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High Noon: Movie review
A few weeks back, I went to the Hollywood Theater in Dormont to see “High Noon” on the big screen. The posting I made after that spoke about what it was like going to the movie in costume and I promised a review.
Mere moments after having been married and turning in his badge, Marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper) learns that Frank Miller, a man he had sent away to prison years before, would be arriving on the noon train to exact his revenge. He thinks he should stay but his Quaker wife (Gene Kelly) had convinced him to promise to give up violence and go away with her to live the life of a shopkeeper. The townspeople rally to send him off to this better life for his own safety and for his new wife and new life.
We all know how that's going to turn out.
The 1952 film “High Noon” is highly acclaimed and it’s actually surprising that I hadn’t seen it until recently. It may be that, even though it is highly respected, it doesn’t get a lot of airplay on television. Being able to see it on the big screen at the Hollywood Theater in Dormont was a treat.
First I want to go over some of the simpler critiques of the film before I dig into the meat of the matter.
“High Noon” is presented in near real time. From the time we see the first clock (10:35 am) to the arrival of the train at noon takes a little over an hour of film time. The close editing heightens the suspense as Kane travels through the town attempting to recruit allies before his literal deadline.
The song “Do not forsake me, my darling” is sung throughout the movie, a somewhat corny song that pretty much lays out the plot of the movie. It seems a bit heavy handed. I know there’s going to be a gunfight, I don’t need to hear you sing about it throughout the movie. It’s more distracting than anything else.
Gary Cooper is subtle in presenting Kane’s internal conflict. Sometime too subtle, mostly consisting of standing and staring for a few moments.
The cinematography switches between close shots showing Kane’s introspection and long shots highlighting his isolation. It’s deft but with occasional slip ups of continuity. Kane is seen with his vest buttoned and then unbuttoned throughout the movie. I know that it was probably supposed to be a representation of his increasing frustration that he becomes more disheveled as the climax approaches but it is inconsistently cut. He will be buttoned up in one scene then unbuttoned in another. Then his pocket watch chain disappears and then reappears.
Minor things, though. Watch the movie closely and you see some subtle but powerful statements.
When I was in college, I took a course with noted Japanese film critic Keiko McDonald called “Westerns and Samurai.” Seeing “Yojimbo” and “A Fist Full of Dollars” and analyzing them side by side, along with other films such as “Shane”, “Miyamoto Musashi”, “The Wild Bunch”, “The Seven Samurai” and “The Magnificent Seven” has colored my view of films with the filters of giri and ninjo.
Giri is a Japanese value corresponding roughly to “duty” or “social obligation.” It is ones loyalty to ones masters or ones responsibility to society. Ninjo is the human emotion of compassion. Sympathy, compassion, love, friendship. Spontaneous moral decisions that may be roughly considered as ones duty to self.
Japanese culture makes much of striking a balance between these two and Japanese film, in the chambara film and also in the yakuza genre, nearly always sets up the conflict between these two obligations at the core of the narrative. The American western often involves these conflicts to a lesser degree but “High Noon”, like the samurai film, has this at it’s heart.
In the introductory sequence, when Marshal Kane first hears that Frank Miller is returning, it is obvious that he feels compelled to take up the badge but he is convinced by his friends and his new wife to leave town immediately. Giri and ninjo. His duty to protect the town from the villains and his need to keep his promise to his pacifist wife set in conflict. Except that it’s not that simple. When he returns and begins his efforts to form a posse for the towns defense, he learns that the town has a different agenda.
The aging former Marshal says he wants to help but he just isn’t capable anymore. Kane’s deputy is ready to sit this out, bitter over being passed over for the position of Marshal after Kane’s retirement. Men in the saloon are ready to see Kane killed. “Frank Miller has friends in this town.” The town Judge packed up a bag ind skipped town almost immediately.
The linchpin occurs in the church where a few seem ready to leap up and aid him but many blame Kane for bringing this issue down upon the town. The town’s mayor stands up and gives an impassioned endorsement of Marshal Kane and what he has done for the town. It seems at first that he is rallying townspeople to the Marshal’s defense but then he turns. While the bad guys are most assuredly bad, if the marshal goes away, the villains’ motivation for violence would similarly go away. Violence would only hurt the burgeoning town’s financial prospects in the future. When the townspeople refuse to move from their seats, their heads hung in a sad mockery of churchgoing prayer, it is worse than if they were merely indifferent or selfishly fearful for their own individual safety
Kane’s obligations have been flipped, giri and ninjo turned on their heads. Where he thought his duty was to protect the town, the town doesn’t want his “protection.” Where he was prepared to sacrifice his personal obligation to his wife, it now seems that he may be acting solely for his own sense of honor, a situation that he is creating. What at first seemed like a matter of a murderer returning to exact revenge twists when we learn that the entire situation may have been precipitated by both Kane and Miller pursuing a relationship with the same woman. A woman who did not become Mrs. Kane.
A tangled mess of conflicting duties that Marshal Kane has no time to unravel. All that remains is the killing.
John Wayne disliked the film because he felt it was an allegory for blacklisting, which he actively supported. In his Playboy interview from 1971, Wayne said that he considered the film "the most un-American thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life" and went on to say he would “never regret having helped run [director Carl] Foreman out of this country.”
You know what? Fuck you, John Wayne. Blacklisting people, destroying their careers because you disagree with their politics, is a dick move and it turns my stomach to see you so smug about it.
As a result of his disgust, Wayne joined with Howard Hawkes to make “Rio Bravo”, to their minds a more American Western. Hawks explained, "I made Rio Bravo because I didn't like High Noon. Neither did Duke. I didn't think a good town marshal was going to run around town like a chicken with his head cut off asking everyone to help. And who saves him? His Quaker wife. That isn't my idea of a good Western."
That is a very shallow and uninspired view of what occurred in “High Noon” and that it is coming from an otherwise quality filmmaker is only marginally less embarrassing than John Wayne’s assessment of the “un-Americanness” of the film. Sheriff John Chance, Wayne’s character in “Rio Bravo”, much like most characters played by Wayne, is entirely devoid of internal conflict. The situation is simple with the obviously defined bad guys on one side and the good guys and their numerous allies on the other. Giri and ninjo are perfectly aligned.
It’s not that this is a bad way to be. We would all like our personal moral duties to be aligned with those of society. It’s secure. It’s comforting. But it doesn’t make for compelling filmmaking.
In “High Noon”, hero Marshal Kane wears black. Villain Frank Miller wears white. Duties to society and duties to ones innate humanness are all murky, muddy shades of gray. At the very end, when Frank Miller lies dead in the street, the empty streets fill with townspeople who gape at the body and congratulate their Marshal. The look of contempt on his face when Will Kane removes his badge and throws it in the dirt says it all.
And this is why “High Noon” is consistently ranked as not only one of the best westerns ever made but also one of the top 100 films ever made . . . and “Rio Bravo” is not.
Mere moments after having been married and turning in his badge, Marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper) learns that Frank Miller, a man he had sent away to prison years before, would be arriving on the noon train to exact his revenge. He thinks he should stay but his Quaker wife (Gene Kelly) had convinced him to promise to give up violence and go away with her to live the life of a shopkeeper. The townspeople rally to send him off to this better life for his own safety and for his new wife and new life.
We all know how that's going to turn out.
The 1952 film “High Noon” is highly acclaimed and it’s actually surprising that I hadn’t seen it until recently. It may be that, even though it is highly respected, it doesn’t get a lot of airplay on television. Being able to see it on the big screen at the Hollywood Theater in Dormont was a treat.
First I want to go over some of the simpler critiques of the film before I dig into the meat of the matter.
“High Noon” is presented in near real time. From the time we see the first clock (10:35 am) to the arrival of the train at noon takes a little over an hour of film time. The close editing heightens the suspense as Kane travels through the town attempting to recruit allies before his literal deadline.
The song “Do not forsake me, my darling” is sung throughout the movie, a somewhat corny song that pretty much lays out the plot of the movie. It seems a bit heavy handed. I know there’s going to be a gunfight, I don’t need to hear you sing about it throughout the movie. It’s more distracting than anything else.
Gary Cooper is subtle in presenting Kane’s internal conflict. Sometime too subtle, mostly consisting of standing and staring for a few moments.
The cinematography switches between close shots showing Kane’s introspection and long shots highlighting his isolation. It’s deft but with occasional slip ups of continuity. Kane is seen with his vest buttoned and then unbuttoned throughout the movie. I know that it was probably supposed to be a representation of his increasing frustration that he becomes more disheveled as the climax approaches but it is inconsistently cut. He will be buttoned up in one scene then unbuttoned in another. Then his pocket watch chain disappears and then reappears.
Minor things, though. Watch the movie closely and you see some subtle but powerful statements.
When I was in college, I took a course with noted Japanese film critic Keiko McDonald called “Westerns and Samurai.” Seeing “Yojimbo” and “A Fist Full of Dollars” and analyzing them side by side, along with other films such as “Shane”, “Miyamoto Musashi”, “The Wild Bunch”, “The Seven Samurai” and “The Magnificent Seven” has colored my view of films with the filters of giri and ninjo.
Giri is a Japanese value corresponding roughly to “duty” or “social obligation.” It is ones loyalty to ones masters or ones responsibility to society. Ninjo is the human emotion of compassion. Sympathy, compassion, love, friendship. Spontaneous moral decisions that may be roughly considered as ones duty to self.
Japanese culture makes much of striking a balance between these two and Japanese film, in the chambara film and also in the yakuza genre, nearly always sets up the conflict between these two obligations at the core of the narrative. The American western often involves these conflicts to a lesser degree but “High Noon”, like the samurai film, has this at it’s heart.
In the introductory sequence, when Marshal Kane first hears that Frank Miller is returning, it is obvious that he feels compelled to take up the badge but he is convinced by his friends and his new wife to leave town immediately. Giri and ninjo. His duty to protect the town from the villains and his need to keep his promise to his pacifist wife set in conflict. Except that it’s not that simple. When he returns and begins his efforts to form a posse for the towns defense, he learns that the town has a different agenda.
The aging former Marshal says he wants to help but he just isn’t capable anymore. Kane’s deputy is ready to sit this out, bitter over being passed over for the position of Marshal after Kane’s retirement. Men in the saloon are ready to see Kane killed. “Frank Miller has friends in this town.” The town Judge packed up a bag ind skipped town almost immediately.
The linchpin occurs in the church where a few seem ready to leap up and aid him but many blame Kane for bringing this issue down upon the town. The town’s mayor stands up and gives an impassioned endorsement of Marshal Kane and what he has done for the town. It seems at first that he is rallying townspeople to the Marshal’s defense but then he turns. While the bad guys are most assuredly bad, if the marshal goes away, the villains’ motivation for violence would similarly go away. Violence would only hurt the burgeoning town’s financial prospects in the future. When the townspeople refuse to move from their seats, their heads hung in a sad mockery of churchgoing prayer, it is worse than if they were merely indifferent or selfishly fearful for their own individual safety
Kane’s obligations have been flipped, giri and ninjo turned on their heads. Where he thought his duty was to protect the town, the town doesn’t want his “protection.” Where he was prepared to sacrifice his personal obligation to his wife, it now seems that he may be acting solely for his own sense of honor, a situation that he is creating. What at first seemed like a matter of a murderer returning to exact revenge twists when we learn that the entire situation may have been precipitated by both Kane and Miller pursuing a relationship with the same woman. A woman who did not become Mrs. Kane.
A tangled mess of conflicting duties that Marshal Kane has no time to unravel. All that remains is the killing.
John Wayne disliked the film because he felt it was an allegory for blacklisting, which he actively supported. In his Playboy interview from 1971, Wayne said that he considered the film "the most un-American thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life" and went on to say he would “never regret having helped run [director Carl] Foreman out of this country.”
You know what? Fuck you, John Wayne. Blacklisting people, destroying their careers because you disagree with their politics, is a dick move and it turns my stomach to see you so smug about it.
As a result of his disgust, Wayne joined with Howard Hawkes to make “Rio Bravo”, to their minds a more American Western. Hawks explained, "I made Rio Bravo because I didn't like High Noon. Neither did Duke. I didn't think a good town marshal was going to run around town like a chicken with his head cut off asking everyone to help. And who saves him? His Quaker wife. That isn't my idea of a good Western."
That is a very shallow and uninspired view of what occurred in “High Noon” and that it is coming from an otherwise quality filmmaker is only marginally less embarrassing than John Wayne’s assessment of the “un-Americanness” of the film. Sheriff John Chance, Wayne’s character in “Rio Bravo”, much like most characters played by Wayne, is entirely devoid of internal conflict. The situation is simple with the obviously defined bad guys on one side and the good guys and their numerous allies on the other. Giri and ninjo are perfectly aligned.
It’s not that this is a bad way to be. We would all like our personal moral duties to be aligned with those of society. It’s secure. It’s comforting. But it doesn’t make for compelling filmmaking.
In “High Noon”, hero Marshal Kane wears black. Villain Frank Miller wears white. Duties to society and duties to ones innate humanness are all murky, muddy shades of gray. At the very end, when Frank Miller lies dead in the street, the empty streets fill with townspeople who gape at the body and congratulate their Marshal. The look of contempt on his face when Will Kane removes his badge and throws it in the dirt says it all.
And this is why “High Noon” is consistently ranked as not only one of the best westerns ever made but also one of the top 100 films ever made . . . and “Rio Bravo” is not.