High Noon

• 1. Introduction

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  High Noon opens on a town marshal who has just gotten married and is minutes away from a peaceful retirement when word arrives that a killer named Frank Miller is on the noon train. The year is 1952. The film is American. The director is Fred Zinnemann. And from the moment Marshal Will Kane receives that news in the small New Mexico Territory town of Hadleyville, the clock becomes the story.

  What makes High Noon unusual is not the gunfight at its center. It is everything that happens before the guns come out. Kane spends most of the film not fighting but asking for help, and being refused. By friend after friend, deputy, judge, congregation, and neighbor. The question the film plants in the listener's mind is a simple one: what does it mean to do the right thing when no one will stand beside you?

  The film was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won four, including Best Actor for Gary Cooper. It was selected by the Library of Congress in 1989 as one of the first 25 films preserved in the United States National Film Registry. It sparked a fierce political controversy before it was even released, because its screenwriter, Carl Foreman, had been summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee during production. And it became a Solidarity election poster in Poland in 1989, the image of Cooper armed with a ballot rather than a gun greeting voters on the day of the first partially free elections in communist Poland.

• 2. One Man, No Posse

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  Kane's rounds through Hadleyville form the moral spine of the film. Judge Percy Mettrick, who had sentenced Frank Miller to prison in the first place, flees town and urges Kane to do the same. Harvey Pell, Kane's own deputy, tells Kane he will help only if Kane recommends him to the city council as the next marshal. When Kane refuses, Pell turns in his badge and his pistol.

  At Ramirez's saloon and at the local church, Kane's attempt to raise a posse meets fear and hostility. Some townspeople worry a gunfight will hurt Hadleyville's reputation. Others, the film suggests, were friends of Miller's. Some resent Kane for cleaning up the town at all. Others simply say it is not their fight. Sam Fuller hides in his house and has his wife tell Kane he is not home.

  Martin Howe, Kane's own predecessor as marshal, is too old and arthritic to help. A man named Herb Baker agrees to be deputized, then backs out when he realizes he is the only volunteer. The one offer Kane cannot bring himself to accept comes from 14-year-old Johnny. Kane admires the boy's courage and turns him away.

  The film's screenwriter Carl Foreman drew on John W. Cunningham's 1947 short story "The Tin Star" for the core premise of an aging lawman facing a dangerous murderer without support. That source story, and what Foreman built from it, would soon draw attention well beyond Hollywood.

• 3. The HUAC Shadow

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  In 1951, while High Noon was in production, Carl Foreman was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. The committee was investigating what it called "Communist propaganda and influence" in the motion picture industry. Foreman had once been a member of the Communist Party. He declined to name fellow members or anyone he suspected of current membership, and the committee labeled him an "uncooperative witness".

  The consequences were swift. His production partner Stanley Kramer demanded an immediate dissolution of their partnership. Foreman remained on the project because he was a signatory to the production loan, but before the film reached theaters, he sold his share to Kramer and left for Britain. He knew there would be no further work for him in the United States. Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn, MPA president John Wayne, and Los Angeles Times gossip columnist Hedda Hopper all applied pressure to blacklist him.

  Kramer later said he had ended the partnership because Foreman threatened to falsely name him as a Communist to HUAC. Foreman said Kramer had feared damage to his own career through guilt by association. Victor Navasky, author of Naming Names, told a reporter that a 2002 documentary based on Foreman's own 1952 letter to film critic Bosley Crowther seemed "one-sided, and the problem is it makes a villain out of Stanley Kramer, when it was more complicated than that".

  John Wayne, then MPA president, saw Foreman's screenplay as an obvious allegory against blacklisting, which Wayne actively supported. He was offered the lead role and refused it. He later told an interviewer that he would "never regret having helped run Foreman out of the country".

• 4. Casting and Cooper

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  After Wayne turned down the role of Will Kane, producer Stanley Kramer offered it to Gregory Peck. Peck declined because he felt the part was too similar to the role he had played in The Gunfighter the year before. He later said he considered refusing High Noon the biggest mistake of his career. Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and Charlton Heston also turned the role down.

  Gary Cooper, Wayne's longtime friend and someone who shared his conservative politics, accepted. Cooper had himself been a friendly witness before HUAC but had not implicated anyone as a suspected Communist, and he later became a vigorous opponent of blacklisting. He wore no makeup for the film, deliberately, to expose his character's fear and anguish on screen. A bleeding ulcer had recently required surgery, and pain from that procedure likely deepened the exhausted look his performance required.

  Cooper was 50 years old during filming. Kramer had cast Grace Kelly, then 21, as Kane's new bride Amy after seeing her in an off-Broadway production. Rumors of a romance between the two during filming remained unsubstantiated. Kelly biographer Donald Spoto found no evidence of anything beyond tabloid gossip.

  Lee Van Cleef made his film debut in High Noon. Kramer had first offered Van Cleef the role of Harvey Pell after seeing him in a touring production of Mister Roberts, on the condition that Van Cleef undergo surgery to alter his nose. Van Cleef refused. He was cast instead as Colby, the only role of his career with no lines of dialogue at all.

  When Cooper won the Academy Award for Best Actor, he was working in Europe. He asked Wayne to accept the Oscar on his behalf. Wayne did, and even managed a joke from the podium about how he wished he had taken the role himself.

• 5. Making the Clock Tick

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  High Noon was filmed in the late summer and early fall of 1951 across several California locations. The opening scenes were shot at Iverson Movie Ranch near Los Angeles. Some town sequences were filmed at Columbia State Historic Park, a preserved Gold Rush mining town near Sonora. Most of the street scenes, however, were shot on the Columbia Movie Ranch in Burbank.

  The church exteriors used St. Joseph's Church in Tuolumne City. The railroad featured in the film was the old Sierra Railroad in Jamestown, a few miles south of Columbia, now known as Railtown 1897 State Historic Park and long nicknamed "the movie railroad" for how often it appeared in productions. The railroad station itself was built specifically for the film, alongside a water tower, at Warnerville, about 15 miles to the southwest.

  The film's central technical achievement was something unusual for a Western: the story plays out in real time. The running time of the narrative almost exactly parallels the running time of the film itself. Frequent close shots of clocks press the pressure of the deadline onto both the characters and the audience. Dimitri Tiomkin's theme song, "Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling," with lyrics by Ned Washington, appears 36 times in the film in various arrangements, functioning as a recurring musical thread that measures the shrinking distance between Kane and noon. The song became a major hit for Tex Ritter on the country-and-western charts, and later a pop hit for Frankie Laine. Tiomkin's score won the Academy Award, and his success with High Noon made him a sought-after composer for westerns throughout the 1950s.

• 6. Reception and Rivalry

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  High Noon earned $3.75 million in theatrical rentals at the North American box office in 1952. Initial reviews were mixed. Critics and audiences expecting the standard Western ingredients of chases, action, and dramatic scenery found them largely replaced by moral dialogue right up until the final scenes. Some critics dismissed the film's climax, in which Amy, a pacifist Quaker, picks up a pistol and shoots a man from behind to save her husband.

  Alfred Hitchcock thought Kelly's performance was "rather mousy" and lacking in animation, saying only her later films revealed her real quality. The Soviet Union criticized the film as a "glorification of the individual". John Wayne's objection was sharper and more personal: he called it "the most un-American thing I've ever seen in my whole life." He and director Howard Hawks made Rio Bravo directly in response. Hawks explained: "I didn't think a good town marshal was going to run around town like a chicken with his head cut off asking everyone to help. And who saves him? His Quaker wife. That isn't my idea of a good Western."

  Zinnemann was unmoved. In a 1973 interview he said: "I'm rather surprised at Hawks' and Wayne's thinking. Sheriffs are people and no two people are alike." He compared the film's moral terrain to A Man for All Seasons.

  On the other side, the film attracted devoted admirers at the highest levels of American politics. Dwight Eisenhower screened it at the White House. Ronald Reagan cited it as his favorite film. Bill Clinton hosted a record 17 White House screenings. Clinton put his response directly: "Not just politicians, but anyone who's forced to go against the popular will. Any time you're alone and you feel you're not getting the support you need, Cooper's Will Kane becomes the perfect metaphor."

• 7. A Ballot and a Badge

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  In 1989, Polish graphic designer Tomasz Sarnecki took Marian Stachurski's 1959 Polish variant of the High Noon poster and transformed it into an election poster for Solidarity. The occasion was the first partially free elections in communist Poland, scheduled for the 4th of June 1989. Sarnecki was 22 years old.

  In the poster, Cooper walks toward the viewer armed not with a gun but with a folded ballot marked "Wybory" - meaning "elections" - held in his right hand. The Solidarity logo is pinned to his vest above the sheriff's badge. The message at the bottom reads "W samo południe: 4 czerwca 1989" - "High Noon: the 4th of June 1989."

  The poster was displayed across Poland. Former Solidarity leader Lech Walesa later wrote that the Communists had tried to ridicule the freedom movement as an invention of the "Wild" West, but the poster achieved the opposite effect. "Cowboys fight for justice, fight against evil, and fight for freedom," Walesa wrote in 2004, "both physical and spiritual. Solidarity trounced the Communists in that election, paving the way for a democratic government in Poland."

  The same year the Solidarity poster appeared, the Library of Congress selected High Noon as one of the first 25 films placed in the United States National Film Registry, recognizing it as culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant. Both events in 1989 pointed to how far a single American film, built around one man walking alone down a dusty street, had traveled from the Columbia Movie Ranch in Burbank.