The Dangerous double-edged Subtext of ‘High Noon’ (example: “High Noon”)

Imagine a town in the old Wild West. The year is 1867 (or any year between 1867 and 1877, really), and the town marshal Will Kane is faced with an impossible choice: He actually wanted to leave town with his newly-wed wife Amy to start a new life with her elsewhere, but word has just reached them that the ignoble villain Frank Miller has been released from prison and is about to arrive in town by the noon train. Miller is a dangerous outlaw who had tormented the townsfolk in the past, looting, raping and pillaging his way through the otherwise peaceful streets of Hadleyville, in short: wreaking havoc and causing unimaginable suffering.

Amy (played by the radiant Grace Kelly) pleads with her husband to skip town with her in order to avoid getting revenge-killed by the vicious criminal and his gang. After all, the town marshal had once arrested Miller and put him behind bars; so he probably tops Miller’s kill list. But Marshal Will Kane (played by screen legend Gary Cooper) feels bound by honour and duty to stay, and eventually Amy departs on her own, abandoning her husband.

Will Kane, for his part, is now faced with a race against the clock: In order to take on Frank Miller and his gang, he has to assemble a posse of able-bodied men in the hour that’s left before the noon train arrives, or he will have to face evil alone.

But alas, everyone, absolutely everyone disappoints: The inhabitants of Hadleyville all desert their marshal in the town’s greatest hour of need; nobody wants to confront evil. All of them come up with excuses that amount to, ‘I am too afraid/too old/too young/not the police,’ etc. They’re all governed by craven cowardice, weakness and blind conformity. And thus…Will Kane has to face off against the villains all on his ownsome. With nobody he can rely on, he has to fight the good fight alone…

This is the basic premise of ‘High Noon’, the 1952 film classic that earned Gary Cooper his second (well-deserved) Oscar.

Cooper’s role as Marshal Will Kane is iconic, and if you’re a die-hard ‘Sopranos’ fan (guilty as charged), then you’ll be happy to know that it’s this particular role that Tony Soprano keeps referring to on the show whenever he says, “Whatever happened to Gary Cooper, the strong, silent type?!”

(Also, I’m almost peeing myself over here at, “I had a semester and a half of college, so I understand Freud!” And yeah, that brilliant scene, that whole performance by James Gandolfini is another example of an iconic role right there.)

We have discussed the film ‘High Noon’ several times on this little blog already because it’s had such a huge impact on 20^th century film making:

We’ve talked about how the whole movie is filmed in real time and what that means exactly.

In another post, we had looked at how this movie inserts shots of clock faces and pendulums into the story in order to ramp up the tension and create a gripping and suspenseful narrative. Both these decisions (the fact that it happens in real time and the inclusion of that clock imagery paired with the underlying tick-tock rhythm of its fantastic soundtrack, which won an Oscar too, by the way – the composer Dimitri Tiomkin actually took home two Oscars for ‘High Noon’ that night in 1953, imagine that: one for the best song and one for the best score)...anyway, so these different decisions show that ‘High Noon’, like no other movie before it, understood time itself as an important factor in creating dramatic conflict; it’s specifically its temporal realism that makes this film so gripping.

In yet another post, we talked about the fact that it gives us a classic example of the villain being introduced with his back to the camera:

(You remember that one, right? Just recently, this knowledge proved very useful again when watching season two of ‘The Diplomat’. Just saying…Also, please don’t click this link unless you want to be spoiled for who’s the baddie on ‘The Diplomat’. But that long shot of the character in question just standing there with their back turned towards us, watching the helicopter, as they’re introduced to us, was certainly something. What an entrance!)

And last but not least, we discussed the way ‘High Noon’ juxtaposes civilization and barbarity by making the revolutionary decision to show civilization in a critical light, presenting society itself as deeply flawed and its members as cowardly and spineless – a decision that was unusual, even ground-breaking for the Western genre at the time of the film’s making. (We discussed this in the context of our analysis of the show ‘Harrow’ when we had talked about why that little Australian show references this old film classic within the first few minutes of its first episode.)

I could potentially write another half dozen or so posts about this movie (at the very least) and probably will at some point, highlighting this or that groundbreaking decision or revolutionary cinematographic detail about it; that’s how important this movie is.

It’s a great, great work of art, and I love it dearly, and yet…

When you examine its subtext…well, let’s just say: things get far more complicated all of a sudden, to be honest. It’s a chamaeleon of a film, dressed up in the cloak of ambiguity – and that despite the fact that its characters are actually as unambiguous as they come.

In some sense, it’s probably the most American movie ever made. (And I’ll explain in a second why I think so.) This might stand in stark contrast to what one John Wayne thought about this film; he was famously so appalled by ‘High Noon’ he was still talking about it with contempt years after its release.

John Wayne thought it was just about the most un-American movie ever made. In fact, he hated it so much, he reportedly made ‘Rio Bravo’ as a rebuttal to it in 1959. (One of the ironies of this whole farce was the fact that, when Gary Cooper received his Oscar for ‘High Noon’, he couldn’t attend the ceremony; Cooper asked John Wayne to accept the award on his behalf, and Wayne – ever the two-faced sycophant – actually praised ‘High Noon’ to the skies during the acceptance speech, even going so far as to claim that the only thing that he regretted was not making ‘High Noon’ himself. It was a lie – and a dastardly lie at that. Wayne had, in fact, been offered the role of Marshal Will Kane in ‘High Noon’, but he had rejected it, deeming the movie too un-American.)

I want to show you today why I think John Wayne was wrong, why ‘High Noon’ is the most American movie ever made.

To understand these ramblings of mine a bit better, you will have to look at the strange double-edged subtext of its screenplay together with me today, alright?

Said screenplay was famously written by Carl Foreman. And it behoves us to take the historical context into consideration here: We are talking about the McCarthy era, the time of the anti-Communist witch hunts. Foreman, a one-time member of the Communist party (who had however left the party a good decade before this film was even made), fell under suspicion of being a secret communist sympathizer like so many other artists, filmmakers and writers at that time; those were the times of the Red Scare and McCarthyite paranoia in America. Foreman was subsequently blacklisted, lost his livelihood and was eventually driven out of America, leaving the States for Britain.

To what extent the screenplay of ‘High Noon’ was already written at the point when he was pressured to testify before the so-called House Committee on Un-American Activities is difficult to ascertain, and it’s, of course, even harder to work out how much of that unpleasant experience influenced this movie, but the general consensus among filmmakers and Hollywood insiders in general at that time was…quite a lot.

The film’s basic premise of one righteous man (Will Kane) trying and failing to get the so-called ‘civilzed’ society around him to acknowledge and confront the danger they are all in just seemed to fit Foreman’s personal predicament too well. Thus the screenplay was read as this great canvas on which Foreman vented his frustration at his cowardly colleagues: gutless screenwriters and actors, spineless directors…so many of the Hollywood establishment were just looking the other way, trying to keep their heads down while individual filmmaker after individual filmmaker was dragged in front of McCarthy’s inquisition, often being blacklisted and losing their livelihood in the process. So many cowards, so little help and support.

Many filmmakers interpreted ‘High Noon’ in this way, and many continue to do so to this very day:

There’s Gary Cooper’s marshal character, for example, the righteous man, doing the right thing and potentially representing the writer himself being targeted by the anti-communist witch hunts. Then there’s Frank Miller, the villain who will arrive by the noon train; he is evil incarnate, a devil that comes a-knocking in order to get you and who might very well represent Senator Joseph McCarthy and his ilk. And then…there are, of course, the cowards. The townsfolk. The people who turn a blind eye to what is happening around them because they think that, if they just hold their breath long enough and keep their heads down, nothing will ever happen to them and they will be spared. (The movie hints at the fact that ultimately nobody will be spared, all of them will go to hell in a hand basket, all of them will see the wrath of Frank Miller (i.e. McCarthy). If you don’t speak up against evil, it will come for you in the end, and all that jazz.)

This is what many film fans to this day think the movie is all about. And to be fair, it’s very likely that this is exactly what Carl Foreman had in mind when he wrote the screenplay.

But that’s certainly not how this commercially very successful movie was interpreted by the public at large! And the way a text is being perceived is often just as important as the way it’s been intentionally written – often reception history is even more important than the original message, whatever that original message might have been.

You see, audiences back in 1952 loved this movie. It was an instant box office hit. And the following year brought it seven Academy Award nominations, of which it ultimately received four.

The reason for this was probably the fact that this top-grossing movie tapped into a deep, collective (and largely subconscious) need the audience was already feeling before even setting foot in the movie theatre: It was something people were probably not consciously aware of, but something they all shared and instantly understood as they were watching this film.

The screenplay actually did something (very cleverly, in my estimation) that wasn’t immediately obvious, but that gave audiences this strong emotional experience, this sense of connection with its main protagonist: It had an underlying second layer of subtext running underneath the more obvious Anti-McCarthy-witch-hunt layer.

So, what is that second layer of subtext?