Short answers, pulled from the story.
High Noon follows Marshal Will Kane of Hadleyville, New Mexico Territory, who on his wedding day learns that Frank Miller, an outlaw he sent to prison, is arriving on the noon train with his gang. Kane attempts to raise a posse and is refused by friends, deputies, and townspeople one by one, before facing the gang alone. The story unfolds in real time, with the film's running time nearly matching the time span of the narrative.
High Noon was directed by Fred Zinnemann and the screenplay was written by Carl Foreman, based on a 1947 short story called "The Tin Star" by John W. Cunningham. The film was produced by Stanley Kramer.
High Noon won four Academy Awards out of seven nominations: Best Actor for Gary Cooper, Best Film Editing, Best Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture for Dimitri Tiomkin, and Best Song for "The Ballad of High Noon." It also won four Golden Globe Awards, including Best Actor in a Motion Picture Drama and Best Original Score.
Screenwriter Carl Foreman was summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951 during production, labeled an "uncooperative witness" after declining to name fellow Communist Party members, and subsequently blacklisted. John Wayne, then MPA president, saw the film as an allegory against blacklisting, refused the lead role because of it, and later said he would never regret having helped run Foreman out of the country. Foreman sold his share of the production to Stanley Kramer and left for Britain before the film was released.
John Wayne refused the role of Will Kane because he believed Carl Foreman's screenplay was an obvious allegory against the Hollywood blacklist, which he actively supported. After declining, he later told an interviewer that he would "never regret having helped run Foreman out of the country." Gary Cooper, Wayne's longtime friend, accepted the role instead and won the Academy Award for Best Actor.
In 1989-22-year-old Polish graphic designer Tomasz Sarnecki adapted Marian Stachurski's 1959 Polish variant of the High Noon poster into a Solidarity campaign image for the first partially free elections in communist Poland on the 4th of June 1989. The poster showed Gary Cooper carrying a folded ballot labeled "Wybory" (elections) instead of a gun, with the Solidarity logo pinned to his vest. Former Solidarity leader Lech Walesa wrote in 2004 that the poster had become "the emblem of the battle that we all fought together."