Unfinished Business

Hello, Miss Grace…

Grace Kelly may have had a short-ish filmography, but she’s got quality over quantity, and that’s not too shabby. One of them, of course, was 1952’s HIgh Noon, a classic of the Western genre that doesn’t hit a single false note. Well, at least the movie doesn’t.

High Noon opens in the tiny town of Hadleyville, where former Marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper) and his new wife, Amy (Grace Kelly) have just been married by Percy Mettrick (Otto Kruger), the justice of the peace. They barely have time to celebrate, though, because someone hands Will a telegram informing him that his old nemesis, Frank Miller (Ian McDonald) is out of prison and on his way  back to Hadleyville, presumably to get revenge on Will for breaking his reign of terror and sending him to prison.

The townspeople want Will to get the heck out of Hadleyville and take Amy with him, but Will’s reluctant. He figures that since the new marshall hasn’t arrived yet, plus the fact that he can’t leave the town in the lurch, he should stay and take care of Miller. Then there’s the little matter of the deputy marshal, Harvey Pell (Lloyd Bridges) being a major flake. He’d rather hang out with Will’s former flame, Helen Ramirez (Katy Jurado), but she gets fed up with him and tells him to take a hike.

Amy, of course, wants to get out of town, and she tells Will she’ll be on the noon train. Much to her chagrin, she’s told she needs to wait in the hotel, where she makes the acquaintance of the hotel clerk, a rather weasely fellow who doesn’t like Will. Fortunately Helen is a sympathetic if jaded ear, and she and Amy hit it off.

Meanwhile, Will’s trekking all over town trying to rustle up a posse, but no one will take him up on it. They appreciate Will freeing the town from Miller before and how safe the town has become, but they don’t want to risk going up against Miller and possibly getting killed. Will tries the bar, he tries the church, and he even asks the former marshal Martin Howe (Lon Chaney, Jr.). The latter would help him, but he’s too old and infirm.

Nope, Will gets no takers. Not the mayor. None of the men, not even the ones who agree with him that Miller needs to go. Helen regards all of them with scorn as she boards the train to head out of town. At least Will has a productive hour before Miller shows up. He even has time to stop in at the barber with nine minutes to go.

There’s not much question as to the outcome here, but getting there is still pretty unexpected, plus there’s the aftermath, Put it this way: What would any of us do if we had a big showdown and everyone who should bring it in the clutch bails on us? How would we respond? Will does what a lot of us would probably expect, and it’s immensely satisfying.

One of the first things that struck me about this movie is that it takes place almost in real time, which doesn’t seem to be a very common story structure for the nineteen-fifties. It’s all about marking time as well, such as when the hotel clerk adjusts the grandfather clock in the lobby, showing that it’s 11:15, or the clock on the barbershop wall showing it’s nine minutes to noon. We see pendulums swing and hear clocks ticking.

Time is very important in High Noon, and because as things get right down to the wire it amps up the suspense very nicely.

There’s really nothing negative that can be said about High Noon. It’s one of the greatest, if not the greatest, western in film history. The acting in the movie is note-perfect, with great chemistry between Amy and Will and definite tension between Will and Helen. There’s not a lot of exposition and not a moment is wasted.

The only false note in the film are the townspeople, and for that matter, Amy, at least initially: They’re a bunch of blithering cowards. The only one who doesn’t flinch is Helen, and she’s left town.

What’s amazing is that High Noon was hugely controversial when it released in 1952. It was the height of the Cold War, and the Russians hated the film because it was a story about an individual standing alone. Certain Americans hated High Noon because it showed the town basically blacklisting Will Kane, not unlike the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, and there were rumors flying around that the screenwriter, Carl Foreman, was a Communist.

Howard Hawks didn’t care for the film because it showed Will Kane running around town trying to get a posse together, which he didn’t think was realistic. Noon‘s director Fred Zinnemann later said in an interview that he didn’t think this was a fair assessment because no two people are alike, and that the story was really about a “man’s conflict of conscience.”

None of the to-do has stopped the film from being a success, though, and in the years since the controversy has faded, leaving us with a plain and simple film masterpiece.

For more of the wonderful Grace Kelly, please see Emily at The Flapper Dame and Virginie at The Wonderful World of Cinema. Thanks for hosting this, ladies–it was a blast! Thanks for reading, all, and I hope to see you tomorrow for the Classic Movie Blog Association’s Haunting: In the Afterlife Blogathon…

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Bibliography

Zinnemann, Fred. Fred Zinneman Interviews. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2005.