“They just don’t care.” High Noon, 1952.
I am often quick to jump on people who call things a "rip-off" of something they hold dear. "Art is a conversation," I'll say or, "There are no original ideas." I need to remind myself that's a universal truth, not limited to the post-post-meta age of pop culture we're in now.
It's easy to dismiss old movies, especially for a woke feminist ally like myself (and you, of course. I mean, of COURSE you are.) I've watched films from before the Civil Rights Act hungry for racial stereotypes and casual misogyny the way a Conquistador observed the Aztec disdain for books: an excuse to dismiss all the craftsmanship on display with a civilized scoff. I know people who literally will not watch a movie like High Noon because they assume the story will be filled with all the various Baby Boomer -isms we fret so hard to absolve ourselves of in the modern age.
And yes, High Noon is a Western from the 1950s, but it's also in conversation with all the other Westerns from the 1950s... and 40s, and 30s, and 20s etc--all the way back to the actual goddamned Wild West.
The reason High Noon is still jammed in our collective unconscious, from Clint Eastwood to McCree; why I had always thought of it, even before I had seen it, as THE western, before Sergio Leone blew the genre open, was that it represents all the cliches, images, and texture of Westerns. I mean, it's right there in goddamned title: HIGH NOON. Name me a more indelible mnemonic for the genre!
But even though I was aware of the Westerns that came before it--your Tom Mixes and your I'd tossed them all into a stew of Hays Code irrelevance, studios scrambling over each other to pump out White Hat vs Black Hat copaganda with a smattering of white supremacy, genocide, and Christian fundamentalism. And High Noon does have those things! You can laugh at it if you want to! But at its core, what the team of craftsmen who put this together were trying to create, is a compelling, thoughtful, and exhilaration distillation of all those tropes and cliches squeezed into a diamond of a movie that would be used as a prism in the decades to come to produce, well, all of modern movies.
The biggest surprise for me was the meaning of the title itself. High Noon isn't just a cool name for a Western: it's the threat that drives the engine of the film. Towns in the wild west revolved around the train schedule, and noon is when the bad guys are coming. The movie proceeds in real time (!) as our hero, Gary Cooper, tries to round up a posse before they arrive. But, and here's the second big surprise of the film, nobody wants to help. Cooper spends the runtime of the film visiting each business and gun owner in town, and nearly all of them tell him to kick rocks. You'd expect Cooper to face this with a hardened mask of heroic stoicism, but every rejection hits him lower and lower, his face gets sadder and sadder, as he realizes that these people he's defended think they might be better off without him.
There's a thrilling deftness to how the movie threads through the Hays Code. While, yes, Cooper's lawman is presented as a lawful good hero, he's constantly reminded by the townspeople that one cop is as good as any other cop, that he serves a transactional purpose, that some of them hate his guts for thinking he's better than them. An early scene between Cooper and the local Justice is a surprisingly acidic dig at the American law system: the Judge packs up and leaves rather than face the bad guy, knowing he can install himself anywhere he likes until it's inconvenient for him.
At the end, Cooper's refusal to accept that the town isn't interested in his protection leads to the deaths of four men. Cooper gets the girl (who renounces her religion to shoot a man in the back) and rides off into the sunset (well, not really, 'cause the movie ends at like 12:15 PM.) And the town just sort of...shrugs and moves on. All the hand-wringing about justice and morality and duty was really important to this one guy and not anyone else, who recognize that, if the supposed criminals do kill Cooper, there will just be another guy with a tin star and a gun pushing them around.
Is this film a full-throated call to respect your powerful men and stand against the tide of Communist-serving apathy? Or is it making fun of the red blooded patriots who thrill at a lawman dispensing justice (ie, bullets) on behalf of a town that doesn't deserve his nobility? I think it might be both! But whatever it is, it deserves to be separated from the stew.