I’m going to go back and find my business manager and agent, producer, and three-name writers and find out why I didn’t get High Noon instead of Cooper.
JOHN WAYNE
After the two disastrous sneak previews in Pomona and Long Beach, and with Fred Zinnemann off on a new project and Carl Foreman gone altogether, just about everyone at the Stanley Kramer Company thought High Noon was a loser. But one film-studio veteran strongly disagreed.
George J. Schaefer, who was sixty-three, had started in the movie industry in 1914 as a secretary to film pioneer Lewis J. Selznick. Schaefer had navigated his way through the executive ranks at Paramount in the early 1930s, and had eventually risen to become president and chief executive officer of RKO Radio Pictures, where he championed the early work of Orson Welles, including Citizen Kane. After leaving RKO in 1942, he independently produced and distributed films, and he helped Stanley cut successful distribution deals with United Artists for Champion and Home of the Brave. After viewing High Noon, he believed Stanley had another potential winner.
Schaefer helped organize special trade screenings in April 1952 that yielded positive reviews. “A basic Western formula has been combined with good characterization in High Noon, making it more of a Western drama than the usual outdoor action feature,” wrote Variety’s William Brogdon. “With the name of Gary Cooper to help it along, and on the basis of the adult-appealing dramatic content, the business outlook is favorable.”
Schaefer and George Glass, Kramer’s astute and loyal PR man, worked with Max Youngstein, head of production and marketing at United Artists, to create a marketing campaign that emphasized the movie’s suspense, its mature approach to relations between men and women, and the idea that it was unusual and nonformulaic—not your standard Hollywood Western. Spewing exclamation points, the movie trailer labeled it “Stanley Kramer’s masterpiece of suspense!” featuring Gary Cooper as “A man who was too proud to run!” It boasted that “Never have so few moments had such excitement!” United Artists had recently been reorganized and its leaders were desperate for a hit; they got behind the picture enthusiastically.
High Noon opened on July 14, 1952, at one of New York’s most majestic old movie houses, the Loew’s Mayfair at Seventh Avenue and Forty-Seventh Street, where it ran for two months. It also opened in Philadelphia, Boston, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, and Portland, Maine. It was an immediate box-office hit, boosted by the astonishing popularity of “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin’” and the excellent reviews the film received.
The New York Times led the way. “Every five years or so,” Bosley Crowther began, “somebody—somebody of talent and taste, with a full appreciation of legend and a strong trace of poetry in their soul—scoops up a handful of clichés from the vast lore of Western films and turns them into a thrilling and inspiring work of art in this genre. Such a rare and exciting achievement is Stanley Kramer’s production, High Noon, which was placed on exhibition at the Mayfair yesterday.”
Anticipating the long conflict over credit, Crowther said it was impossible to know who was responsible for the film’s quality, but he named Kramer, Foreman, Zinnemann, and Cooper as all likely candidates.
“What is important is that someone—or all of them together, we would say—has turned out a Western drama that is the best of its kind in several years. Familiar but far from conventional in the fabric of story and theme and marked by a sure illumination of human character, this tale of a brave and stubborn sheriff in a town full of do-nothings and cowards has the rhythm and roll of a ballad spun in pictorial terms. And, over all, it has a stunning comprehension of that thing we call courage in a man and the thorniness of being courageous in a world of bullies and poltroons.”
Crowther came back a few days later with a second paean to the film. He lavished praise particularly on Carl for his taut, realistic screenplay. “Mr. Foreman has no dangled puppets, he has truly and artfully conceived real characters whose motives and dispositions are clear and credible,” Crowther wrote. “The marshal, played by Gary Cooper, is not the usual, square-jawed, stalwart sort; he is a tired and unglamorous sheriff who would gladly crawl off in a hole if he thought that would mean an avoidance of a showdown—but he knows it won’t. He is a man with the sense to meet a challenge, not duck in the hope it will go away.”
Stanley, who still thought of High Noon as a forlorn mutt of a film, was stunned by Crowther’s raves. “We went to New York and Bosley Crowther said ‘Do you know how good this is?’” he recalled. “Bosley Crowther really created High Noon.” After the extraordinary New York Times review, Stanley said, the other critics “seemed to fall in line.”
Otis L. Guernsey Jr. of the New York Herald Tribune joined the choir. He called High Noon “an American movie achievement which can stand beside the tallest from anywhere and look most of them in the eye.”
So did Time magazine. “Zinnemann’s direction wrings the last ounce from the scenario with a sure sense of timing and sharp, clean cutting,” wrote Time, which called High Noon “a taut, sense-making horse-opera that deserves to rank with Stagecoach and The Gunfighter.”
The summer of 1952 was a scorcher and the new technology of electric-powered air-conditioning no doubt helped drive people to the theaters. High Noon was the only new film to make Motion Picture Herald’s “Box Office Champions” for August, and it finished the month as the national leader, according to Variety. It quickly became United Artists’ biggest earner since The African Queen the year before. The film brought in $2.5 million in eighteen weeks and was the main reason for UA’s return to modest profitability in 1952. It became the eighth biggest grossing picture of the year with $3.4 million (Big Jim McLain was twenty-seventh, with $2.6 million). Gary Cooper, who had taken less than half his usual salary for the picture in return for a percentage of the net profits, eventually earned a reported six hundred thousand dollars.
It was an astonishing success for such an austere and unusual piece of entertainment. What audiences saw was a modest, terse, almost dour eighty-four-minute black-and-white Western with no grand vistas, no cattle drives, and no Indian attacks, in fact no gunplay whatsoever until its final showdown. Yet its taut, powerful storytelling, gritty visual beauty, suspenseful use of time, evocative music, and understated ensemble acting made it enormously compelling.
“It’s a great movie,” says film critic Leonard Maltin. “Its compactness is one reason. For all its purposefulness, it doesn’t beat you over the head. It’s telling a story. And it’s very well cast: all of those character actors are just perfect. The blend of location and back lot is seamless. And that music is inspired.”
The film begins quietly, with a man hunched on a rock in a thin grove of trees, waiting for two companions, while Tex Ritter’s haunting version of “Do Not Forsake Me” plays and the credits unwind. From that calm, subdued opening moment, High Noon’s story marches forward relentlessly and purposefully toward its violent climax and doleful conclusion.
The clocks and the theme song are the two threads that are braided throughout the movie, although they serve very different purposes. The clocks constantly remind us that time is running out for our hero. They help build and underscore the tension and anxiety of his fruitless search for support. There are no dissolves in High Noon—none of the usual fade-ins and fade-outs connoting the unseen passage of time—because time passes directly in front of us. Every minute counts—and is counted. The song, whose melody is played at least twelve times during the picture, reminds us of Will Kane’s dilemma and what’s at stake for him. His life and his happiness are on the line, yet he cannot walk away from his duty. After the debacle of the film’s two sneak previews, Stanley Kramer had artfully reduced the amount of song time but still used snippets of the melody as an evocative, subliminal reminder that a fatal confrontation is coming.
As he walks the deserted streets of Hadleyville seeking volunteers, Will Kane is engaged in a journey into the unfaithful heart of his community. His travels become a series of bitter disappointments: the judge, the deputy, the former volunteer, the saloon customers, the selectmen, the church members, the retired marshal, even his lovely new bride—they all turn away from him in his hour of need.
The lawman’s search is for the meaning of his life. Kane has lived by certain bedrock assumptions: that good men will stand together and confront evil when it arises, that wives and friends will provide moral support, and that the pillars of civil society—church and state, and the ministers, judges, and elected officials who represent these institutions—will rally to support law and order and human decency. All of those assumptions are challenged and upended as High Noon unfolds.
Kane’s individual meetings with the characters who betray him are the moral core of the movie and the moments when Cooper and the supporting cast are at their finest. Thomas Mitchell, Grace Kelly, Lloyd Bridges, Katy Jurado, Otto Kruger, and James Millican (uncredited as Herb Baker, the unfaithful volunteer) all hold their own in their scenes with Cooper. They do most of the talking (and self-justifying) while Cooper responds with quiet stoicism and deepening despair to each disappointment. And film editor Elmo Williams astutely re-shuffles the order of Kane’s search to put his former mentor Mart Howe toward the end. It’s an appropriate shift because in many ways Howe’s rejection is the most disheartening. The two actors play the scene beautifully. Lon Chaney Jr. as Howe seems to make almost perfect sense as he runs down his list of reasons why he can’t accompany Kane to the showdown. But his excuses are all hollow and self-serving, and Chaney’s doleful delivery betrays him. He knows he is abandoning his friend. Kane knows it, too. He doesn’t continue to plead; he simply gets up and leaves. The scene is one of Cooper’s best moments. His line readings express his deep respect and affection for the older man (actually Chaney was five years younger than Cooper). He never raises his voice or shows anger. But he makes clear by his physical movements and the blank expression on his face that this rejection by his friend and mentor is the ultimate betrayal.
Will Kane is now fully alone, his isolation underscored in High Noon’s most memorable visual moment—the reverse high-crane shot in which the camera pulls up and away from the lone figure of the marshal, standing in the middle of Hadleyville’s deserted main street. Then he turns and walks slowly toward the train station to meet his fate.
“Look, no one is there,” says director Wolfgang Petersen, who first saw and fell in love with the film as a teenager in post–World War Two Germany. “Where are the people? They are just gone. Not even a dog can be seen. He is completely alone.”
Like his acting, Gary Cooper’s movements throughout High Noon are minimalist. He is dressed in black vest, hat, and pants in contrast with the blank white sky. He walks gingerly, reflecting his character’s existential burden (and the actor’s ailing back and sore hip), and his line readings are slow and careful, like a man bearing a crushing burden. He may be in a tight spot and desperate for help, but he won’t beg or compromise. His utter relief when Harvey Pell, his chief deputy and friend, shows up for work quickly dissolves when Pell makes clear he won’t back Kane unless the marshal agrees to do an unacceptable favor in return. Kane doesn’t hesitate; he immediately says no, then resumes his search for allies. He literally has no time to waste on scoundrels. He knows his life is ebbing away with the ticks of all those clocks, but he doesn’t cut any moral corners.
None of the people who made High Noon, including Stanley Kramer, was enthusiastic about hiring Cooper. Yet in the end they owe him so much. His carefully controlled performance, his ability to portray simultaneously strength and vulnerability, is an enormous asset. It gives his character, and the entire picture, plausibility, intimacy, and human scale. Will Kane is no superhuman action hero, just an aging, tired man seeking to escape his predicament with his life and his new marriage intact, yet knowing he cannot. There’s none of Cooper’s usual light touch or self-confident insouciance. He tries and fails once or twice to be charming or ingratiating—when he lifts up Amy, his new bride, and demands a kiss, or when he tries to kid Harvey about the deputy’s impetuousness. But mostly he is bone-tired and achingly sincere. Cooper falls back on directness and determination.
It is a brave performance, and it is hard to imagine any other actor pulling it off with the same skill and grace. Certainly none of the gifted young bucks whom Kramer, Foreman, and Zinnemann considered and might well have preferred—Brando, Holden, Heston, Peck, Douglas—could have done it with such convincing authenticity, despite all their talent. In High Noon, Gary Cooper is indeed the truth.
The suspense builds with each rejection, until finally at one minute before noon, Elmo Williams takes out his film editor’s scissors and glue-pot and cuts and pastes a montage of faces, settings, and clocks that manages to review the entire narrative so far in ruthlessly swift strokes, as Dimitri Tiomkin’s score builds in tempo and volume. Then suddenly, the inevitable whistle of the noon train slashes open the montage to announce that evil has finally arrived.
When it comes, it wears a very human face. Frank Miller, played by veteran character actor Ian MacDonald, isn’t tall or muscular or physically intimidating in any way. He wears a nondescript Western businessman’s outfit and a no-nonsense manner. There are no handshakes for his younger brother or his hired gunmen, and no acknowledgment of Helen Ramirez, his former lover, whom he espies boarding the train a few yards down the platform. Miller just loosens his tie and checks his revolver. “Let’s get started,” he demands.
Kane is just as terse and determined. As Tom Hanks points out, Cooper speaks just seven words of scripted dialogue in the last fourteen minutes of the film. There are no brave or angry speeches, no high-volume exposition, no heart-stirring declarations. “Gary Cooper is not just Sheriff Will Kane in High Noon—he is also a mysterious and cryptic teacher of the art of acting on the screen,” says Hanks.
Other legendary performers have also praised the pure craft of High Noon. In Fred Zinnemann’s files is a handwritten note from Katharine Hepburn on behalf of herself and Spencer Tracy:
Dear Freddy, Spence and I were completely bowled over by your picture—It is a memorable job—Thrilling and inspiring and full of such integrity … I cannot remember being so completely absorbed—it seemed three minutes long—Cooper and the dark woman were so touching, in fact all the cast were so good—the music extraordinary—the writing, photography. It is so all of a piece that it delivers the most powerful punch I have received in a long long time. Your own qualities of simplicity & strength are certainly right there all the time—Never a cliché and never a clever touch—just wonderful & simple & overpowering—You gave us a tremendous life & again reminded us of what a lovely business this is—affectionately, Kate Hep
High Noon has all the trappings of Western movie patriarchy. Its hero is a man of standard masculine characteristics—inarticulate, stubborn, adept at and reliant on gun violence. But it also has two strong female characters who struggle to come to terms with the sudden crisis at hand and must choose whether to embrace or reject the man they both love and yet are deeply in conflict with. As feminist film critic Gwendolyn Foster says, the movie mounts “a subtle attack on gender expectations throughout both narratives.”
Neither woman fits the conventional models that Western films usually impose on their female characters. Amy Fowler Kane, the marshal’s young bride, is a Quaker from Missouri—pale-skinned, blonde, attired in a prim white wedding dress—but is not a typically submissive spouse. She confronts her new husband about his decision to return to Hadleyville and abandons him when he refuses to accede to her pleas. “I don’t understand any of this,” she complains at first, but gradually she comes to see the full implications of his decision and of her own. While Grace Kelly believed her performance was wooden and failed to mesh with the other actors, it actually seems appropriate for the role of an uninitiated outsider who doesn’t know the history of the town nor the sensibility of her new husband.
By contrast, Helen Ramirez, Kane’s former lover, a brothel owner and half-Mexican—brown-skinned, dark-haired, black-bodiced, and voluptuous—understands his predicament and longs to help him. But because he has previously rejected her, and perhaps because she knows his cause is hopeless, she chooses to walk away and protect herself instead.
Helen had been Frank Miller’s lover when he ruled Hadleyville through terror and violence, then had jumped readily into the arms of Kane after he defeated Miller and sent him to prison. After Kane ended their affair, she turned to Harvey Pell, his strong, handsome, but utterly immature deputy. She makes no apologies for using her sexuality to control the men around her. “There are very few men who cannot be managed, one way or another,” she tells Amy.
Helen, better than any other character, understands intuitively that what’s at stake is not just Kane’s life but the fate of the entire community. Kane “will be a dead man in half an hour, and nobody is going to do anything about it,” she tells Pell in what is perhaps the most perceptive comment by any of the film’s characters. “Don’t ask me how I know. I know. And when he dies, this town dies, too. It smells dead to me already.”
Fred Zinnemann was clearly fascinated by Katy Jurado’s performance and his camera lingers on her face in almost all of her scenes. “The close-up is how you indicate who’s in charge, who’s the strong person,” notes film scholar Charles Ramirez Berg. By giving more of these to Jurado, “Zinnemann and Foreman were turning the stereotype upside down.”
The long-standing Hollywood tradition in Westerns that the dark-skinned bad girl winds up taking a bullet for the man she loves is also subverted in High Noon. Rather than dying, Helen Ramirez leaves her former lover to his fate, cashes in her assets, and boards a train for a new start in another town. “What surprises us in retrospect is how much the film questions the values that make up the supposed fabric of American society, a fabric that can be ripped asunder with unsettling ease,” writes Foster.
In the end, Amy finally surrenders her own Quaker principles and submits to her husband’s values in order to save his life. She picks up a revolver and kills one gunman and helps Kane kill another. When it’s over, Kane lifts her crumpled body from the street, embraces her, and leads her to the buckboard that will deliver them far from Hadleyville. But first he drops his badge on the ground. The gesture is a condemnation of the corrupt community they are leaving. But it’s also a renewal of his promise to Amy: no more gunfights, no more law enforcement.
High Noon’s sensitive focus on Helen and Amy—remarkable for its era and genre—is one of the elements that make it an extraordinary movie. “It is the women who control the point of view of this film,” says film historian Joanna E. Rapf.
Despite High Noon’s success, the movie has stirred wariness and rejection from many critics of stature. Robert Warshow, whose 1954 essay “Movie Chronicle: The Westerner” is a classic, admires the film’s documentary-style visuals and understands that the movie is one of many that seek to transform the genre “from the boisterous adolescent beauty of the 1930s and ’40s to a sense of seriousness and realism, both physical and psychological.”
“As lines of age have come into Gary Cooper’s face since The Virginian, so the outlines of the Western movie in general have become less smooth, its background more drab,” writes Warshow. “The sun still beats upon the town, but the camera is likely now to take advantage of this illumination to seek out more closely the shabbiness of buildings and furniture, the loose, worn hang of clothing, the wrinkles and dirt of the faces.” The true theme of the Western is no longer “the freedom and expansiveness of frontier life, but its limitations, its material bareness, the pressures of obligation.”
But Warshow ultimately dismisses High Noon as a “‘social drama’ of a very low order … altogether unconvincing and displaying a vulgar anti-populism.” He says the film shouldn’t have to explain why the marshal must face his enemies alone—“a question that does not exist in the proper frame of the Western movie, where the hero is ‘naturally’ alone.” As a result, complains Warshow, while “the hero of High Noon proves himself a better man than all around him, the actual effect of this contrast is to lessen his stature: he becomes only a rejected man of virtue.” Cooper riding away at the end with his bride “is a pathetic rather than a tragic figure.”
Two of the most revered icons of the Western movie tradition, director Howard Hawks and actor John Wayne, also argued that Will Kane’s pleas for help from ordinary townsfolk somehow sully his professionalism and make him appear weak and helpless. When the residents turn him down contemptuously, the movie portrays them as cowardly and unworthy of the marshal’s sacrifice. In the end, he confronts the Miller gang alone not to protect a corrupt and selfish community that doesn’t deserve to be defended, but because his own honor demands it. Wayne was especially dismayed that the movie portrayed churchgoers and public officials as cowards and hypocrites. He interpreted this as an attack on American values, which in many ways it is.
Hawks and Wayne eventually went beyond their visceral dislike for High Noon. They made an enduring cinematic rebuttal, Rio Bravo (1959), considered by many critics to be one of their best movies. “I didn’t think a good sheriff was going to go running around town like a chicken with his head cut off asking for help, and finally his Quaker wife had to save him,” Hawks told author Joseph McBride. Hawks said he decided to “do just the opposite, and take a real professional viewpoint … We did everything that way, the exact opposite of what annoyed me in High Noon, and it worked and people liked it.”
Fred Zinnemann also came in for much criticism. Film critic Andrew Sarris, who helped import the French auteur theory of filmmaking to the American critical scene, never felt Fred was a true creative cinematic artist of the stature of John Ford, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, or Orson Welles. Sarris decried High Noon as his “runner-up” for the title of “most overrated Western … with its mannered, fussy performance by Gary Cooper and the pallid presence of Grace Kelly. Also, this is the favorite Western for people who hate Westerns.” Robin Wood, the great British film critic, blasted Fred’s direction as “external and shallow … His handling of the actors is almost uniformly abominable.”
Sarris, like Warshow, put his finger on what many Western lovers believe: that High Noon is just a barely disguised social drama using a Western setting and costumes. Even Fred’s own remarks lent support to this view. He saw the story told in High Noon as a classic clash between an outsider and a corrupt community, one of his favorite themes and a conflict that happens all through history. “High Noon is not a Western, as far as I’m concerned,” he wrote. “It just happens to be set in the Old West.”
Westerns, which were arguably America’s first and foremost indigenous movie genre (starting with Edwin S. Porter’s Great Train Robbery in 1903, considered the first narrative film), were indeed in the process of changing direction by the time High Noon came along. For decades they had presented myths about the taming of the frontier: in telling tales of heroic sheriffs and cavalrymen defeating criminals and hostile Indians they portrayed the civilizing of the West as a courageous and moral enterprise. But films like High Noon presented a different, more complex message: that a community established through violence and avarice could be cowardly and corrupt, with no place for brave men and women.
Charles Silver, director of the Film Study Center at the Museum of Modern Art, lumps High Noon with a string of anti-Romantic, anti-populist Westerns, along with William Wellman’s Ox-Bow Incident (1943) and Henry King’s Gunfighter (1950). “There was little regard for either the nobility of the Western myth or the cinematic potential of the imagery of the American West,” Silver writes. A longtime champion of John Ford’s Westerns, Silver contends High Noon explicitly contradicts Ford’s evocative and visually poetic work.
But it’s also possible to view High Noon as a worthy link between two of Ford’s most important Westerns: Stagecoach (1939) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). In the former, a fresh-faced outlaw and a reformed prostitute, played by John Wayne and Claire Trevor, survive Indians, bad guys, and society’s disapproval, then leave town on a buckboard. In escaping the suffocating strictures of a corrupt society, their liberation is a celebration of their independence and their innocence. Carl and Fred both greatly admired Stagecoach, and they clearly borrowed heavily from its plotline and visual appearance.
By contrast, Liberty Valance is an elegiac ode to a mythic West that never was. The hero, played again by John Wayne, guns down an evil malefactor but allows another man to take the credit, and he loses the love of his life and his self-respect in the process. A sadder, more self-critical film, made by a director who as he aged embraced emotional complexity and contradiction, Valance takes the measure of the sacrifice of love and honor of those who helped tame the West. High Noon is the bridge between these two superb films—the passageway between innocence and experience and between triumph and resignation.
In the end, the question of whether High Noon is a genuine Western seems a bit silly. It is filmed like a Western, is set in a Western town, uses a Western musical theme, and operates within the classic story framework of one man facing a showdown with the bad guys. And of course, it stars one of the genre’s most recognizable and reliable performers.
Ultimately, argues film historian Michael Selig, “High Noon is an expression of the genre attempting to find itself. Will Kane stalks the streets, from saloon to church, searching for the community of altruistic individuals that used to exist in Hadleyville. As he is rejected again and again, his face registers fear, an emotion new to Western heroes.” High Noon, says Selig, manages “to deepen and change the narrative line of the Western without fundamentally altering the role of the individual heroic action.”
Audiences have always loved High Noon, even if the higher-brow critics have not. There’s something about Gary Cooper marching slowly down a deserted Western street, a six-shooter holstered on his hip, that has stirred and reassured three generations of viewers. It is a symbol of moral bravery for an uncertain age.
The film was enormously influential. Its success—and the subsequent success of Shane (1953), which was filmed at the same time but not released until the following year—inspired an entire sub-genre of one-man-versus-evil Westerns. In Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), a one-armed World War Two veteran played by Spencer Tracy solves the murder of the father of a Nisei war hero, defeats the killer and his accomplices, and rallies the decent folks of a demoralized Western town. Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) begins with a High Noon–ish scene of three bad men waiting at the depot for a train to arrive (but it is Charles Bronson who gets off the train and kills all three). High Plains Drifter (1973), the first Western directed by Clint Eastwood, is a fantasy sequel to High Noon: a mysterious man shows up in a small town after its sheriff has been murdered and takes revenge on the three killers and on the townsfolk who had stood idly by while the sheriff was killed.
But film historian David Thomson believes Will Kane’s most faithful cinematic heir is Harry Callahan, the modern-day San Francisco police lieutenant who goes one-on-one with murderous criminals in Dirty Harry (1971) and its various, more tawdry sequels, his righteous actions always portrayed in stark contrast to the cowardly equivocations of his morally corrupt superiors. At the end of Dirty Harry, after gunning down the villain, Eastwood flings his inspector’s badge into a pool of dirty water, echoing Cooper’s same action twenty years earlier at the conclusion of High Noon. But whereas Cooper’s gesture is one of sadness and resignation, Eastwood’s is one of contempt.
Clearly High Noon is a Western, but is it also, as Carl Foreman insisted, a blacklist allegory? Almost no one thought so at the time, including Fred Zinnemann. When he first read Carl’s first draft, he said many years later, “I felt the situation as described by Kramer and Foreman very fascinating and I saw no parallel with any political upheavals. I don’t believe that there are any. I think that this is a mystique that’s been created and there’s nothing to it.”
Bosley Crowther, after receiving Carl’s eleven-page letter, hinted at the politics in a column he published in August 1952. He called High Noon “a drama of one man’s bravery in the midst of a town full of cowards. It is a story that bears a clear relation to things that are happening in the world today, where people are being terrorized by bullies and surrendering their freedom out of senselessness and fear.”
Will Kane, Crowther added, “is a man with the sense to meet a challenge, not duck in the hope it will go away. The marshal can give a fine lesson to the people in Hollywood today.”
An anonymous editorial writer for The Nation, a progressive magazine, also got the message. “There must be times these days,” the editorial declared, “when Mr. Foreman feels that he too has been deserted by those who should have helped him stand off the bullies and tough guys whose aggressions have so largely destroyed the moral fiber of the Western town that goes by the name of Hollywood.”
The official mouthpiece of the Kremlin, for what it’s worth, saw nothing left-wing about High Noon. The movie, Pravda complained, was a celebration of the American capitalist myth that one man was what truly mattered. In High Noon, the guardians of Communist orthodoxy sniffed, “the idea of the insignificance of the people and masses and the grandeur of the individual found its complete incarnation.”
Dave Kehr, film curator at the Museum of Modern Art, is also no fan of High Noon. He has written that Gary Cooper plays an “inflated archetype in his most overrated film,” which Kehr calls a “didactic political fable.” Still, Kehr respects its political acuity.
“What convinces in High Noon,” writes Kehr, “is the film’s sense of social malaise, of a community drained of coherence and conviction in the face of overwhelming fear—certainly a plausible portrait of a country in which, according to a Gallup poll in September 1951, about half the respondents believed that the Korean conflict represented the beginning of an atomically charged World War III.”
Still, seen on the screen at a distance of more than sixty years, High Noon’s politics are almost illegible. Rather than appearing to be a brave opponent of the blacklist, some critics have suggested that Will Kane could just as readily be seen as Senator Joseph McCarthy bravely taking on the evil forces of Communism while exposing the cowardice and hypocrisy of the Washington establishment.
It’s an intriguing exercise to compare and contrast High Noon with On the Waterfront (1954), another classic film to emerge from the blacklist era and one whose politics were supposedly the exact opposite. On the Waterfront was written by Budd Schulberg and directed by Elia Kazan, both of whom were former Communists who—unlike Carl Foreman—denounced the party and named names before HUAC. The film’s hero, Terry Malloy, a New Jersey dockworker played by Marlon Brando, turns state’s witness and testifies against a corrupt union boss (played by Lee J. Cobb, who was also a cooperative HUAC witness) who rules by bribery and terror. Terry’s conversion from a loyal stooge in the union to a whistleblower is an act of personal courage.
Yet despite the intentions of their creators, the two films seem like compatible companion pieces when viewed from a modern perspective. Both are about brave men who, when abandoned by friends and allies, choose to stand alone against evil forces and triumph.
Wolfgang Petersen, who watched High Noon for an article in the New York Times in 2001, captured well the film’s celebration of personal courage and its impact on him as a German teenager in the early 1950s. “People were not really talking about the past or about responsibility,” he recalled. “And then I saw this movie, and it was so clear to me: There is good. There is bad. It was about heroism, you know, about courage … It was very powerful.”
When the awards season began in early 1953, High Noon started out strong. It won the best film and best director prizes from the New York Film Critics, as well as top honors from the Film Daily newspaper, the Associated Press, Photoplay, and Look magazine, and was nominated for a Golden Globe. Carl won best screenplay from the Screen Writer’s Guild. Finally, the film was nominated for seven Academy Awards. HIGH NOON LOOKS TO SWEEP OSCARS was the headline on Variety’s annual straw poll article. The newspaper predicted the movie would win best picture, best actor, and best screenplay. Foreman’s “victory looks virtually certain,” it noted.
But Hollywood’s conservative lobby was determined to deny Carl an Oscar. Predictably, the counterattack began with a column by Billy Wilkerson in the Hollywood Reporter that disparaged Carl’s award from the Screen Writers Guild, one of Wilkerson’s favorite political punching bags.
“Some of the guild crowd are giving out with the argument that a man’s literary talent and his writing accomplishments have nothing to do with his politics, or vice versa,” he wrote. “In the present circumstances—national and international—this is a rather stupid argument, because when any man uses his talents and industry to grab American dollars which directly or indirectly help out a cause that is dedicated to the overthrow of our form of government, the least any loyal American can do is NOT VOTE AN AWARD to such a man.
“The honoring of Foreman and the nominating of Michael Wilson in the same Screen Writers Guild sweepstakes not only are an affront to the upholders of our democracy, but indicate plainly that within the Screen Writers Guild there is still too much sympathy for the commie line.”
Hedda Hopper joined in with a series of columns between December 1952 and March 1953 pushing for rival films in the various categories High Noon was nominated for—with the notable exception of best actor, where her old friend Gary Cooper was a nominee.
The American Legion also attacked the film on political grounds. “We feel that the continued employment of Communists and Communist sympathizers in the production of motion pictures is totally indefensible,” wrote Robert A. Bunch, Washington, D.C., district commander for the Legion, in a letter to United Artists when High Noon opened. “The situation is assuming the proportions of a national scandal, particularly in view of the fact that America’s young men are dying on the battlefields of Korea at the hands of the ideological brothers of the Hollywood Communists.”
UA’s response ignored the substance of Bunch’s allegations, merely noting that it had not produced High Noon but as its distributor had a legal obligation to market it.
Luigi Luraschi, head of foreign and domestic censorship at Paramount Studios, regularly submitted written reports to “Owen,” his CIA handler. In a letter dated March 9, 1953, he reported that as a member of the board of the Motion Picture Academy he had been lobbying to undermine High Noon’s chances for the best picture award despite “a lot of activity from the … left flank.” Carl Foreman’s screenplay, he claimed, spinning his own fantasy, was “full of messages … I don’t know whether things got hot or not, but Foreman was taken off, the propaganda presumably taken out, and the picture made as it is being released today. For the average fan it will seem O.K. For the Communist and for his propaganda purposes abroad, where he may see fit to press the issue, it is still full of subtleties which are a part of the construction and which can’t be taken out.”
“Can’t understand how Cooper got sucked in,” Luraschi added. “He’s a savvy guy, but I guess the Western cloak fooled him.”
The Oscars ceremony took place ten days later. It was the first time the event was televised (by NBC) and the first to be held simultaneously in Hollywood and New York. The result was an audience of forty-five million viewers, then the largest in television history.
If the Hollywood Reporter is to be believed, no one was rooting for Carl to win best screenplay, including members of High Noon’s own production company. “We were told that none of the Kramer boys wanted to accept the screenplay award if Carl Foreman won it for High Noon,” wrote the Reporter. “They drew for the ‘honor’ yesterday afternoon, we were told, and Rudolph Sternad was stuck with the short straw!”
They were spared the supposed embarrassment of picking up an award for a man who had been hounded out of Hollywood because of his political views. The Oscar was won by Charles Schnee for The Bad and the Beautiful, a much inferior screenplay. Fred Zinnemann lost out as best director to John Ford for The Quiet Man, Ford’s fourth Oscar.
The best picture award went to The Greatest Show on Earth, Cecil B. DeMille’s lumbering circus epic. There was a strong element of political submission in DeMille’s victory; he was, after all, still crusading to expel from Hollywood anyone with a leftist tinge, and more people probably feared than respected him. Bosley Crowther called DeMille’s film “spectacular but old-fashioned” compared to the “intelligence, dynamism, and moral fiber” of High Noon.
Stanley Kramer, in retrospect, said he was convinced it was politics that defeated High Noon. “I still believe High Noon was the best picture of 1952,” he wrote more than forty years later. “But the political climate of the nation and the right-wing campaigns against High Noon had enough effect to relegate it to an also-ran status. Popular as it was, it could not overcome the climate in which it was released.”
At Dimitri Tiomkin’s urging, Tex Ritter attended the ceremony, sat next to Gary Cooper’s mother, and sang “Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darlin’” live on national television. The music won two Oscars: one for Tiomkin and Ned Washington for the song and another for Tiomkin’s innovative musical score, which used the “Do Not Forsake Me” melody as its core motif. Elmo Williams and Harry Gerstad also won the Oscar for best film editing. It was no small irony that Williams, who had leaped to take all the credit for “rescuing” High Noon, had to share the editing Oscar with a man who, at least according to Williams, had done nothing but splice together a few reels of film under Williams’s direction in time for the fateful showing in Stanley Kramer’s living room.
Gary Cooper was up against Marlon Brando (Viva Zapata!), Kirk Douglas (The Bad and the Beautiful), José Ferrer (Moulin Rouge), and Alec Guinness (The Lavender Hill Mob). Four of the five nominees had starred in films made by the Stanley Kramer Company, a tribute to Stanley’s talent for choosing and attracting the very best performers. Despite High Noon’s alleged Communist connection, Cooper was the one bona fide member of the Hollywood establishment among the five nominees and few people were surprised when he won his second Oscar for best actor. What was surprising was the man who went to the podium to collect it for him. Cooper had run into John Wayne on location in Mexico, and had asked Wayne to represent him. It was typical of Cooper’s sense of modesty and professionalism that he would not take time away from his current project, the profoundly mediocre melodrama Blowing Wild, to attend the Oscars. Wayne may have hated High Noon, but he couldn’t refuse a fellow member of Hollywood’s aristocracy no matter what the politics. Looking svelte and dashing in his evening wear, he gave a gracious but rueful acceptance speech:
I’m glad to see that they’re giving this to a man who is not only most deserving, but has conducted himself throughout his years in our business in a manner that we can all be proud of him. Coop and I have been friends, hunting and fishing for more years than I like to remember. He is one of the nicest fellows I know. I don’t know anybody nicer, and our kinship goes further than that friendship because we both fell off of horses into pictures together.
Now that I’m through being such a good sport, I’m going to go back and find my business manager and agent, producer, and three-name writers and find out why I didn’t get High Noon instead of Cooper. ’Course I can’t fire any of these very expensive fellows, but I can at least run my 1930 Chevrolet into one of their big, black new Cadillacs.
Carl Foreman’s response upon hearing these remarks was to offer Wayne his services as a screenwriter: “I’m over here in London, Duke, you can get me any time.”