High Noon; Dutch Delight November 14, 2006
Posted by John Hodson in : DVD News & Info, Film & DVD Reviews, Westerns , trackback‘Kane will be a dead man in half an hour and nobody’s going to do anything about it. And when he dies, this town dies too. I can feel it. I am all alone in the world. I have to make a living. So I’m going someplace else. That’s all.’
Helen Ramirez
Life very much imitating art, Carl Foreman’s world was going to hell in a handcart as he was writing the script for High Noon. He was under investigation by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (commonly known as HUAC, presumably because it doesn’t make much of an acronym any other way…), as were many of his colleagues, indeed, many of the cast and crew that were working on what - in fact if not in spirit - is a low budget ‘quickie’ western.
Foreman faced a moral dilemma. He either danced to HUAC’s tune or, in imitation of his pragmatic woman of ’dubious reputation’ Helen Ramirez, who quits Hadleyville because she has to ‘make a living’ somehow, he can get out of the country of his birth…before the clock strikes noon. Foreman, unlike his protagonist Will Kane, chose to flee.
There was a hokey slice of condescending cold war wisdom that went, if I can recall it correctly, ‘if you’re not a communist when you’re 18 there’s something wrong with your heart. If you’re still a communist when you’re 80, there’s something wrong with your head.’
As a working class Jew in the 1930s, young Carl saw the effects of the Great Depression on his countrymen, and, like many 1000s of other American young men and women of conscience, joined the American Communist Party. He later told HUAC, when he was called before them during the production of High Noon, that, yes, he had been a party member, but had become disillusioned with ‘Uncle Joe’ Stalin and had quit. Yet he steadfastly refused to give the Commission names of fellow party members, was labelled an ‘unfriendly witness’, and blacklisted. Can’t work, can’t eat. Not HUAC or Senator Joe McCarthy’s problem.
By the time High Noon was finished, a storm bursting over Foreman’s head, the Chicago born Oscar nominated (for Champion) screenwriter had decamped to England, to continue making his living, but behind he left a picture that, though ostensively a simple western tale, left few in doubt of its allegorical origins. And while Foreman would liked to have been Will Kane - a man alone, strapping on his gun for the final confrontation - his screen doppelganger is actually a combination of the frontier marshal and his former squeeze, the proud but practical Ramirez, a woman who fears that her town is about to die and die bloody at the hands of something evil, like her former lover Will, and so gets the hell out from under.
It’s something of a triumph that High Noon made it to the screen at all in the political climate of ’50s America. Foreman’s script is particularly and deliberately unsubtle, and word got out as filming was taking place. The hounds of the right were soon on the trail of the Reds under this particular bed, and were subsequently let loose not only on screenwriter Foreman (he was also associate producer but producer Stanley Kramer, in a bid to placate the witch hunt, had that credit removed and bought him out of the Kramer company. The two never spoke again), but also on Lloyd Bridges, who was also blacklisted alongside cinematographer Floyd (father of musician David) Crosby.
Laughter was in short supply for many in Tinsel Town, but it was Foreman who enjoyed a last guffaw, albeit from beyond the grave. High Noon won four Oscars (not bad for a film with a budget of $750,000, shot in less than a month), Foreman’s script was nominated (again, though he didn’t win), but he later did in fact win one of the little statuettes, while blacklisted, for The Bridge on The River Kwai (he was originally uncredited, but, like fellow writer Michael Wilson, finally received recognition posthumously from the Academy in 1984. Better late than never…).
Ironically, it was John Wayne who picked up Gary Cooper’s Oscar award for Best Actor at the 1952 ceremony, though the old cold warrior couldn’t resist having a verbal pop at the absent Foreman and his film. Wayne always professed a distaste for High Noon, but it would be seven years before the ‘Duke’ and the equally right wing Howard Hawks delivered their riposte, the tremendous Rio Bravo. Both director and lead actor thundered that High Noon was somehow anti-American, that real heroes didn’t go around begging for help and, as Wayne would erroneously recall, grinding their badges into the dust. “I didn’t think a good sheriff was going to go running around town like a chicken with his head off…” said Hawks (from Hawks on Hawks by Joe McBride).
My deep suspicion is that it wasn’t High Noon either man had a problem with as such, it was Foreman and what they deduced were his politics. Wayne later said that he was ‘proud’ to have helped drive Foreman from the country. And while reactionaries at the centre of the HUAC storm might have been affronted by the allegory, your average cinema-goer wasn’t that concerned; what they saw was an exciting, thrilling, ground-breaking western. In fact, up until the moment Kane drops that badge on Main Street (and as far as Wayne was concerned, he might as well have pissed on the Stars and Stripes) and looks at the townspeople with utter contempt, it could be read entirely the other way; a triumph of rugged individualism over the collective will. Most people just bought their popcorn and had a great time.
As for Cooper, well, therein lies one of the stranger aspects to all this. First off, let me get this out of the way, for it seems the fashion today to compare Gary Cooper to the knottiest of 3 x 2 pieces of pinewood. Various reports say that ‘Coop’ had trouble with bleeding ulcers and / or back trouble while filming, thus explaining how easily the look of a man with the troubles of the world on his broad shoulders. I suppose it couldn’t have hurt (no pun intended), but the man from Montana, whose father was a genuine western pioneer, who, though untrained, had been acting on screen for three decades (and had been a 24-carat Hollywood star most of that time), was very fine actor indeed.
I’ll say that again for those who prefer to believe the idiocy put about that Coop was as wooden as a cigar store injun. Gary Cooper had a style that was almost wholly transparent, on set he appeared to be doing very little, in fact when it came to the rushes, it was apparent that he and the camera were made for each other. As a screen actor he was almost perfection itself; watch the close-ups (of which there are many) in High Noon. Zinnemann knows what his star, though entering the autumn of his career, is capable of and trusts him with the tightest of tight shots. This is how good Coop is; there’s a brief two sentence exchange with Katy Jurado in Spanish. You don’t have to know the meaning, Cooper invests his two words - two words - with a tear-jerking mixture of love, loss, pain and sadness. I’m a fan; I hope it shows.
But, far more intriguing for me at least, is the fact that Cooper, whose politics were very much on the liberal wing as a young man, willingly, almost eagerly, volunteered to testify before HUAC.
Far from stupid, he must have known not only of Foreman’s troubles, but also the subtext must have leapt from the pages of his copy of the screenplay. Cooper knew that one of the dangers of getting involved with High Noon was a guilt by association, a fact Foreman confirmed later after Cooper defended the screenwriter. And yet he stuck that chin out and went ahead and took the role, a role in a movie that few predicted would end in glory, in an Oscar, and in movie immortality. Will Kane would have been proud.
So, backstory over. The main feature.
It’s not clear where Hadleyville is (the name is only seen on signs, never spoken), but it’s probably Texas / New Mexico, possibly mid-1880s, the town (it thinks) having put it’s lawless past behind and looking to the future, for growth, for investment. An injection of capital(ism). It’s summer in this ‘dirty little village’, and the sun beats down mercilessly from a cloudless sky.
It was the late, great Dimitri Tiomkin’s idea to have the film open with the three members of the Miller gang meeting by a ‘hanging tree’ just outside of town, then riding in, the scene covered by no natural sounds, just Tiomkin and Ned Washington’s song, sung in stripped down country fashion by ’oater’ star Tex Ritter. By the time the credits end, pages of narrative have been covered (sing this; come on, sing dammit!);
Do not forsake me, oh my darlin’
On this, our weddin’ day
Do not forsake me, oh my darlin’
Wait, wait alongI do not know what fate awaits me
I only know I must be brave
And I must face a man who hates me
Or lie a coward, a craven coward
Or lie a coward in my graveOh, to be torn ‘tweenst love and duty
S’posin’ I lose my fair-haired beauty
Look at that big hand move along
Nearin’ high noonHe made a vow while in state’s prison
Vowed it would be my life or his’n
I’m not afraid of death but oooh!
What will I do if you leave me?Do not forsake me, oh my darlin’
You made that promise as a bride
Do not forsake me, oh my darlin’
Although you’re grievin’, don’t think of leavin’
Now that I need you by my sideWait along, wait along, wait along
Wait along…
It was a brilliant concept (not least Washington’s rhyming of ‘prison’ with ‘his’n’). Tiomkin always said that his favourite score was the one he wrote for Wayne’s The Alamo, but it’s in this film that we have the almost perfect marriage of music and image, the notes pounding out like a metronome, tick-tocking down the the seconds of Marshal Kane’s life. Tiomkin uses the tune throughout, sometimes giving it a romantic lilt, but also as part of proceedings, jauntily knocked out by the saloon pianist, it’s played on harmonica by Colby (Lee Van Cleef; the only sounds he makes onscreen, otherwise, he doesn’t utter a word), heard in church, and it’s there on on a small portable pump organ as Kane marries Amy. And then dramatically, at the climax, each note, each second is marked, down to the terrible shriek of the train whistle as it, Kane’s doom, enters plain view. Noon.
By the time the Miller gang - Ben Miller (Sheb Woolley), Jim Pierce (Robert Wilke), Jack Colby (Van Cleef) - get to town, and the credits have ended, we’re already well into the story.
Marshal Will Kane (Cooper) and his new bride (the gorgeous Grace Kelly, like Van Cleef, making her film debut) are getting hitched in the company of all their great and true friends; all of them, including Amy Fowler Kane, would within a few short minutes ’forsake’ Kane when they hear that an evil they thought had been eradicated five years previously is about to hit their town like a twister. Kane, unlike many western heroes, is an everyman, as far away from a social outsider like John T. Chance as is possible. Kane’s cleaned up the town, he’s part of the community, and he’s about to give up being a law man to settle down and become a storekeeper. Practically everyone that matters, is, after all, at his wedding. They are, as said, his ‘friends’.
But those ‘up north’ commuted Frank Miller’s death sentence and now, for some unexplained reason he’s been pardoned. He’s out and he’s coming back to town. And not for the wedding. Both Kane and Miller (Ian McDonald) go against the grain of typical western characters good and bad. Kane is willing to face down his nemesis, indeed he knows he has no option, but he also seeks help. And he’s not only afraid, he’s not afraid to admit it.
Miller, well, for well over an hour this black demon is never seen and what he’s done, what dark crimes he’s committed, are never made clear. There are obtuse references, Kane tells Ramirez (Katy Jurado): ‘You know how he is…’ and an odd look comes over her face, as if the Marshal has dredged up a memory from the dark recesses of her mind of something particularly nasty, and painful.
In fact, at the mere mention of his name, grown men grow queasy and bolt their doors, yet the most we see of him during this period is the empty chair from which he was sentenced to hang. It’s not a dead man that’s coming back to Hadleyville, but like the spectre at the feast, Miller’s presence is tangible, we share their fear, and he dominates the whole proceedings. By the time we do see him, the boys, as dirty and dusty as all get out, greet him off the train, and Frank is the real city slicker, in brand new, expensive store bought duds, quite the dude. As if he’s ready to go to that little white boarded church with the rest of the folks. All the same, he has a killer’s blank eyes.
One by one, as Kane tries to gather a posse, they desert him. First and foremost his Quaker bride, who has taken many months to persuade her man to forsake the gun, but is horrified that he now has to kill, or be killed on the day of their betrothal. Will’s deputy, the feisty and opportunistic Harvey Pell (Lloyd Bridges) sees a chance to get the job of Marshal that he feels Kane has denied him. In turning his back on Will, he shows just why. Kane’s former mentor Martin Howe (a lovely understated cameo by Lon Chaney) will not help him. Living on the edge of town in a small wooden shack (a future Kane has seen and was determined would not be his), Marty tells him: ‘You risk your skin catching killers and the juries turn ’em loose so they can come back and shoot at you again. If you’re honest you’re poor your whole life and in the end you wind up dying all alone on some dirty street. For what? For nothing. For a tin star.’
The town fathers, all his old back-slapping buddies deny him, talk themselves out of helping the man they all agree has made their town the peaceful law-abiding place it is; Kane is reduced to considering, then almost reluctantly rejecting, aid offered by first a one-eyed drunk, then a 14 years old boy (’I'm big for my age’). And the clock is ticking.
Foreman brings them all on; men who disappear at the first signs of trouble, the excuses they dredge up (’Go on home to your kids Herb’), those that are desperate to see him get his ‘comeuppance’, all of whom are telling him to get out of town, and by implication, take his trouble far away with him.
Vienna born Fred Zinnemann hadn’t directed a western before and he clearly comes to the project with an open mind, not bound by convention; indeed for such a thrilling story, it’s something of a surprise that it’s 73 minutes before there’s anything we can accurately describe as western action (i.e. gunplay). It was Zinnemann, with the help of cinematographer Crosby, who determined to give his movie a stark, high contrast look; it’s beautifully shot in black and white, dry and dusty, those lines deeply etched in Cooper’s tired and dirty face. Time and again we return to two central motifs, a simple shot of miles and miles of empty railroad, down whose parallel tracks, death is coming. And those clocks; the seconds ticking away on huge clock faces, pocket watches, train station chronometers, the pendulums swinging like bodies at the gallows. Kane can’t stop time and we, the audience, are able to feel the sands trickling through his fingers.
When they produced the first cut, Zinnemann and his editor Elmo Williams, were dissatisfied. Then Williams screened a cut he’d made as an experiment. It was trimmed to almost real time, so two minutes into the picture Kane would wed at 10:35am, and while it be wrong to say the whole film is played out in ‘real’ time, it’s as near as dammit, a succession of those clocks would count us down to ‘high noon’, the tension becoming palpable as each clock face, each watch is checked, time slipping inexorably away. Out went a whole back story, of another sheriff bringing in a wanted man to Hadleyville, and a comic interlude with town drunk Jack Elam in the saloon. The normally taciturn Zinnemann almost jumped for joy; this was it, this was his film.
From Ben Miller rearing his mount at the Marshal’s door -‘You in a hurry?’ ‘I sure am.’ ‘You’re a fool…’ - to Judge Mettrick (Otto Kruger) pointing at that empty chair (’…have you forgotten what he said? …’I'm going to kill you Will Kane…’), Mayor Henderson’s (Thomas Mitchell) stunning betrayal, Tiomkin’s score hammering down those final few seconds to noon as Will scratches away at his last will and testament, the blast of that train whistle and the score rising in time with a magnificent towering crane shot of Cooper, alone in an empty street to face his destiny - it’s spine-tingling cinema, cinema that makes the pulse race, that feeds those neural pleasure receptors the good stuff. The real good stuff.
And the Academy agreed, giving it - despite a behind the scenes campaign firmly against it - awards for Best Actor (Cooper’s second after Sergeant York), Editing, Best Original Song (the first time a non-musical had scooped this) and Best Score. In 1953, the defiant Writers Guild of America awarded Foreman, in absentia, their prize for ‘Best American Written Drama’ for High Noon. Screw you, Senator Joe…
Today, there’s a growing school of thought that is of the opinion that Leone and later Peckinpah came out of nowhere with their ‘revisionist’ westerns, which is total and utter tripe. Indeed there are many fans of Italian westerns in particular that would never dream of watching a Hollywood western.
Theirs wasn’t a revolution as such; High Noon is yet another step on the western’s evolutionary ladder. Leone’s bad guys weren’t the first ones to look as if they’ve been dragged through sagebrush backwards. The denizens of the Hadleyville saloon are a bunch that would sit well in any Leone casting call, and by the time he faces down the Miller gang, Marshal Kane is bruised, battered and dirty, his clothes torn, his nerve almost shredded. Indeed Leone, a western fan since he was a child, crammed as many references from his favourite westerns as he could into the delectable Once Upon a Time in The West (and, of course, that opening sequence is the heaviest nod possible to Zinnemann’s masterpiece). From John Ford to Raoul Walsh, Budd Boetticher, Sam Fuller, Anthony Mann and many more; both ‘Bloody Sam’ and Sergio would acknowledge the debt they owed to the masters of cinema’s oldest genre.
I suppose there’s more than a touch of the evangelist in me when it comes to film classics (maybe you’ve noticed?)
Whisper it, gentle reader, but sometimes I have been known to, well, shall we say, be slightly economical with the truth in a bid to spread the word when an older, sometimes, little known, or less-loved, film debuts on DVD. It’s not that I aim to dupe anyone - heaven forfend - but, damn it, I just want to share the joy. So, sometimes a quite decent transfer becomes ‘brilliant’. Come on; just watch the bloody thing.
This is no ‘little known or less-loved’ film and so you can trust me, Scouts honour, when I tell, I have just watched Paramount’s Region 2 Dutch Special Edition of High Noon, and it was akin to looking into the face of God.
In the UK, rights issues mean we’ve had to put up with Universal’s nasty, worn and tattered transfer for years (the only good news is, aside from being included in their Grace Kelly Screen Goddess set, it appears to be out of print). In R1, fans were looking forward to the home video rights for a whole slew of back catalogue classics owned by Republic, returning to the ownership of Paramount, after several years with Artisan (now Lion’s Gate), who, shall we say, failed to do many of them justice. In mitigation, for most, they didn’t hold the best elements, which are securely in Paramount’s Los Angeles vaults.
The twist is that Paramount actually declined to take the whole catalogue back, save for some TV titles, it’s said, and It’s a Wonderful Life. Quite why this should be is a puzzle, though rumours abound that the current suits could not care less about classics on DVD (except, obviously, Capra’s fable), which is why their output has slowed to a crawl. In fact, a crawl would be welcome.
We should be thankful then, that the above doesn’t seem to be the case the world over. The new High Noon Special Edition has been issued in Holland, France and Australia. In terms of extras there is no difference between the new disc and Artisan’s R1 50th Anniversary release, with ‘Hi - I’m Leonard Maltin…’ present and correct with a ‘Hi - I’m Leonard Maltin…‘ type featurette, and interviews with a whole slew of people, some, sadly no longer with us - Fred Zinnemann, David Crosby, John Ritter (son of Tex, who is himself heard in a vintage radio interview), Jonathan Foreman, Tim Zinnemann and Maria Cooper, all of whom also feature on the commentary track. So far so good.
But the transfer, the transfer - it’s truly blissful.
Look, when I had a first peek at it, I was so thrilled I sat down and practically watched the whole thing straight through. At breakfast. I shed tears of joy - I swear - when Grace Kelly’s luminous face turned upwards to gaze lovingly into Cooper’s at the wedding. It’s so good, it makes the Artisan - both iterations, one being slightly better than the other - look like VHS. It’s clean as a whistle, beautifully defined and detailed, and not only, as is their practice at Paramount bless ‘em, does it have a stereo track (phooey…), but also a full throated restored mono track (huzzah!), so that ol’ Tex and his chug-chugga-chug-chugga-chugga-chugga-chug can be heard loud enough to make the china rattle with no distortion.
It is, without a shadow of a doubt one of the best presentations of a black and white movie of this vintage (or possibly any other) extant on DVD. Screencaps simply do not do this justice (they never can tell the whole story) - you must see this yourself to believe just how good a job Paramount have done here - but there are a few stills of the R4 version posted in The DVD Forums Westerns Thread here.
I picked up my R2 Dutch copy - English friendly, right down to the menus - from Mediadis.com for €8.99 plus postage. And after all that good news, there’s more; more European (and possibly Antipodean) R2 Paramount classics on the way in 2007 apparently - newly restored versions of The Godfather, Godfather 2, we can expect Don Siegel’s Invasion of The Body Snatchers, Ford’s The Quiet Man, a lip-smacking prospect if it is restored at last, Looking for Mr Goodbar and more (full list here). If they are anywhere near the standard of High Noon, then I can see a lot of fans in the UK and US ‘going Dutch’ next year…
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[…] I was so pleased when John Mulholland replied to my piece on Vera Cruz; and very kind comments they were too. The utterly delightful thing is, that John is one of the leading lights at MODA Entertainment. As a writer and director of some rather spiffy documentaries, he possesses far, far more knowledge than I on Vera Cruz and High Noon, and imagine my delight when he was generously willing to share what he knows with me - and ultmately you, gentle reader - thus fleshing out both those blogs in a way I couldn’t have imagined whilst writing either. […]
[…] A quick huzzah for an upcoming U.S. release; Lionsgate is to release High Noon as a two-disc SE. Effectively, it will be the release that Paramount abandoned some 18 months ago now when they made that sudden and depressing about face that left their Republic holdings in the hands of Lionsgate. Happily, the new set will boast that eye-wateringly wonderful restoration and transfer that has already been enjoyed by fans in Holland, France and Australia (you can read about it here), all the extras from previous releases, plus a new and fascinating 50 minute documentary. […]