Poor man’s Alien. This time, when the monster shows up, it’s not as terrifying as the xenomorph
★★★☆☆
High Noon is a movie that has been on my radar for a long time. It is a 1952 classic directed by Fred Zinneman, starring Gary Cooper as Marshall Will Kane and Grace Kelly as his quaker bride Amy. The film is maybe most famous as being poorly referenced by Hans Gruber in Die Hard (That’s Gary Cooper, asshole). Or maybe it is best known as the 27th best film of all time according to AFI. It is also David’s favorite western movie of all time. This film has a lot of accolades is what I am trying to get at. While it deserves those accolades, this film doesn’t hold up as well as I would have liked it to.
In addition to being a classic western, the movie doubles as a monster movie. In the beginning of the movie we meet Marshall Kane about 5 minutes before he marries his beautiful bride. About 2 minutes after they are wed, he hands over his gold star and begins to plan his new life. His friends assure him that they’ll be fine, after all the new marshall will be arriving the next day. But, that would make for a pretty crummy movie, so then we learn that Frank Miller has been pardoned by a northern judge (Damn Yankees!) and will be arriving back in town on the 12:00 PM train. Frank Miller is our monster.
Kane spends the rest of the film (told in almost real time) trying to gather up deputies among the townsfolk, fighting with his wife, and being told ‘I wish you had just left town’. And this is where I think this film is begging to be remade. Every conversation Kane has helps to build on the mythos of Frank Miller as an ultimate boogeyman. No one wants to cross the line to help Kane. These conversations played well in this movie, but it was so clear that this was a movie from 1952. Every one of the scenes could be packed with so much more tension and emotion by a modern writer/director. I’d love to see David Fincher’s High Noon and think this would have been much more deserving of a Coen Brothers take than True Grit was.
The characters in this film are also rich, if a little one note and goofy by today’s standards. I wanted to make sure to single out Katy Jurado’s performance of Helen Ramirez, a wealthy entrepreneur of Mexican descent who serves as Kane’s former lover and a foil for Grace Kelly in almost all ways. Her character seems forward for even 1952, yet here she is in the old west. Her character’s storyline ultimately left me wishing or that she was used a little more effectively or that I was able to find out a little more about her.
My biggest problem with this film, though, comes in the last 15 minutes. As that 12:00 PM train rolled in, I was terrified of Frank Miller. I mean I had just watched life-long friends, fellow law enforcers, and an entire church turn on Kane, a man they themselves proclaimed cleaned up their town and made it safe for kids to go outside again. I don’t know exactly what I expected to step off the train, but I was ultimately disappointed in the third act of this movie. I don’t want to spoil anything so that’s all I will say for now.
All of these problems eventually led this to be a good film where I saw potential for a great one. There are a lot of reasons you should check this movie out. Start getting rid of those classic Hollywood films from your queue. If western’s are your thing, then you have already seen this movie, but if you are looking to give the genre another chance you can do a lot worse. If neither of those things tickle your fancy, just watch it anyway, because that’s what John McClane would do.
High Noon is available to stream on Netflix.
Next week, David takes on The Wind Rises. I know this will be a little challenging for him as he doesn’t love Studio Ghibli as much as I do. It’s really one of his greatest flaws. This is Hayao Miyazaki’s final film and is based on the life of Jiro Horikoshi.
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