Note: This is #29 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009.
At first I thought High Noon was going to be a quintessential cowboy movie, what with Gary Cooper in the tall, lanky lead as a sheriff in a small town set upon by criminals. But unlike next week’s movie Shane, High Noon actually doesn’t follow that template once you get into it. In fact, I’ve started to mentally append the subtitle “The Existential Cowboy” to this movie’s main title since it has a lot more going on underneath the surface about facing death alone.
The surface in question deals with Will Kane (Cooper), who is at the end of his tenure as the sheriff (or marshal, whatever) of a small town in New Mexico. Kane has just married his pretty and pacifistic new wife Amy (Grace Kelly) and is getting ready to start his new life elsewhere when he receives word that a man he helped put away for murder has been released and is on his way into town to take his revenge on Kane and everyone else involved with bringing him (temporarily, anyway) to justice. Most of the rest of the movie deals with Kane’s trying to recruit a team to defend the town against the approaching killers.
What I appreciated about this movie is that it’s really about how one man faces his presumably certain death once it’s clear that nobody (well, almost nobody) is going to help them. The movie’s depth and tension comes from watching how Kane is trying to deal with the impending doom and contrasting that with how his fellow townspeople try to cope. Most refuse to deal with it, a few flee, others deny that it exists, some wish they could help but can’t and tell Kane that he has to give up or go it alone. This is where my “The Existential Cowboy” subtitle comes into play –the movie can be seen as a existentialist parable about how people have to make their own independent choices, specifically those concerning how they accept their own mortality and inevitable death. Kane knows about the approaching doom on the 12:00 train and the audience is reminded of it by repeated shots of clocks and other indicators of time. But he has to deal with it alone.
This is cool stuff that elevates the film above a simple Western action flick and it’s just too bad that the film makers blinked at the end instead of seeing the idea all the way through. Still, it’s good stuff in that it sticks in your mind for some time after viewing.
What’s interesting is that both Howard Hawks and John Wayne (the two biggest players in Westerns at the time) denounced this film as being “anti-American” since it seemed to be an allegory for blacklisting, which both Wayne and Hawks supported.
Hawks also hated it because it wasn’t “manly” since Cooper’s character was asking for help.
Hawks and Wayne were jackasses.
Yeah, I had read a bit about that and my reaction was mostly “Buh?” I guess Cooper’s character was unfairly blacklisted and nobody would help him because of it? Context means a lot, I guess.