Signature Edition

High Noon Blu-ray Review

Reviewed by Dr. Svet Atanasov, September 29, 2016



The sheriff

Fred Zinnemann's westernhas been discussed so much during the years that at this point there is nothing that one can write about it that has not already been written by someone else. One can probably only add that its 'classic' status is certainly deserved.Sheriff Will Kaine (Gary Cooper) has found the perfect woman (Grace Kelly) to settle down with and is now ready to retire. She has asked him to do so and he has given her his word that as soon as they are pronounced husband and wife he will take off his badge and call it quits.But on his final day on the job Kaine is told that his replacement will be late and that the notorious gunslinger Frank Miller (Ian MacDonald) is coming back to town. This is bad news for Kaine because a few years ago when he cleaned up the town he placed Miller behind bars and he vowed to put a bullet in his head.Miller is due to arrive on the noon train. He will be greeted by his three best men (one of them played by a very young looking Lee Van Cleef) and then together they will go looking for Kaine.The local residents urge Kaine to rush and leave town so that he can avoid confrontation with Miller, but he decides to stay and deal with the gunslinger once and for all. Shortly after, his wife abandons him, and then the town's residents agree that it will be in their best interest to distance themselves and do the same.The film has a very simple message: It is worth fighting and even dying for what is right. But during the years there have been a number of very political interpretations of it that have been used to reframe it in different ways. One of these interpretations suggests that Miller portrayed the infamous Senator Joseph McCarthy and his gang was the HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Committee), while Kaine portrayed the film's writer, Carl Foreman, who was a member of the Communist Party and was called before HUAC during the early 1950s. So the environment in which the clash between Kaine and Miller occurs apparently imitated the polarized and paranoid environment in which Foreman lived. There is another popular interpretation which suggests that the odd conflict between Kaine and the town's residents actually reflected the division between people like Foreman and other communists who abandoned them and later on became informers and witnesses for McCarthy's people. So in this interpretation the focus of attention is actually on the erosion of trust between the communists as well as their bitter disillusionment.It is also worth mentioning that during the Cold War era the film resonated very differently with folks living behind the Iron Curtain. Basically, Kaine was seen as a promoter of the strength of American individualism and his stance was interpreted as a veiled denouncement of the mass fear and hypocrisy that kept the communists and their lackeys in power for decades. So in this case the film turned out to be quite effective as a pro-American piece with specific and surprisingly relevant political points.Ultimately, however, the film's strength isn't in its ability to inspire political debates. Its technical qualities -- from the brilliant decision to shoot in real time to the careful framing choices to the great management of Dimitri Tiomkin's score and the manner in which it enhances the tension and drama  are undeniably excellent.The film is loosely based on John W. Cunningham's story "The Tin Star". According to various reports, however, producer Stanley Kramer bought the rights to the story after he discovered that Foreman's script actually had plenty of similarities with the original story.