Do not forsake me, oh my darlin’, on this our wedding day …
After the film shoot was finished, Fred Zinnemann and film editor Elmo Williams spent ten days assembling a director’s rough cut, mostly using Fred’s master shots. It was nearly two hours long, according to Williams. And it included the three scenes involving the subplot with Toby the deputy. But under the rules of the game, the final cut belonged not to the director, but to the man whose name topped the company masthead.
Stanley Kramer was deeply dismayed by what he saw. Stanley had never liked the dailies but had been too busy to interfere with what was, to his mind, a minor film for which he had few expectations. But now all of his unhappiness poured out. The rough cut was too long and lacking in tension and excitement, and he intensely disliked it. “I was terribly disappointed when I saw the first cut,” Stanley confirms. “This was not the fault of Williams. Whatever blame there was belongs to me. In that first cut, the picture I had in mind was not what I saw. Maybe it wasn’t too bad, but it wasn’t too good either. Something was missing.”
After this, Williams’s and Stanley’s accounts begin to diverge. According to Williams, a frustrated Kramer didn’t know what to do next. One of Stanley’s earliest jobs in Hollywood had been cutting film, and he took great pride in his editing skills, which he had used on several of the company’s previous films—most especially on Champion, its first and biggest hit. So Stanley was inclined to try to edit High Noon himself, but he had no idea where to begin, or so Williams would later claim. “He intimated to me he was going to take over the picture,” Williams recalled. “He was going to Palm Springs for a week and think about it … And he implied to me maybe they’d change editors too.”
Williams says he pleaded with Stanley to give him a crack at reediting the picture while Stanley was away. “And he kind of reluctantly said, ‘Well, what the hell, go ahead.’”
Williams says he used lots of trims and scraps from the cutting-room floor, shots of the railroad tracks, the ticking clocks, and an empty chair to try to build dramatic tension. “They were pieces of film at the beginning or the ends of takes,” he recalled. He eliminated the three scenes involving Toby, and ruthlessly pared scenes between Grace Kelly and Katy Jurado or between Jurado and Lloyd Bridges. “Every time you left Cooper and his problem the picture lost its tension,” Williams recalled. “And I decided early that that’s where the flaw was in the script.”
Over the years Elmo Williams’s version of his edit became more and more elaborate, even as his memory for details began to recede. In a November 2000 interview when he was eighty-seven, he claimed for the first time that he had filmed new shots of clocks and of the empty chair in the corner of Judge Mettrick’s courtroom. “I went out and shot the inserts myself. I didn’t do the camera work, but I took a cameraman and shot the clocks,” he said.
Stanley returned from Palm Springs but was sidetracked on other matters for several days, giving Williams more time to polish and refine his version. He worked on it until the very last minute, then recruited Harry Gerstad, the company’s supervising editor and Williams’s boss now that Carl Foreman was officially out of the picture, to help him by splicing together pieces of film. They took the finished product to Stanley’s house that evening and showed it to Stanley, his wife, Ann, and George Glass. As the showing began, Williams recalled, “Stanley’s talking to George all the way through it. I thought, Oh Christ … I knew I didn’t have his attention. But by the time the prologue was finished he was quiet … didn’t say another word.” When it ended, “he walked over and shook my hand.”
Everything was fine, said Williams, except he had cut so much that the film was down to sixty-eight minutes, at least twelve minutes short of the required length for a first-run feature film. So Williams went back and restored scenes of Kelly, Jurado, and Bridges.
Over the years Elmo Williams took credit for saving High Noon and regaled journalists and authors with tales of how he had single-handedly turned it into a classic. In his various retellings, he suggested that Fred Zinnemann had been so smitten by Grace Kelly that he had given her far too many scenes, that Gary Cooper’s various aches and pains had rendered his performance wooden and tedious, that Carl Foreman had written and Fred Zinnemann had filmed several peripheral out-of-town subplots, not just one, and that it had been Williams’s idea—not Carl’s or Fred’s—to insert many of the clocks to give the film narrative tension.
“I hate to defend myself, but it was my editing of the film that made it what it was in the end,” Williams said in 2000.
Stanley Kramer mocked Williams’s claim that he had saved High Noon. “Now Elmo was a very good editor, [but] Elmo is not now nor was then the creative brain of our century,” said Stanley in an unpublished 1973 interview. “I think that Elmo’s contribution was that he said why don’t I use the clock and see if I can’t jazz up the thing in juxtaposition to the railroad track. I said absolutely … we should do that.”
But Stanley’s own version of the edit is equally dismissive of Fred and Carl’s work. In essence, Stanley claims it wasn’t Elmo Williams’s editing that saved High Noon but his own. When he saw Fred Zinnemann’s director’s cut, says Stanley, “the idea of the man in the town trying to seek support … was not jarring your teeth as we thought it should.”
“I was certainly aghast,” said Stanley. “There were problems, but I knew what to do with it. I was the one who did the final cut of this film—I alone, and I stand by whatever flaws or virtues the film has to this day.”
Stanley claims it was he, not Williams, who put the emphasis on the ticking clocks. He claims that the director’s cut “had shot a few clock scenes … but not enough of those clock views, I now decided. We put more clocks on tables, walls, mantels, and so on, and shot short takes of them, which we inserted one by one into the film.”
Elmo Williams insists that Stanley Kramer did not edit one frame of the film. “Kramer did not cut a version of the picture,” said Elmo in a 1978 interview with author Lawrence Suid. “I cut the next version, and the next and the next … It was essentially my version of the picture.”
Both Williams’s and Kramer’s conflicting versions of the rescuing of High Noon from creative oblivion deeply outraged Fred Zinnemann and Carl Foreman. Both men insisted that the clocks had always been part of the original script—which adhered faithfully to Carl’s real-time concept driving forward the narrative. Indeed, there are fourteen specific references to clocks and time in Carl’s script, plus four other times when characters look at their pocket watches. Fred added even more shots of clocks, as reflected in his handwritten notes on the film set. What Williams did create was four more quick shots of clocks and pendulums in the dramatic montage of people and scenes at the moment when the whistle blows announcing the arrival of the noon train.
Carl, who left the film entirely by the end of October after signing the severance contract with Stanley’s company, had his own version of what happened. He maintained that Stanley had cut the film ruthlessly, in part perhaps because he was deeply angered by the way Carl had modeled the betrayals of Jonas Henderson and the other cowardly townsfolk after Stanley’s own behavior toward Carl.
“Stanley didn’t like it, and took over,” Carl wrote in 1952. “He cut it brutally, almost, it seemed, with venom. Everyone agreed the version was bad. He gave in, finally, and Elmo Williams took over and returned the cut to Fred’s original version.”
In those early days just after the film was released, Carl praised Williams for preserving the film and preventing Stanley from destroying it. “Elmo Williams is, I think, the best, most creative editor in Hollywood. One of the best, anyway.”
Later on, however, Carl was less complimentary. In a 1982 letter to Williams, Carl said he was grateful to him “for not allowing Kramer and Gerstad to destroy the film. I have always thought that you liked the film and tried to preserve it, and that you did what you did in order to pacify Kramer … [who] knew very well that he was the basis for the characters of Henderson and Fuller in the script.” But Carl added, “It really isn’t fair for you to take all the credit for its success, as you have done over the years.”
When the respected film critic Arthur Knight wrote a piece praising Williams’s editing, Carl fired off a blistering letter upbraiding Knight for portraying Elmo as “the demon editor … who saved High Noon by cutting in all those clocks.” Carl lamented that Knight had fallen for Williams’s “perpetuation of this nonsensical myth.”
Fred Zinnemann predictably seethed for years as the various editing legends were retailed in books and magazine articles. He finally exploded in 1988 after his good friend and fellow director Bertrand Tavernier asked him if it was true “that High Noon had been made in the cutting room.”
“I hoped that the record would be set straight some day, but wanting to avoid unpleasant public disputes which might have hurt the picture I kept silent for many years while that insidious campaign grew into a myth,” Fred wrote to Maria Cooper Janis.
“While there is no question that the final editing was brilliant, there was not much elbow room for cuts or for major structural changes, as most scenes were frozen in their places by the progression of time clearly shown on various clocks. Thus, despite all assertions to the contrary, the picture could make sense only in the form originally intended by Foreman and myself.”
Where does the truth lie? Carl’s claim that Stanley Kramer set out purposely to butcher High Noon in the editing room because of his anger with Carl is hard to swallow. After all, a mutilated fiasco of a film would have reflected as badly on Stanley, whose company would have been held ultimately responsible, as on Carl and Fred, and it would have cost Stanley his investment. It’s far easier to accept the idea that Stanley truly believed the film was a disaster and saw himself as the only person who could save it. It’s readily conceivable that Stanley tried to edit the film, cut it deeply and perhaps angrily, was frustrated with the result, and turned it over to Elmo Williams when he volunteered to give it a try. Williams’s cut brought the film part of the way back to Fred’s original version, but with a tighter and tenser narrative that stayed more focused on the marshal and the clocks.
This explanation takes into account all four men’s versions while treating each of them with some skepticism. In the end, it’s the only one that makes sense.
The men who might truly lay claim to saving High Noon had nothing to do with its filming or editing, but everything to do with the song that helped make it famous.
The leader of these music men, Dimitri Tiomkin, was born in the Ukraine in 1894 to a wealthy Jewish physician and his wife. At age seven he began training as a musician at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, with its battalions of pianists, fiddlers, and composers. “Music has always produced vivid personalities and notable eccentrics, and so did old Russia,” Tiomkin boasts in his lively and quirky autobiography, Please Don’t Hate Me, and he himself certainly qualified as one.
While the conservatory bored him, Tiomkin played piano at movie houses in St. Petersburg to earn money and spent late evenings at the Homeless Dog, a bohemian basement café whose owners vanished soon after the 1917 revolution. He himself fled Russia and the Bolsheviks in the early 1920s. He wound up in Paris in a two-man classical piano act with a fellow Russian, then sailed to New York, where they performed on the vaudeville circuit back in the days when mainstream audiences actually paid attention to classical music.
His major nemesis in America, as he cheerfully confesses, was the English language, which he butchered in speech all of his adult life and never quite mastered—“like loving a beautiful woman who slaps you in the face,” he writes. He couldn’t pronounce the words, couldn’t string together a grammatical sentence, couldn’t figure out which words went where. “We go theater with party. What show is?” was typical.
While making a speech to the exclusive Lambs Club in New York, he tried to tell a funny story about a fat Russian admiral. The audience laughed all the way through, but in the wrong places. “You might as well tell them in Italian,” suggested the toastmaster, George M. Cohan. “They’ll understand it better.”
It wasn’t just the language. “Dimi” couldn’t master the long strides Americans used for walking; his were short steps like a ballet dancer. “Walk like a man,” his Viennese-born wife, Albertina, commanded him in vain. And he couldn’t break the habit of kissing a married woman’s hand upon introduction. All too often, the woman in question would reach for his hand expecting a handshake and inadvertently smack his face as he bent over.
Still, he was a great success musically. He mastered jazz piano and composition, collaborated with George Gershwin, and gave piano recitals throughout the country, arriving in Hollywood in the early 1930s just as demand was soaring for music to fill the soundtracks of the new talking pictures. He hooked up with famed director Frank Capra and wound up composing the music for Lost Horizon (1937), You Can’t Take It with You (1938), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Meet John Doe (1941), and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). His movie scores were lush and melodramatic, with classical echoes—just the kind of aural pastiche that Hollywood loved. When Tiomkin won an Oscar in 1955 for the musical score for The High and the Mighty, he thanked Brahms, Strauss, Wagner, Beethoven, and Rimsky-Korsakov. Some in the audience thought he was being pretentious, but others understood that he was actually paying tribute to all the great composers he had stolen from. Altogether, he was nominated for nearly two dozen Oscars and won four.
He first met Stanley Kramer and Carl Foreman in the Army Signal Corps. Tiomkin was too old and unfit to be drafted, but he volunteered at Frank Capra’s behest and he loved the work. By his own estimate, he churned out scores for hundreds of pictures, from short training films to full-length documentaries. He could command an orchestra of any size and all the recording equipment he desired, day or night. “Having always been harassed by studio economies I found myself in the lap of musical luxury,” he recalled fondly.
When Stanley and Carl formed their independent film company after the war, they turned to Tiomkin for music scores. They couldn’t pay him anywhere near what the major studios offered, but he liked working with talented young people. Tiomkin composed the scores for So This Is New York, Champion, Home of the Brave, The Men, and Cyrano de Bergerac. Sometimes Stanley and Carl found Tiomkin’s music too lushly dramatic. Fred Zinnemann in particular felt Tiomkin had overstuffed The Men with musical clichés, and he upbraided Tiomkin after a sneak preview in San Francisco. “I remember that he wept—real tears—but it was too late for changes,” said Fred.
Curiously enough for a Jewish boy from the Ukraine, Tiomkin’s most enduring claim to fame as a composer lies with his music for Westerns: Red River, Duel in the Sun, Giant, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and of course, High Noon. Perhaps he was able to musically connect cowboys with Cossacks, or perhaps, like a lot of newcomers to America, he was swept up by the romantic myth of the Old West. His biographer, Christopher Palmer, compares Tiomkin’s scores to the epic paintings and sculptures of Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell. “They, like him, viewed the West from an expansively romantic, essentially nineteenth-century viewpoint,” writes Palmer, “and their pictures decisively influenced the ideology and iconography of the Hollywood Western.”
Himself a bubbly eccentric, Tiomkin managed to cope with the extreme fantasies of Hollywood’s aristocracy. While working on Duel in the Sun, he faced a demand from the passionately imperious producer David O. Selznick to come up with orgiastic music for a rape scene featuring Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones, Selznick’s mistress and wife-to-be. Tiomkin made several attempts that Selznick found too sedate. “It isn’t orgasm music,” he said of Tiomkin’s final effort. “It’s not shtup. It’s not the way I fuck.”
“Mr. Selznick, you fuck your way, I fuck my way,” an exasperated Tiomkin replied. “To me, that is fucking music!” Selznick eventually surrendered.
Stanley Kramer and Carl Foreman may not have always loved Tiomkin’s scores, but they knew they were getting a bargain, and Stanley gave him free range when it came to the orchestral score for High Noon. The result was one of the most innovative and evocative scores in motion picture history—and a song that set off yet another creative whodunit.
* * *
Just as he did with the editing of the picture, Elmo Williams sought to take complete credit for choosing and inspiring the music. He said the story told in High Noon felt to him like a folktale, the kind an old man might tell his grandson, or something from a Carl Sandburg poem, and he wanted music that would feel the same way—a folk tune like “Ghost Riders in the Sky” as sung by Burl Ives, one of the most popular singers of the era. Williams discussed this idea with Tiomkin, but the composer couldn’t grasp what he wanted and in any case was too busy working on music for two of the new films the Kramer Company was making at Columbia. That’s when Williams turned to the Burl Ives recording. He knew it wouldn’t be used in the final film, but it had the kind of thumping folk-style beat he was looking for.
Williams’s method was to cut his films to music. He had worked at the Capitol Records studio in Hollywood on early television shows and had experimented with combining film and music to fill airtime, and he worshipped the power of rhythm. When editing film, he used a process called “temp tracking”; it’s standard procedure in many modern films, but Williams could rightfully claim to be one of the first to regularly use it. “I find in cutting that every show has its own rhythm and if you screw around with it you screw the show up,” he recalls in an unpublished interview with film historian Rudy Behlmer. “… I used to put a click track in my synchronizer when I was cutting and usually take the rhythm from the leading character in the show—the speed he walks, the speed he talks, whatever it is. I’d take it and I’d find a kind of medium rhythm with the main character, and when I cut a picture and get through with it and think I’ve got a good shape, I stick the click track in my synchronizer and I wind it through. You’d be amazed; when the cuts are right they fall right on the beat, just as though you had added the music from the beginning … It really works and you know when you’ve got a show right.”
Elmo Williams says he used “Ghost Riders in the Sky” as the temp track for the rough cut he showed Stanley Kramer, and that Stanley was quickly sold on the idea of using a similar-style ballad for High Noon. Stanley turned to Tiomkin, who at first resisted, according to Williams, complaining, “I am not cowboy! I cannot write horse opera! Cossacks I can write, but not cowboy!” It’s a nice story, but Tiomkin had already written highly successful scores for two classic Westerns, Duel in the Sun (1946) and Red River (1948), and it’s difficult to imagine he had any reservations about composing music for High Noon.
In any event, Williams claims that Tiomkin eventually relented and wrote a Western theme song—some said he stole the melody from a Ukrainian folk song. Then Tiomkin hired lyricist Ned Washington to write the words. A slim, dapper, pencil-mustached man of fifty who was born and raised on the poor side of Scranton, Pennsylvania, Washington was a journeyman lyricist with a superb track record in Hollywood and Manhattan. Among his biggest hits were lyrics for “When You Wish Upon a Star” (1940), an Academy Award winner (he also shared an Oscar for his lyrics for Pinocchio’s overall score), as well as “Stella by Starlight” (1944) and “My Foolish Heart” (1950). After High Noon, he would go on to write lyrics for several more Tiomkin melodies, including the “Theme from Rawhide” (1958) and “Town Without Pity” (1961). All in all, he was nominated for eleven Oscars as a co-songwriter and won three.
Ned Washington, according to Elmo Williams, was baffled by Tiomkin’s description of what he was looking for. Here too, just as he did as film editor, Williams says he stepped to the fore and saved the day: he described to Washington his folksong concept and an inspired Ned went to work.
Dimitri Tiomkin’s version of what happened, presented in his memoir, is very different. For one thing, it doesn’t even mention Elmo Williams. Instead, Tiomkin says he was brought in after the film was shot and Fred Zinnemann’s rough cut was put together, after which the consensus among Stanley Kramer, George Glass, and the rest of the Kramer Company was that the picture “looked like the ugliest duckling of all.” Tiomkin was not so pessimistic. He believed the right song could help save it—everybody, it seems, felt a personal duty to save High Noon—and he convinced Kramer to try out a theme song that could be sung, whistled, and played by the orchestra all the way through the film, an innovative approach that had rarely been used in movies before.
Contrary to Williams’s claim, Tiomkin says he was well-versed in the melodies of the Texas range and Mexican border as well as traditional frontier tunes and was not at all put off by the assignment. His wife, Albertina—always the sharp-eared, sharp-eyed critic—vetoed his first songwriting attempt, but during the course of a long day at the piano he modified it, expanded it, and made it more complex to the point where she approved. Then he needed a lyric, something supple enough to stretch with the twists and turns of the unconventional melody he’d composed. And he wanted words that would tell the story of the picture with style, sentimentality, and pathos.
Enter Ned Washington, who when he first heard the twisting melody did indeed seem puzzled. “What are you doing, Dimi, playing variations?”
“Is melody, Ned,” Tiomkin replied. “Is melody for you writing words. Please don’t hate me.”
Washington, a professional’s professional, came back with “Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darlin’.”
Ned’s simple poem not only fit the notes and the sentiment, but also revealed and reflected the central ideas of the film. The song’s narrator is Will Kane himself, addressing Amy, his new bride, expressing the fears and longings in music that Kane can’t find the words to articulate in the actual film:
Do not forsake me, oh my darlin’
On this our wedding day.
Do not forsake me, oh my darlin’
Wait, wait along.
The noonday train will bring Frank Miller
If I’m a man I must be brave
And I must face that deadly killer
Or lie a coward, a craven coward
Or lie a coward in my grave.
Oh to be torn ’twixt love and duty
S’posin’ I lose my fair-eyed beauty
Look at that big hand move along
Nearin’ high noon.
He made a vow while in state’s prison
That it would be my life or his’n
I’m not afraid of death, but oh
What will I do if you leave me?
Do not forsake me, oh my darlin’
You made that promise when we wed
Do not forsake me, oh my darlin’,
Although you’re grievin’, I can’t be leavin’
Until I shoot Frank Miller dead.
Wait along, wait along, wait along, wait along…
“It’s a masterpiece in its way,” declares Tiomkin, and he was right. Ned had created a true folk tale, unconventional yet powerful, poignant, and dramatic. The lyric deftly summarized the plot of the film: the initiating event (“The noonday train will bring Frank Miller”), the backstory (“He made a vow while in state’s prison”), the psychological tension (“Look at that big hand move along nearin’ high noon”), and the hero’s desperate dilemma (“Oh to be torn ’twixt love and duty”). The song not only narrates the plot, it lays out the implications of the coming showdown and explains the marshal’s inner conflict in a way that he himself cannot articulate. “The song, at first glance, seems very simple in both structure and message,” writes music scholar Deborah Allison. “A slightly closer look exposes a work of considerable complexity.”
Next, Tiomkin needed the right performer to capture the poetry and the pathos of the song. It’s likely that in this instance he took the advice of Elmo Williams, who had worked at Capitol Records and knew about the company’s top country music star, Tex Ritter, a former B-movie cowboy hero and balladeer from the remote northeast corner of Texas, with a low, husky voice and smooth singing style.
Woodard Maurice Ritter was born in 1905 on a ranch forty miles from Shreveport, Louisiana, in one of the poorest counties in Texas. He went to a one-room schoolhouse that held two classes after they nailed a flimsy wooden partition down the middle one day. He was one of six children and he and his two brothers sang in church every Sunday. But Tex Ritter was no country yokel. He went to the University of Texas at Austin, graduated pre-law, went on to law school at Northwestern University in Chicago, and found his way into Western music shows to help pay his tuition. Singing at first was just a hobby—Ritter still thought he’d become a lawyer—but a visit to the theaters and dance halls of New York City in 1928 changed his mind. He abandoned his suit and silk tie for cowboy boots, a bolo tie, and a ten-gallon hat. He wound up singing cowboy tunes on the radio, then toured the country in a series of Western plays and musicals, including Green Grow the Lilacs, the forerunner of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!
In his late twenties Ritter landed in Hollywood, where he met Hoot Gibson, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Ken Maynard, and Buck Jones and followed their lead into the singing cowboy movies. His first starring role was in Song of the Gringo for Grand National Pictures in 1936; it was the start of a decade of formulaic but stirring B Westerns. “Movie fans knew what to expect … a staunch hero, a damsel in distress, galloping horses, fistfights, gunplay, and villains for the hero to vanquish,” writes Bill O’Neal, Ritter’s biographer.
When Grand National went bankrupt in 1938, Ritter went on tour to make money, and he basically never stopped. He sang product-endorsement jingles for Frostilla shaving cream, milk cartons, playing cards, bandannas, and paper dolls. For seven years he was on the Motion Picture Herald’s list of Top Ten Money-Making Western Stars. By the time he made his last movie in 1945, he had appeared in sixty Westerns, mostly for “Poverty Row” outfits like Grand National, Monogram, and PRC. Still, he was at the apex of his recording career; in January of that same year he held down the top three places on Billboard magazine’s country music chart. He recorded for Capitol Records for thirty-two years.
Ritter and two guitarists—one of them the legendary finger-picker Merle Travis—arrived at Tiomkin’s house on a Sunday in full cowboy regalia. They looked at a few photo stills from the movie while Tiomkin explained the plot. Then the maestro sat down at the piano and played—and sang—the song, his Russian accent contorted into a tortured Texas Panhandle drawl, which vastly amused his small audience. “Tex and his cowboys nearly fell off their chairs laughing, and Ned Washington doubled up with mirth at hearing such a parody of his song,” Tiomkin recalled.
Nonetheless, they got the idea. Ritter and his boys recorded the song, with Tex singing in a soft, plaintive style that was both intimate and haunting, while the two guitars played gently behind him.
“It wasn’t supposed to be Gary Cooper’s voice necessarily; it could have been his thoughts,” Ritter recalled. “But it was used instead of [instrumental] music to create the mood.”
It was a unique use of a theme song. Movies like Laura (1944) and The Third Man (1949) had used haunting themes throughout their stories, but the music in each was solely instrumental: the songs set a mood but did not tell a literal story. An anonymous writer at Billboard captured High Noon’s innovation exactly: “The song does not merely advance the story line. It is the story line.”
“What is remarkable in this coupling of music and film,” the writer adds, “is the ‘economic’ use to which the song is put. It would be difficult to get any more out of the song. It pays all possible dividends; it sets moods, tells the story, chord sequences are used as a leitmotif, etc.”
Tiomkin, who loved selling his music almost as much as he loved composing it, suggested that Ritter record the song for Capitol, but the company was not interested because Western movie themes were not considered big sellers. So Tiomkin took the song to Mitch Miller, a producer at Columbia Records who had a well-tuned ear for commercially popular music. Miller recorded a more synthetic and melodramatic version of the song with Frankie Laine, a pop singer who was younger and sexier than Ritter. Laine belted it out as if he were singing “Bolero” during a cattle stampede, with a female chorus behind him. When Capitol’s executives realized that Columbia was about to outflank them with Laine’s 45, they summoned Ritter for a recording session on May 14, 1952.
Capitol released Ritter’s austere version on June 21, and Columbia released Laine’s more lathered rendition a week after, and soon there were four more recorded versions of the song as well. Laine’s leaped to the top of the charts, while Ritter’s trailed behind. When High Noon was finally released in late July, the runaway popularity of the theme song helped pave its success, which in turn triggered a new wave of record sales. Laine’s record sold more one million copies, while Ritter’s sold eight hundred thousand. Still, “for many of us who were captivated by High Noon the only version of the title song that ever rang true was by Tex Ritter,” writes Bill O’Neal.
Neither Tiomkin nor Williams mentions Stanley Kramer in their accounts of how the music was created, but Stanley of course has his own version. He says it was his idea from the beginning to use a ballad for High Noon and that he decided he wanted something along the lines of a Burl Ives song. Stanley says Tiomkin and Washington brought him a folk song that he vetoed because it wasn’t powerful enough. He then dug out the Ives recording of “Ghost Riders in the Sky” and played it for Tiomkin and Washington. “Tiomkin was very irritated with me, but they went back and they did it again,” Stanley recalls. “Now the next time they came back on the stage and played it, it was ‘Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin’.’”
One thing everyone agrees on: Stanley Kramer loved the song and believed it could be the key to rescuing the film. He loved it so much he inserted it a dozen different times in the edited version of the picture. Then he held two movie previews, the first in Pomona, the second in Long Beach. Stanley went to the first and couldn’t help but notice the audience growing restless each time the song was reprised. By the fifth iteration there was laughter and jeering. It was way too much of a good thing.
Tim Zinnemann recalls attending the preview at Long Beach with his father when he was ten years old and hearing members of the audience laugh and boo. Afterward, he and Fred stood alone in the lobby while various studio officials talked in hushed and somber tones that confirmed they had just witnessed a disaster. Tim went to the men’s room and overheard two of the studio guys talking. “Oh hell, what does a European Jew know about making Westerns anyway?” one asked the other. The upshot, recalls Tim: “The movie sucks … and everybody was pointing at Fred Zinnemann and saying it’s all his fault and I told you so.”
Stanley’s response was to pare down the “Do Not Forsake Me” segments. The melody still appears a dozen times during the picture, but most of them are shorter in duration and several are lower in volume. Tiomkin’s orchestral score offers several variations of the melody; at one point even Lee Van Cleef’s character, one of the bad guys waiting for Frank Miller’s train, plays the tune on his harmonica. The melody remains omnipresent without being overwhelming, and it becomes an even more haunting accompaniment to the story. Still, no one involved was anticipating a critical or box-office success.
Another bad omen came when Harry Cohn, the famously despotic head of Columbia Pictures and architect of the Kramer Company’s new multi-movie contract, asked to see the film. He suggested to Stanley that perhaps Columbia could distribute the film as their first joint offering. Stanley replied that the picture was already promised to United Artists, and in any event it wasn’t ready to be shown yet. But Cohn couldn’t wait. When Kramer arrived at Motion Picture Center Studios the following Sunday morning, Tiomkin told him Cohn had been there earlier and taken home a print of the rough cut for viewing.
Stanley was furious. He was already having his doubts about the deal with Columbia, and Cohn’s arrogant behavior set him off. The next morning he stormed into Cohn’s plush all-white office—said to have been modeled after Benito Mussolini’s totalitarian-deluxe office suite in Rome—and started screaming at him.
“I said I wouldn’t let him see it if he was the last man on earth,” Stanley recalled. “I called him every name under the sun, and [told him] I want to break the contract.”
Cohn looked at Stanley as if he were insane. “What are you upset about?” Hollywood’s Il Duce demanded of his new junior partner. “The picture is a piece of crap.”