I have already told you that I am not a Communist.
In the days before he was due to testify, Carl Foreman had a persistent daydream: that he would enter the witness stand as Abraham Lincoln, with a shawl around his shoulders and a wart on his cheek, and deliver a glorious burst of folksy eloquence that would shame the committee and trigger a standing ovation, putting an end to the madness of the Hollywood inquisition.
Reality was far less noble. Carl and Sidney Cohn spent the weekend prepping for his testimony, while the cast and crew of High Noon finished their work week on Saturday and prepared to fly up to the town of Sonora, 320 miles to the north, for a week of location shooting. With the project he had worked on so intensely removed from his sight, and the hearings bearing down on him, Carl suddenly felt alone and afraid. The career he had worked so hard to build was unraveling and there was nothing he could do to stop it. It was as if High Noon were truly happening to him.
The only person he could turn to for comfort was his wife, Estelle. They made love Sunday night and it was better than it had been in years. “We were together,” he would recall. “We were joined.”
Early Monday morning, Carl dressed in a dark blue suit and what he called “a very sincere tie.” He picked up Cohn at the hotel and the two men drove to the Federal Building on East Temple Street in downtown Los Angeles, an imposingly gray and impersonal rectangle of concrete and glass with stripes of dark windows running up the sides that from a distance looked not unlike prison bars. They took the elevator up to the fifth floor; in Room 518 five microphones bristled from a polished tabletop near the front facing the committee members. Carl sat down and took a quick sip of water.
Frank Tavenner started with the basics: where and when was Carl born, where had he gone to school, when did he move to Los Angeles and what were his various jobs and screen credits there, and what was he working on now? Carl gave a quick plug to High Noon—and a backward swipe at the committee—describing the film as “the story of a town that died because it lacked the moral fiber to withstand aggression.”
“It is a suspense story,” he told Tavenner, “and I hope it will be a good one.”
Then Tavenner cited Martin Berkeley’s recent testimony that Carl was a member of the Communist Party. Was it true? Carl consulted with Sid Cohn, then declined to answer, invoking both the First and Fifth Amendments. “However, I should like to say this—”
Tavenner first cut him off—“I asked you no further question”—then changed gears: “I think I should give you the opportunity to answer.” It was a far cry from the aggressive handling of earlier witnesses. The committee clearly was learning the benefits of appearing to be courteous in public.
Carl explained that on September 11, 1950, he had voluntarily signed an oath as a member of the executive board of the Screen Writers Guild pledging that he was not a member of the Communist Party, nor of any organization dedicated to the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. “That statement was true at that time, sir, and is true today.”
It was a convoluted way of saying he hadn’t been a party member for at least a year; Tavenner immediately sought clarification. What about between 1945 and 1950? he asked.
Carl declined to answer on the same grounds as before.
Did you surrender your party membership while you were in the Armed Forces?
“I have already told you that I am not a Communist…”
Did you rejoin the party after you left the Army?
“I decline to answer that…”
Were you a member of the Communist Party while you taught screenwriting at the People’s Educational Center?
“I decline to answer…”
Had Carl at any time renounced his party membership?
“I have never admitted that I was a member of the Communist Party.”
Do you deny it now?
“I decline to answer…”
Carl was fencing with Tavenner and it was a dangerous game. He could be charged with contempt of Congress for his partial answers and selective use of the Fifth Amendment. And of course, his failure to fully cooperate would almost certainly land him on the blacklist.
Bill Wheeler was sitting next to Tavenner and whispering in his ear. The next question: Had there been conflict within the Screen Writers Guild between Communists and anti-Communists?
Carl said he really didn’t know because in the days before the war, “I was a very unimportant guy in Hollywood and in the guild as well.”
Tavenner asked Carl to speak louder. Carl again reached for a glass of water.
Didn’t you violently oppose the Screen Writers Guild loyalty oath?
Carl said yes, but so had many other guild members. “When the resolution was finally written to my satisfaction, I voted in favor.”
Tavenner pressed on. How many members of the guild were also members of the Communist Party?
Carl declined to answer.
Representative Clyde Doyle took over. Doyle, who fashioned himself a man of sweet reason, reminded Carl that the committee’s stated mission was to investigate subversive activities. He understood why Carl did not want to snitch on others, Doyle said, “but how about yourself, can’t you help us from your experience to make this study?”
Carl said it was a fair question, and he added, “I hope you will believe this: if I knew anyone who now or ever had treasonous intentions toward the United States of America and its form of government or its Constitution, I would consider it not only my duty but my privilege to report it to the nearest authorities.”
Doyle said his son had been killed in the war and he honored every person who had served in the military, as Carl had. But he said he had learned too much about the perfidy of Communists to honor any of them. “Foreman, we know of your great ability and your splendid service to the Armed Forces … leave names out if you will, as far as my questions are concerned … [but] what do you know about the functions of the Communist Party, if anything, that would help us get at the problem? Is that a fair question?”
But Carl wouldn’t bite. He fell back on pleading patriotism. “I am an American, I was born here and I love this country. I love it as much as any man on this committee.”
Doyle ran out of time. The soft sell hadn’t worked. Now Donald L. Jackson, a former Marine and former journalist, took over with a more aggressive approach. “How many known or self-admitted Communists are members of the Screen Writers Guild?”
“I wouldn’t have any idea, sir.”
Jackson, who had replaced Richard M. Nixon on the committee after Nixon’s election to the Senate, asked why Carl had opposed a loyalty oath for guild members.
He had, said Carl, because he believed the United States was engaged in a war of ideas with the Soviet Union and for America to win that struggle, people must be free to express themselves. “I have a feeling that the imposition of oaths somehow smacks of police state methods and I kind of don’t like it.”
Jackson then went for the patriotic jugular. Wasn’t Foreman aware that every one of the eighty thousand Americans killed or wounded in Korea had taken such an oath?
Carl pointed out again that he himself had ultimately taken the oath. He had no problem with oaths, so long as they were voluntary.
The two men were talking past each other. Jackson dismissed Carl as untrustworthy. “I personally will place no credence in the testimony of any witness who is not prepared to come before this committee and fully cooperate,” he declared.
Jackson read an editorial from Saturday’s Herald Express, a Hearst paper, praising the committee’s “splendid job” and honoring the late screenwriter James McGuinness—he had died in December 1950—and fellow members of the Motion Picture Alliance who had fought against Communism. Representative Francis Walter chimed in, saying it was “very, very disturbing” to hear that some of the committee’s most passionate supporters were now being blacklisted by Communist sympathizers for their pro-American views.
Carl didn’t hesitate to challenge this. “Mr. Walter, please don’t be disturbed,” he replied, “because that information is absolutely incorrect.” He pointed out that he was soon to produce a picture that starred Adolphe Menjou and was directed by Edward Dmytryk and that Gary Cooper was starring in his current picture, High Noon—all of them associated with the Alliance. “Really, sir, you have been misinformed,” he told Walter.
Jackson jumped back in. “Do you think that Mr. Dmytryk was doing the American thing, the right thing, in coming before this committee and giving us the benefit of his knowledge regarding Communism and Communist activities?”
Carl dodged and weaved. “I don’t think it is very important as to what I think, Mr. Jackson. I think it is important to Mr. Dmytryk what he thinks.”
Charles Potter came next, expressing his disappointment that Carl was withholding information. Once again, Carl fell back on his record of personal loyalty and patriotism, citing the honorary membership he had been given by the Paralyzed War Veterans of America for The Men.
“I am afraid, Mr. Foreman, that they are disappointed in your testimony today,” Potter replied.
By now the hearing had drifted into a near-comatose slump. It was a dispiriting ritual. The committee had tried to entice Carl to be a good American and come clean, and when he refused, they had tried to shame him. Carl had been polite and deferential, and he had spiritedly defended his own patriotism, but he had ducked all the key questions. He had not uttered one word of criticism of Communism. All he would concede for the record was that he wasn’t a Communist now, and hadn’t been one in 1950 when he signed the Screen Writers Guild loyalty oath. There would be no Larry Parks moment of truth.
“The witness is excused,” concluded Chairman Wood. It had only taken an hour. Carl headed home to Brentwood.
The house was flooded with telegrams, flowers, and phone calls of support. Someone even sent over a box of glassware addressed to The Home of the Brave. Carl felt exhausted, but there was no sense of relief either for him or for Estelle. They both knew the crisis wasn’t over. Estelle was exhausted as well, so in the evening she stayed home while Carl’s buddy John Weaver drove him to Union Station, where he boarded the night train to Sonora. He spent Tuesday on the set. The morning headlines were relatively mild. The Los Angeles Examiner led with Walter’s allegation that former Communists who had informed on the party were being blacklisted by movie producers and employment agencies. It quoted Carl as denying the allegation, which made him look like he was speaking on behalf of opponents of the committee, a role he had no desire to be cast in.
Back in Hollywood, the Kramer people met with Harry Cohn’s crew of executives at Columbia to assess the damage that Carl’s invocation of the Fifth Amendment had caused. This wasn’t the first time they had been embarrassed politically. Two months earlier, Sam Katz had learned that Joseph Losey, a talented young director who had just been offered a three-picture deal to help the Kramer Company with the growing load of films, was to receive a HUAC subpoena. Katz had told Losey he would have to sign a loyalty oath before the deal could go through. Losey had fled to Europe instead.
The understanding that Stanley and Carl had reached before he testified now went out the window. After the meeting, Columbia issued a statement in Stanley’s name. “There is a total disagreement between Carl Foreman and myself,” it read. “Interests and obligations involved are far greater than his or those of this company,” Stanley added, somewhat cryptically. Therefore, the shareholders and directors would meet as soon as possible, and “necessary action will be taken at that time.”
PARTNER TURNS ON RELUCTANT FILM QUIZ WITNESS read the headline in the Washington Post, an accurate if brutal summation.
When reporters reached him in Sonora, Carl refused to comment. He called the office in Los Angeles, but he was told that Stanley, George Glass, and Sam Katz were all out of town and unavailable to talk to him.
In his letter of September 14, twelve days earlier, Stanley had pledged that neither side would issue public statements about Carl’s status with the company without first informing and obtaining the consent of the other.
“They didn’t wait the sixty days,” Carl would recall. “They quit right then and there and threw me to the wolves.”
In one sense, Carl was lucky: the committee had quietly decided not to seek to prosecute witnesses who had selectively invoked the Fifth Amendment. But there was the blacklist to contend with. Two days later, after the committee adjourned its Hollywood session for the fall, the Motion Picture Industry Council announced that twenty-eight “unfriendly” witnesses would face industry sanctions in keeping with its policy of “repudiating those who did not cooperate with the committee.” The council had been set up by Dore Schary and fellow studio executives three years earlier to protect the industry’s public image by helping enforce the Waldorf Statement’s ban against employing subversives. It didn’t list the names of the newly targeted twenty-eight, but Carl’s was one of them. His old friend and mentor was now one of his persecutors.
When Sidney Cohn finally reached Sam Zagon, Stanley Kramer’s lawyer, he accused the Kramer Company of breaking their word to Carl. Zagon replied, “Well, it’s obvious that he’s got to go.”
While Carl was testifying that Monday, Fred Zinnemann and the High Noon cast and crew flew to Sonora on a chartered DC-3. Everyone seemed to relax once they landed in the cool foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, far removed from the smog-drenched heat and toxic politics of Los Angeles. “The northern California countryside was ravishingly beautiful,” Fred would recall. “It was great to be in the open from dawn to dusk.”
But the first morning on location, disaster nearly struck. Floyd Crosby and Fred set out to shoot one of the key moments in the High Noon narrative—the arrival at noon of the train carrying the newly released Frank Miller. The empty train tracks symbolizing the threat to come were one of Fred’s three cherished visual elements, and he wanted to film the train’s appearance in the most powerful possible way. He and Crosby decided to position the camera between the two rails to capture the approaching train head-on, starting as a distant dot on the horizon and culminating with the engine coming to a screeching halt within inches of the camera. Both Floyd and Fred were on their stomachs behind the camera tracking the locomotive as it grew larger and larger in the viewfinder. “It looked beautiful,” Fred recalled, “moving rapidly with white smoke billowing. Then it let out black smoke, which looked even better. What we didn’t know was that this was a signal that the engine’s brakes were failing.”
With the engine bearing down on them, Crosby and his assistant tried to snatch the camera out of the way but the tripod’s hooks got caught on one of the rails. Both he and the assistant—and Fred, who was standing just behind them—jumped to safety at the last possible moment. The camera was crushed by the oncoming locomotive, but the film magazine remained miraculously intact. The exposed film was saved, and the shot appeared in the movie. But it cost eight thousand dollars to replace the camera.
Carl’s arrival gave him and Fred a chance to again review one of the more difficult decisions they faced during the film shoot. Carl’s script contained a subplot involving a second deputy named Toby. In “The Tin Star,” John Cunningham’s short story, Toby is the sheriff’s loyal main deputy. Carl used the same character in his screenplay, but his version puts Toby out of town bringing in a prisoner while the main story is taking place. Toby is in a hurry to get back to Hadleyville to attend Kane’s wedding, but he is unaware that Frank Miller is returning on the noon train and so he has a limited sense of urgency.
Carl wrote three short scenes, scattered through the screenplay. In the first, Toby cuts the rawhide thong around the prisoner’s hands to enable him to smoke. In the second scene, the prisoner hits Toby on the head with a rock and tries to escape but is overcome by Toby and knocked unconscious. In the third scene, Toby and the recaptured prisoner arrive at a stagecoach station, where Toby ties him to a hitching post, goes inside, and reacquaints himself with a sultry young Mexican woman he has met before. He decides to linger there for beer and seduction under the assumption that he has already missed the wedding and doesn’t need to hurry back to town.
Carl and Fred have both maintained that they added the subplot scenes for “protection” because they feared the film might otherwise feel too claustrophobic and intense. “People go to a Western expecting to see a lot of vistas and things like that,” Carl recalled. “We wanted a safety valve. Suppose we were wrong? One must have conviction, agreed, but I think there are valid cases for protection takes.”
“Stanley liked it, Fred liked it, everybody liked it.”
The three scenes were scheduled to be filmed outside Sonora near the end of the location shoot, but Fred claimed they were never completed because the weather turned bad while the fight scene was being shot on the day before they were due to return to Hollywood. Fred insisted that he had hated the subplot because it “destroyed the unity of time and place which was so enormously important,” and stalled the relentless action of the film. Both Fred and Carl said the scenes were never intended to be used, and Fred insisted they had abandoned the scenes after two or three attempts. But film editor Elmo Williams claims they shot the entire sequence of three scenes and that he included it in the director’s master cut at Fred’s request.
In fact, says Roberta Haynes, the actress who played the young Mexican woman and who is likely the last surviving member of the cast, all three scenes were completed. The shooting schedule backs her up; it shows that two and a half days were devoted to the three scenes—September 28 and 29 and October 1. And Carl supports Williams’s claim that Fred included them in the director’s cut made immediately after the film shoot was completed. Later on, as we’ll see, the fate of the three scenes took on great importance when High Noon was edited.
The last day on location was devoted to filming the fight scene between Will Kane and Harvey Pell in the livery stable. Lloyd Bridges says Gary Cooper was reluctant to do the scene because his back was hurting and he had other physical ailments as well. But in the end he decided to perform it without a stunt double.
Before the filming began, Bridges smuggled his wife, Dorothy, and seven-year-old son, Beau, who were visiting the set, up to a hayloft to watch. Lloyd explained to Beau that it would be a pretend fistfight and no one would get hurt. But when at the end Cooper threw a bucket of water on Beau’s supposedly unconscious dad, the boy burst out laughing. “My father did not tell me he was going to get knocked out,” recalled Beau, himself now a highly respected actor, more than sixty years later. “Then Cooper goes over and throws a bucket of water on him, and I wasn’t ready for that. And I just lost it and started cackling and laughing and I destroyed the shot.”
The two men had to film the entire fight scene again. Cooper never uttered a word of complaint.
Beau said his father bawled him out all the way back to the hotel, but when Cooper got on the elevator with them he invited Lloyd and his family to join him for dinner. “He was a sweet man,” Lloyd Bridges would recall.
Cooper in general was relaxed and friendly on the set. Roberta Haynes noticed how easygoing and informal he was, and she got to know him better the following year when she worked with him on Return to Paradise, which was filmed in Samoa. “He was wonderful to work with and very cooperative,” she recalls. “He was very private but he never played the big star. I loved working scenes with him.” As for his reputation as a lady-killer, Haynes said he never was anything other than a gentleman to her. “In fact, he said to me I shouldn’t feel bad if he didn’t make a pass at me because he was on [medication] for his ulcers.”
Grace Kelly, who arrived from Denver a few days before rehearsals began, never seemed to fit in with the rest of the cast and crew. She looked uncomfortable and seemed unfriendly. Fred Zinnemann recalled that she seemed “tense and remote,” but he wasn’t displeased, because her stiffness served her in the role of the troubled new bride who felt betrayed by her husband’s insistence on confronting the Miller gang.
Gary Cooper was more kind. “I knew this: she was very serious about her work and had her eyes and ears open,” he would tell Hedda Hopper after the film shoot was completed. “She was trying to learn, you could see that. You can tell if a person really wants to be an actress. She was one of those people you could get that feeling about and she was very pretty. It didn’t surprise me when she was a big success.”
“I also feel like she fills a much needed gap in motion pictures,” Cooper added, offering his professional opinion as a longtime connoisseur of beautiful women and their capacity for passion. “It’s been quite a few years since we had a girl in pictures that looked like she was born on the right side of Park Avenue. Looks like she could be a cold dish with a man until you got her pants down and then she’d explode.”
For her part, Kelly expressed warm feelings about Cooper as well. “He’s the one who taught me to relax during a scene and let the camera do some of the work,” she would recall. “On the stage you have to emote not only for the front rows, but for the balcony too, and I’m afraid I overdid it. He taught me the camera is always in the front row, and how to take it easy.”
The warm feelings articulated by Kelly and Cooper led many people on the set to conclude they were having an affair. Cooper, after all, was famous for sleeping with his female costars as if it were a contractual obligation, and Kelly would soon acquire a reputation for the same kind of sexual conduct. For several years after High Noon, she was reputed to have slept with various of her leading men, including Clark Gable, William Holden, Ray Milland, and Bing Crosby. “Grace almost always laid the leading man,” novelist Gore Vidal once claimed. “She was famous for that in this town.”
When Patricia Neal visited Cooper on the Sonora location, she noticed that Kelly studiously ignored her. “I was used to being snubbed in public, but this I couldn’t figure,” Neal writes. “Unless she felt I was competition.”
She finally asked Cooper, “Is Grace interested in you?”
“Nope, I think she’s set her cap for Freddie,” Cooper replied. But Neal adds, “He wasn’t totally convincing.” She didn’t ask him again.
Grace’s parents, who must have had an inkling about the dangers their beautiful, love-starved daughter faced in Hollywood, dispatched her eighteen-year-old sister, Lizanne, to live with her at the Chateau Marmont during the film shoot and act as a junior chaperone and all-around wet blanket. When Cooper took Grace for a drive in his silver Jaguar in search of a good meal, Lizanne reportedly would squeeze herself into the back of the two-seater and tag along.
The problem with the tales of Grace Kelly’s promiscuity is not only that there’s no reliable way to verify them, but that they all fit a certain template. Sex in Hollywood, as anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker noted in her 1950 study The Dream Factory, was often a joyless, hollow, and transactional exercise, with older, powerful men exploiting younger, attractive women. “It’s good to be skeptical,” says film historian Jeanine Basinger. “When you spend time in Hollywood here’s what you hear: number one, all the men were gay, and number two, all the women were nymphomaniacs. It was how men talked about women and nobody thought much about it.”
Roberta Haynes, who was an attractive brunette with aspirations of stardom, recalls being chased around the office by producer Jerry Wald, who was almost twice her age. But when it comes to Grace Kelly, Haynes believes Cooper was telling the truth. She recalls seeing Grace sitting on Fred Zinnemann’s lap on the film set several times during their week in Sonora and concluding they were having an affair.
If so, they weren’t the only ones. Roberta also contends that Carl Foreman and Katy Jurado were sleeping together during the location shoot, although Jurado stayed away when Estelle Foreman arrived in Sonora for a visit. Carl himself made a teasing reference to helping Jurado with her English during the film shoot. “I used to work with her a lot,” he recalled. “That was very pleasant.”
Despite her lack of English language skills, Jurado’s performance captivated Zinnemann, Foreman, and Kramer. She fit their fantasies of the smoldering, dark-skinned, Latina sexpot, and her sneer and her arrogance, mixed with a certain vulnerability enhanced by her hesitant pronunciation, made her perfect for the role of the proud but humbled businesswoman. “I wanted a Mexican gal and she had a fire and a thing for it and I think she was wonderful,” Stanley would recall.
Although High Noon was only her second American film, twenty-four-year-old María Cristina Estella Marcela Jurado García was already a full-fledged movie star in Mexico. The film that made her famous was Nosotros los Pobres (“We, the Poor”), one of the greatest of Mexican epic melodramas about the urban poor, released in 1948. After High Noon, she would go on to dozens more Hollywood pictures, usually playing a Native American or “half-breed.” She was nominated for an Academy Award for playing the Comanche wife of Spencer Tracy’s character in Broken Lance (1954). In Stay Away Joe (1968) she played Elvis Presley’s half-Apache mother. “I love to act any character at all,” she once told Louella Parsons. “But just once I would like to be my Mexican self in an American motion picture.”
After the film shoot was over, Grace Kelly complained about her own performance. Ever the perfectionist, she compared herself with withering disapproval to one of Hollywood’s most accomplished stars. “You look into Gary Cooper’s face and you see everything he’s thinking,” she said. “I looked into my own face and I saw nothing.”
Grace felt that Fred Zinnemann had not been helpful professionally, despite his infatuation with her. “I couldn’t get the kind of direction from him that I needed as a neophyte, and I wasn’t equipped enough for moviemaking at that time to do it for myself,” she recalled. “After I saw the finished picture, I was horrified! I remember thinking, ‘Well, this poor girl may never make it unless she does something very quickly.’ I rushed back to New York and started taking classes again with Sandy Meisner,” her highly regarded acting teacher.
Fred confessed that he had difficulty working with people he didn’t think were talented. Not being an actor himself, he believed his role was to help free performers to do their most creative work. “All I do is use my instinct for casting and let the actors feel that I trust them and have respect for them, and encourage them,” he said. But “if by some chance I get a mediocre actor, I get very frustrated.”
Grace Kelly, apparently, was a mediocre actor by Fred Zinnemann’s demanding standards.
The cast and crew returned to Hollywood on October 3 with just a week of shooting left and began filming the scenes in Helen’s hotel room at Motion Picture Center Studios the following day. Two days later they returned to the Columbia Ranch in Burbank to put the finishing touches on the climactic showdown, including the final shoot-out between Will Kane and Frank Miller.
Much of the gunfight had been staged at the ranch before the film company had gone to Sonora. Fred’s highly detailed notes make clear that the creation of the sequence was an elaborate collaborative effort, involving not just Fred and Carl but also Stanley Kramer, production designer Rudolph Sternad, and composer Dimitri Tiomkin. Then Fred and Sternad roughed out a series of sketches showing every shot Fred would need and the relation of each camera cut to the ones that came directly before and after. “Thanks to this exact pre-planning, the actual production time was reduced very considerably,” Fred writes. The High Noon creative machine was humming.
The shoot-out had to be plausible and exciting, and it had to end with one live marshal and four dead gunmen.
The solution that they came up with was a perfect fit. In the opening segment Will Kane is able to shoot and kill Ben Miller, Frank’s impulsive younger brother played by Sheb Wooley, after Ben inadvertently alerts Kane by breaking a shop window and taking a woman’s bonnet. This reckless act allows the marshal to get the drop on him. It’s a highly appropriate fate for Ben, an arrogant man-child whose undisciplined act of petty thievery gets him killed.
In the second segment, Kane manages to kill Jack Colby, played by Lee Van Cleef, after the gunman blunders into the livery stable where Kane has taken cover, leaving himself exposed and an easy target. We know almost nothing about Colby, who has no speaking lines in the film, except that he plays the harmonica and seems bored and impatient as he waits for his vengeful boss’s train to arrive. His impatience proves fatal. Two bad guys down, two to go.
Amy, Kane’s estranged new bride, is sitting with Helen Ramirez on the soon-to-depart train when she hears the gunfire. Fearing the worst, she leaps from her seat and rushes wildly up the main street. She comes across a dead body that she fears is her husband’s until she gets close enough to see it’s one of the gunmen (Ben Miller). She then makes her way to the nearby marshal’s office, where she reads Kane’s last will and testament. Meanwhile, Kane is pinned down in the livery stable by the two remaining gunmen, Frank Miller and Jim Pierce. They hurl burning lanterns into the barn to smoke him out. He turns loose the horses inside and climbs on one as they stampede from the burning barn. Miller and Pierce give chase and trap Kane inside the saloon, where he faces another cross fire. Pierce has his back to the marshal’s office; Amy grabs the gun that an angry Harvey Pell had left hanging on a hook and shoots Pierce in the back through the window. Seeing what has happened, Miller seizes Amy and marches her out into the street with a gun to her head, forcing Kane to come out as well. Amy wildly reaches up and claws at Miller’s face, and as he throws her to the ground Kane opens fire, killing him. These last two killings not only are plausibly staged, but they restore the partnership and the trust between Kane and his new wife. The two have confronted terrible danger and survived, and they share a quality no one else in Hadleyville possesses: courage.
It took three days to finish shooting the gunfight at the Columbia Ranch, leaving three more days for filming back at Motion Picture Center Studios. The last day was October 11.
The proof of Fred Zinnemann’s relentless efficiency came in dollar signs: he completed High Noon in the allotted thirty-two days at the budgeted amount of $790,000. Meanwhile, at a nearby film set, his good friend George Stevens was making his own classic Western: Shane, admittedly a far more visually sumptuous film, shot in Technicolor largely on location in picturesque Jackson Hole, Wyoming. It took seventy-five days to shoot—twenty-seven above what had originally been scheduled—at a cost of $2.9 million.
Afterward, Carl held a modest wrap party for the cast and crew. It felt a little like a wake. Stanley Kramer, Sam Katz, and George Glass all stayed away. “One or two secretaries and a few of the production staff at the Columbia offices dropped in, but no one else,” Carl recalled.