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Gary Cooper stands alone in High Noon |
Director: Fred Zinnemann
Cast: Gary Cooper (Marshal Will Kane), Grace Kelly (Amy
Fowler Kane), Thomas Mitchell (Mayor Jonas Henderson), Lloyd Bridges (Deputy
Marshal Harvey Pell), Katy Jurado (Helen Ramirez), Otto Kruger (Judge Percy Mettrick),
Lon Chaney Jny (Marshal Martin Howe), Eve McVeagh (Mildred Fuller), Harry
Morgan (Sam Fuller), Morgan Farley (Minister Mahin), Ian MacDonald (Frank
Miller), Lee Van Cleef (Jack Colby)
It’s 10:35 am on the day of the wedding of retiring Marshal
Will Kane (Gary Cooper) to Quaker Amy Fowler (Grace Kelly). It should be the
happiest day of his life – but events are interrupted by news that Frank Miller
(Ian MacDonald), a killer Kane put away, has been released and will arrive on
the midday train with his gang to kill Kane. Kane’s first instinct – and the
town’s – is for Kane to flee the town: but Kane doesn’t want to spend his life
looking over his shoulder, and besides his friends and colleagues in the town
will stand with him right? He decides to make his stand – to the outrage of his
pacifist wife – only to find one-by-one the citizens of the town excuse
themselves from helping Kane. After all, who wants to die?
Playing out like a Western 24, Kane has got a little under 90 minutes to put together a posse
to give himself a fighting chance against these hardened killers. Zinnemann’s
film is full of carefully placed shots of clocks that hammer home the ominous
approach of Kane’s seemingly inevitable death. In a brilliant use of contrasts,
Kane walks with growing desperation in virtually every shot through the
increasingly abandoned town, mixed with clever cut-backs to the Miller gang
waiting patiently at the train station (with deep focus shots of the train
lines stretching on forever) for Miller to arrive and kick off the killing.
Using a wonderful combination of low-angles, tracking shots and one superb crane
shot that pulls out and away to show Kane stranded alone in the abandoned town,
Zinnemann’s film stresses Kane’s isolation, anxiety and growing desperation.
Because Kane is scared. And why shouldn’t he be? He’s
past-his-best and over-the-hill, a long-serving hero on his last day in the
job, outmatched by his opponent. Why on earth wouldn’t he be desperate for
help? John Wayne and Howard Hawks hated the film, loathed its perceived
anti-American-spirit and, most of all, couldn’t stand the idea of a Western
hero being scared and desperate for help. They even made a twist on the film, Rio Bravo, where Wayne played a marshal
turning down any and all help in order to do what a man needs to do alone. For
them that was a Western hero, and
this self-doubting, anxious pussy Kane – the man even cries at one point! – was
an abomination.
Cooper seemed to be no-one’s choice for the film – Heston,
Brando, Fonda, Douglas, Clift and Lancaster all turned it down – but scooped
the Oscar as Kane. Then 51, his obvious age and vulnerability – at one point
Lloyd Bridges almost beats the crap out of him – make him feel even more at
risk from this threat. In a performance devoid of vanity – other than perhaps
Kane landing the radiant (and thirty years younger) Grace Kelly as his wife –
Cooper is sweaty, nervous, twitchy and a mix of All-American duty and genuine
nerves, resentment and terror at what feels almost certain to be his end. Kane
knows why he must do it, but to Wayne’s disgust, he still doesn’t like it.
Carl Foreman, the screenwriter, was to be pulled before the
House of Un-American Activities for his communist sympathies. And the entire
film is pretty clearly a commentary on the McCarthyite era, specifically the
abandonment of those pulled before the house by those who seemed to be their
friends. Like the blacklisted Hollywood writers and actors, Kane opens the film
with admirers and friends all of whom eulogise his greatness and decency: and
all of them turn their back on him as the chips go crumbling down.
Most of the film is given over to Kane desperately going
from ally to ally, only to find that he is offered only platitudes, excuses and
outright cowardice. His deputy demands a recommendation for Kane’s job, and
chucks in his star when Kane refuses. Old friends hide in their houses and
refuse to come out when Kane comes calling. Lon Chaney Jnr’s retired marshal
pleads illness. The judge rides straight out of town and suggests Kane does the
same. At a town meeting in the church, the voices calling to help Kane are few
and far between, and Mayor Thomas Mitchell praises Kane to the skies, before
concluding the town would be better off if he could ride away and not come
back. The one man who volunteers backs down when he finds out no one else has
volunteered, and the only person eager to fight is a 14 year old boy.
So much for loyalty and the American way. When the chips are
down, words mean nothing and it’s the actions that show the man. Customers in
the saloon talk about how life wasn’t that bad when the Millers ruled the town
(to show how wrong this is, literally their first action when riding into town
is to steal something from a milliners). Others moan that all this law
enforcement from Kane has actually made business a bit worse for the town. Why
do the hard thing, why make the stand, when it’s so much easier to just look
down, keep quiet and let the just suffer while your life ticks on.
Cooper’s Kane is masterfully low-key, subtle, using only the
slightest gestures to show deep-rooted, only barely hidden resentment and
bitterness, covering fear. What he’s doing he’d give anything not to do, but he
sees no choice. There is no other Western where the hero writes a will, and
quietly weeps with his head on his hands on his desk. There is no other Western
where the hero spends so long trying to make a manly task easier to do. There
is no other Western where the self-serving cowardice and hypocrisy of the
townsfolk are more blatant. No wonder Cooper – in the final insult for Wayne –
drops his tin star in the dirt at the film’s end, as the townsfolk rush out to
congratulate him on winning the duel. This is a film that looks at America as
it really is – and many people didn’t like that one little bit.
Zinnemann’s direction is spot on, a perfect blend of tension
build and technical mastery, mixed with superb dialogue from Carl Foreman. Not
a word or shot is wasted, and every single character and event is carefully
sketched in, established and build up with no effort at all. Cooper is superb,
Grace Kelly just as good in a thankless role as the humourless Quaker wife who
struggles with her life-long principles against her love for her husband.
Beautifully filmed, with a wonderful score with Dimitri Tiomkin, High Noon is a classic for a reason, a
masterpiece of slow-build and enlightened social commentary.
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