Grace Kelly live happily ever after, the end.
Rating: Easy 10/102
Cast and Crew
Gary Cooper, hoo boy. Another legend we’re catching towards the end of his career—but what a career. Cooper was a strong, silent type who played characters who were tested as they stood by what they believed in. Jeopardy wants you to be able to say the names of many of his movies; some answers and questions are below.
“Helen Hayes starred with Gary Cooper in this Hemingway war classic”: A Farewell to Arms, from 1932 (though heads up, he also starred in For Whom the Bell Tolls with Ingrid Bergman in 1943)
“In this film, Gary Cooper portrayed a tuba player from Mandrake Falls who inherits $20 million”: Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, from 1936
“Cooper won an Oscar for playing this WWI sergeant”: Sgt. York. The 1941 film is about Alvin York, a Medal of Honor winner who led an attack on a machine gun nest and killed 25 during the Meuse-Argonne offensive.
“A classic Gary Cooper film is called ‘Meet’ him”: Meet John Doe, from 1941. Newspaper columnist Barbara Stanwyck publishes a letter about a fake homeless man and hires a real one to pose as him when the story blows up.
“This movie in which Gary Cooper starred as Lou Gehrig got nominations in 2 writing categories”: the hagiography The Pride of the Yankees, from 1942, a year before Gehrig died
“Quaker author Jessamyn West’s 1st novel, it was made into a film about Quakers starring Gary Cooper”: Friendly Persuasion, from 1956, about Quakers in Indiana having their pacifist beliefs tested by the Civil War3
And there’s more! He cowboyed it up as The Virginian (1929)4, played Wild Bill Hickok in The Plainsman (1936), served in the Foreign Legion in Beau Geste (1939), discovered spaghetti in The Adventures of Marco Polo (1938), and espoused Objectivist claptrap in The Fountainhead (1949). But, beyond the laundry list of his roles, what you can see is that Gary Cooper often played the ideal American hero—but one who must pay a hefty price for his ideals.
Lloyd Bridges, the father of Beau and Jeff, played the cowardly deputy marshal in High Noon. His biggest role came later, in the action-adventure TV show “Sea Hunt,” which was on from 1958 to 1961. It was a procedural about a former Navy “frogman,” or combat diver, who now does freelance diving. Bridges also had supporting roles in goofy ‘80s and ‘90s comedies like Airplane!5 and Hot Shots.
Lon Chaney, Jr., the son of Lon Chaney, the “man of a thousand faces,” played the former marshal in an absolutely devastating scene. Will comes to him for help, saying “you’ve been a law man all your life.” The erstwhile marshal replies:
Yeah, all my life. It’s a great life. You risk your skin catching killers and juries turn them loose so they can come back and shoot at you again. If you’re honest, you’re poor your whole life. In the end you wind up dying all alone on some dirty street. For what? For nothing. For a tin star.
And yet Will Kane persists. This is such a good movie.
Lee Van Cleef plays one of Frank Miller’s gang. He’s best known as a star of two of the Sergio Leone Spaghetti Westerns (For A Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly) and this one Primus song. He famously said that “Being born with a pair of beady eyes was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
Sheb Wooley is another of the gang. Beyond High Noon, he was also in the Clint Eastwood TV Western “Rawhide,” on from 1959 to 1965. He’s best known for reaching #1 on the pop charts with the novelty song “The Purple People Eater.” Amazingly, he’s also the guy who did the Wilhelm scream, which has been used in over 200 films.
The Trivia
When Will walks into the church, the parson is reading from the book of Malachi (“for, behold, the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven; and all the proud, yea, and all…”). That book is canonically the last of the twelve minor prophets, which also makes it the last book of the Old Testament. The twelve minor prophets are only distinguished from the four major prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel) by length, not by any subjective ranking of their quality, so don’t feel too bad for Malachi and his eleven buddies.
In church, the choir is singing the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” I’ve linked to some trash in this post so far6 but I find this song really, really moving. You should know that it was written by the abolitionist writer Julia Ward Howe and that it was based on the soldiers’ song “John Brown’s Body.” The song provides the titles of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” and John Updike’s “In the Beauty of the Lilies.” Seriously, this song is like 100 times better than “The Purple People Eater.”
Tex Ritter sings the song that refrains throughout High Noon. Tex Ritter is the father of John Ritter (of “Three’s Company” and “8 Simple Rules” fame) and grandfather of Jason Ritter (on “Parenthood” and a voice on the animated show “Gravity Falls”). Tex was a country music and TV star, but his most famous role was in the 1931 play “Green Grow the Lilacs” that was adapted into “Oklahoma!”
Odds and Ends
Will’s new wife is a Quaker; the Quakers, also known as the Religious Society of Friends, were started by George Fox and hold the belief that anyone can have a personal relationship with God…the movie was based on John Cunningham’s short story “The Tin Star”…the 2000 film Shanghai Noon is related to High Noon in name only…amazingly, High Noon didn’t win Best Picture; it lost out in a major upset to The Greatest Show on Earth, which is now considered one of the worst films to have ever won the award.
Yes, I’m sure Grace Kelly’s character has a name, but really, the whole time you’re watching the movie, you’re like, “oh hey, that’s Grace Kelly, what’s she doing in this dusty old Western.” Anyway, this is just Kelly’s second Hollywood role, but we’ll dive into her story in 1954 when she goes and wins an Oscar.
And if you want your movie to be more than popcorn entertainment, High Noon also plays as a straight allegory about the Red Scare. It’s a nice bonus, but the movie is a 10 even without it.
Jessamyn West was Richard Nixon’s second cousin. Nixon was one of our two Quaker presidents; the other was Herbert Hoover.
We covered Owen Wister, author of the novel that The Virginian was based on, in our post on The Magnificent Yankee, because a fictionalized version of Wister was that film’s narrator.
He was the one who picked the wrong week to quit amphetamines.
Seriously, “The Purple People Eater” stinks. I’m sorry if you clicked on that.