Post by petrolino on Jul 28, 2018 0:16:57 GMT
The western 'High Noon' is an adaptation of the story 'The Tin Star' by John W. Cunningham. In Hadleyville, a small town located in New Mexico Territory, Marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper) looks to appoint deputies for a showdown with the notorious Miller Gang.
'High Noon' was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" in 1989, the respected cultural body's first year of existence. A television sequel, 'High Noon, Part II : The Return Of Will Kane' (1980), luckily engaged Elmore Leonard to write an original screenplay. Peter Hyams' compelling science-fiction fantasy 'Outland' (1981) draws a high degree of inspiration from 'High Noon'. The film was remade as the television movie 'High Noon' (2000).
"People gotta talk themselves into law and order before they do anything about it. Maybe because down deep they don't care. They just don't care."
Principal Cast
Gary Cooper as Marshal Will Kane
Thomas Mitchell as Mayor Jonas Henderson
Lloyd Bridges as Deputy Marshal Harvey Pell
Katy Jurado as Helen Ramírez
Grace Kelly as Amy Fowler Kane
Otto Kruger as Judge Percy Mettrick
Lon Chaney Jr. as Marshal Martin Howe
Ian MacDonald as Frank Miller
Lee Van Cleef as Jack Colby
Robert J. Wilke as Jim Pierce
Sheb Wooley as Ben Miller
Eve McVeagh as Mildred Fuller
Harry Morgan as Sam Fuller
Morgan Farley as Dr. Mahin
Harry Shannon as Cooper
Jack Elam as Charlie
Principal Cast
Gary Cooper as Marshal Will Kane
Thomas Mitchell as Mayor Jonas Henderson
Lloyd Bridges as Deputy Marshal Harvey Pell
Katy Jurado as Helen Ramírez
Grace Kelly as Amy Fowler Kane
Otto Kruger as Judge Percy Mettrick
Lon Chaney Jr. as Marshal Martin Howe
Ian MacDonald as Frank Miller
Lee Van Cleef as Jack Colby
Robert J. Wilke as Jim Pierce
Sheb Wooley as Ben Miller
Eve McVeagh as Mildred Fuller
Harry Morgan as Sam Fuller
Morgan Farley as Dr. Mahin
Harry Shannon as Cooper
Jack Elam as Charlie
'Led Boots' - Jeff Beck
The opening credit sequence in 'High Noon' sets the scene as three horsemen gather to ride into a small town, ultimately pushing through to reach a tiny railway station. Singing cowboy Tex Ritter relays 'The Ballad Of High Noon', known more commonly as 'Do Not Forsake Me, O My Darlin’, a song with a hypnotic wobbleboard effect composed by Dimitri Tiomkin and fateful lyrics by Ned Washington. During this atmospheric opening, we catch glimpses of the future opening to Sergio Leone's masterpiece 'Once Upon A Time In The West' (1968), one of many westerns to be influenced by 'High Noon'. Sudden events in the film are depicted in real time.
"High Noon (1952) is possibly the all-time best Western film ever made - a successful box-office production by Stanley Kramer and director Fred Zinnemann (who also directed From Here to Eternity (1953) and A Man For All Seasons (1966)). The Western genre was employed to tell an uncharacteristic social problem tale about civic responsibility, without much of the typical frontier violence, panoramic landscapes, or tribes of marauding Indians.
The film's screenplay by Carl Foreman [this was his last Hollywood film before blacklist exile to London, soon after his work on Home of the Brave (1949), Champion (1949), and The Men (1950)], written during a politically-oppressive atmosphere in the early 1950s when McCarthyism and political persecution were rampant, was loosely adapted from a Collier's Magazine story The Tin Star (by John W. Cunningham) published in December 1947. In fact, the film's story has often been interpreted as a morality play or parable, or as a metaphor for the threatened Hollywood blacklisted artists (one of whom was screenwriter Foreman) who faced political persecution from the HUAC during the McCarthy era due to actual or imagined connections to the Communist Party, and made life-altering decisions to stand their ground and defend moral principles according to their consciences. It also has been interpreted as an allegory of the Cold War and US foreign policy during the Korean War."
- Tim Dirks, Filmsite
"It sounds straightforward enough: High Noon was written by Carl Foreman, based on a story by John W. Cunningham called "The Tin Star." But according to Foreman, it wasn't that simple. In a letter to The New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther, Foreman said he came up with the idea himself and wrote a four-page plot outline, then discovered (thanks to a friend passing it along) that it bore some similarities to "The Tin Star." To avoid any problems, he bought the film rights to the short story, hence the official "based on" credit. All of this became an issue later, when Foreman accused producer Stanley Kramer of taking too much credit away from him as the originator, to which Kramer's rebuttal was basically, "What are you talking about? You adapted someone else's story."
While he was writing the film, Foreman was subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to testify about Communists in Hollywood. Foreman had been one, but not for several years, and he refused to name names. He was bound for blacklisting, and High Noon producer Stanley Kramer actually tried to have him removed from the film. (He was saved by director Fred Zinnemann and star Gary Cooper, who was conservative but didn't like HUAC's tactics.) He came to view the story — about a principled man surrounded by cowards who does what's right even when he's personally threatened — as a parable about himself and the other blacklisted writers. On the other hand, fans of Senator Joseph McCarthy saw him as the Gary Cooper character, Will Kane. "Kane's unpopularity for choosing to fight rather than abide [his town's] do-nothing policy is akin to McCarthy's self-image of a crusader risking 'smear and abuse' from those upset by his forthright approach," wrote one film historian."
- Eric D. Snider, Mental Floss
The film's screenplay by Carl Foreman [this was his last Hollywood film before blacklist exile to London, soon after his work on Home of the Brave (1949), Champion (1949), and The Men (1950)], written during a politically-oppressive atmosphere in the early 1950s when McCarthyism and political persecution were rampant, was loosely adapted from a Collier's Magazine story The Tin Star (by John W. Cunningham) published in December 1947. In fact, the film's story has often been interpreted as a morality play or parable, or as a metaphor for the threatened Hollywood blacklisted artists (one of whom was screenwriter Foreman) who faced political persecution from the HUAC during the McCarthy era due to actual or imagined connections to the Communist Party, and made life-altering decisions to stand their ground and defend moral principles according to their consciences. It also has been interpreted as an allegory of the Cold War and US foreign policy during the Korean War."
- Tim Dirks, Filmsite
"It sounds straightforward enough: High Noon was written by Carl Foreman, based on a story by John W. Cunningham called "The Tin Star." But according to Foreman, it wasn't that simple. In a letter to The New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther, Foreman said he came up with the idea himself and wrote a four-page plot outline, then discovered (thanks to a friend passing it along) that it bore some similarities to "The Tin Star." To avoid any problems, he bought the film rights to the short story, hence the official "based on" credit. All of this became an issue later, when Foreman accused producer Stanley Kramer of taking too much credit away from him as the originator, to which Kramer's rebuttal was basically, "What are you talking about? You adapted someone else's story."
While he was writing the film, Foreman was subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to testify about Communists in Hollywood. Foreman had been one, but not for several years, and he refused to name names. He was bound for blacklisting, and High Noon producer Stanley Kramer actually tried to have him removed from the film. (He was saved by director Fred Zinnemann and star Gary Cooper, who was conservative but didn't like HUAC's tactics.) He came to view the story — about a principled man surrounded by cowards who does what's right even when he's personally threatened — as a parable about himself and the other blacklisted writers. On the other hand, fans of Senator Joseph McCarthy saw him as the Gary Cooper character, Will Kane. "Kane's unpopularity for choosing to fight rather than abide [his town's] do-nothing policy is akin to McCarthy's self-image of a crusader risking 'smear and abuse' from those upset by his forthright approach," wrote one film historian."
- Eric D. Snider, Mental Floss
Grace Kelly
'Polyester Bride' / '6'1"' - Liz Phair
Often cited as a political western, 'High Noon' is scripted by Carl Foreman who'd be blacklisted during production having testified before the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Key themes touched upon in the movie include political persecution, social injustice, self-determination and authoritarian abuse of power, ideas delivered via subtext and in the form of a thinly veiled allegory. Long after the film was released, revolutionaries and freedom-fighters in Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia were adopting dialogue from it. A famous poster designed by Tomasz Sarnecki transformed Marian Stachurski's Polish variant of the original American 'High Noon' poster into an election poster for Poland's Solidarity movement, once again reflecting the film's enduring status as an emblem of solidarity.
“In 1943, to the dismay of her family, Katy Jurado was signed up to appear in 'Internado Para Señoritas', directed by Gilberto Martínez Solares, for which she won an Ariel (Mexico's Oscars). There was then a spate of 13 films before she made her American debut, as the wife of Gilbert Roland in Budd Boetticher's 'The Bullfighter And The Lady' (1951), shot in Mexico. Jurado appeared in three more Mexican movies, including a great performance in Luis Buñuel's 'El Bruto' (1952) - for which she won the top Mexican award - before going to Hollywood the same year to play in Fred Zinneman's 'High Noon'.
Reportedly not knowing any English, during the shoot of both her early US films she learnt her lines phonetically, had them explained in Spanish and "hoped for the best". This seems difficult to believe, especially when you see her performance in 'High Noon', for which she was Oscar-nominated as best supporting actress, so it may have been a publicity stunt. Whatever the truth, Jurado continued to make US films until the early 1960s, appearing in such productions as 'Arrowhead' (1953), with Charlton Heston, and 'Broken Lance' (1954), as Spencer Tracy's Indian wife. She took over this role from Dolores del Rio, who was refused a work permit for having contributed to a cause considered communist in the US.”
- Sheila Whitaker, The Guardian
"Hollywood icon Gary Cooper had a refreshing authenticity that makes his conversion to Catholicism only natural. Contrary to frequent reports asserting otherwise, his conversion was not prompted by illness.
“No way,” his daughter, Maria Cooper Janis, said. “He was coming to this on his own, in his own time … bits and pieces of his own life that he wanted to put together in a new way. He had a very real spirituality, that wasn’t an ‘ism’ … that, I think, he was born with, that he grew up with, living out West in nature [and] having a very strong affinity to the American-Indian culture and spirituality.”
- Mary Claire Kendall, National Catholic Register
“At sixteen Luis Bunuel experienced a seismic upheaval in his character. What had been passionate devotion to the Church turned almost overnight to contempt. Despite good grades, he left the Jesuit college and graduated two years later from the local high school.
Luis was always vague about the exact motives for this change of heart. He told Jose de la Colina and Tomas Perez Turrent, two critics who interviewed him in the 1970s, that Darwin's Origin of Species made him 'take a sharp turn', but his wife Jeanne is probably closer when she writes, 'He hates the spiritual power of the Church, and its money.' Luis himself said only that his apostasy began with simple scepticism at the fables fed to him by the Church. His upbringing had turned him into a classic nineteenth-century pragmatist, with an informed intellectual interest it the material world, based on careful observation. He had watched insects, plants and animals, and seen a logical order in their lives and deaths. To convince him, a religious system needed to be rational, and to dove-tail with nature.
His first doubts about Catholicism were not philosophical but practical. If there was to be a literal Day of Judgement, for example, when the dead would rise, how could one earth hold the corpse of every person who had died since the beginning of time? The Church's standard response, 'Because God has decreed it', was insufficient.
Luis also distrusted a God so manifestly lacking the will to expunge his enemies. Perhaps, whispered the Tempter, He did not have the power. By deserting the Church, Luis challenged God to strike him down. Every apostate has his or her own method of throwing down the gauntlet... Luis... drank most of a bottle of cheap brandy and vomited it up during Mass. No bolt of lightning vulcanized him to the pew, and his scorn ripened into a hatred of the Church that would flourish for almost seventy years and generate one of the most consistently vituperative anti-ecclesiastical bodies of work in the history of art.
All his life, Bunuel would be drawn to stories of men who challenged God. Gilles de Rais, the hero of Huysmans's La-Bas, the Marquis de Sade, the heroes of Lewis's The Monk and Moral's Don Juan Tenorio thrilled him with their reckless insubordination; he would film, or consider filming, most of them. They fed his conviction that he had been right to abandon the Church.”
- John Baxter, ‘Bunuel’
Reportedly not knowing any English, during the shoot of both her early US films she learnt her lines phonetically, had them explained in Spanish and "hoped for the best". This seems difficult to believe, especially when you see her performance in 'High Noon', for which she was Oscar-nominated as best supporting actress, so it may have been a publicity stunt. Whatever the truth, Jurado continued to make US films until the early 1960s, appearing in such productions as 'Arrowhead' (1953), with Charlton Heston, and 'Broken Lance' (1954), as Spencer Tracy's Indian wife. She took over this role from Dolores del Rio, who was refused a work permit for having contributed to a cause considered communist in the US.”
- Sheila Whitaker, The Guardian
"Hollywood icon Gary Cooper had a refreshing authenticity that makes his conversion to Catholicism only natural. Contrary to frequent reports asserting otherwise, his conversion was not prompted by illness.
“No way,” his daughter, Maria Cooper Janis, said. “He was coming to this on his own, in his own time … bits and pieces of his own life that he wanted to put together in a new way. He had a very real spirituality, that wasn’t an ‘ism’ … that, I think, he was born with, that he grew up with, living out West in nature [and] having a very strong affinity to the American-Indian culture and spirituality.”
- Mary Claire Kendall, National Catholic Register
“At sixteen Luis Bunuel experienced a seismic upheaval in his character. What had been passionate devotion to the Church turned almost overnight to contempt. Despite good grades, he left the Jesuit college and graduated two years later from the local high school.
Luis was always vague about the exact motives for this change of heart. He told Jose de la Colina and Tomas Perez Turrent, two critics who interviewed him in the 1970s, that Darwin's Origin of Species made him 'take a sharp turn', but his wife Jeanne is probably closer when she writes, 'He hates the spiritual power of the Church, and its money.' Luis himself said only that his apostasy began with simple scepticism at the fables fed to him by the Church. His upbringing had turned him into a classic nineteenth-century pragmatist, with an informed intellectual interest it the material world, based on careful observation. He had watched insects, plants and animals, and seen a logical order in their lives and deaths. To convince him, a religious system needed to be rational, and to dove-tail with nature.
His first doubts about Catholicism were not philosophical but practical. If there was to be a literal Day of Judgement, for example, when the dead would rise, how could one earth hold the corpse of every person who had died since the beginning of time? The Church's standard response, 'Because God has decreed it', was insufficient.
Luis also distrusted a God so manifestly lacking the will to expunge his enemies. Perhaps, whispered the Tempter, He did not have the power. By deserting the Church, Luis challenged God to strike him down. Every apostate has his or her own method of throwing down the gauntlet... Luis... drank most of a bottle of cheap brandy and vomited it up during Mass. No bolt of lightning vulcanized him to the pew, and his scorn ripened into a hatred of the Church that would flourish for almost seventy years and generate one of the most consistently vituperative anti-ecclesiastical bodies of work in the history of art.
All his life, Bunuel would be drawn to stories of men who challenged God. Gilles de Rais, the hero of Huysmans's La-Bas, the Marquis de Sade, the heroes of Lewis's The Monk and Moral's Don Juan Tenorio thrilled him with their reckless insubordination; he would film, or consider filming, most of them. They fed his conviction that he had been right to abandon the Church.”
- John Baxter, ‘Bunuel’
Katy Jurado
There's a tough, realistic fight scene in 'High Noon' between Marshal Kane and Deputy Marshal Harvey Pell (Lloyd Bridges) in which cinematographer Floyd Crosby shoots down low between a horse's legs, a visual trick that seems to presage the child's eye view used during a fight sequence in George Stevens' oncoming western 'Shane' (1953). Crosby's growing use of intrusive, increasingly oppressive near close-ups captures every bead of sweat dripping down guilt-wracked faces as Tiomkin underpins his romantic musical score with strident chimes and metronomic washes. In contrast, my favourite shot in the movie has to be a dramatic crane lift that isolates Kane when the main street's been deserted. Tension levels are enhanced throughout the picture by editors Elmo Williams and Harry Gerstad who use concise clockface cuts to remind Kane the walls are closing in on him.
"High Noon's also not actually shot in New Mexico. Fred Zinnemann’s classic is another of countless Westerns at least taking place in the pre-statehood location (believed to be anywhere between the late 1860s and late 1870s). The precise physical setting is the fictional, never-acknowledged town of Hadleyville, where Marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper) has just married and is retiring from duty. Unfortunately an old enemy, Frank Miller (Ian MacDonald), and his gang have come for revenge and ultimately a famous 12 o’clock gunfight. Apparently the production was to be shot near Gallup but it was cheaper to just film in California."
- Christopher Campbell, IndieWire
“It was a semi-blacklist and a very strange thing. Some studios would work with Floyd Crosby and some studios wouldn’t. He shot 'High Noon' starring Gary Cooper for Fred Zinneman, so he was able to make big films but some directors wouldn’t work with him. During one of those times, he was a cameraman for me and I realised he was a brilliant cameraman. Whenever he was available, I always went back to Floyd ... I wasn’t aware of his work for FW Murnau at the time, but I certainly became aware of it [later on]. He was very good and he could work quickly. I found there were cameramen who worked quickly but whose work wasn’t so good. Some cameramen do excellent work but work very slowly. He was the only cameraman I ever met who could work quickly and at the same time do good work.”
- Roger Corman, Little White Lies
- Christopher Campbell, IndieWire
“It was a semi-blacklist and a very strange thing. Some studios would work with Floyd Crosby and some studios wouldn’t. He shot 'High Noon' starring Gary Cooper for Fred Zinneman, so he was able to make big films but some directors wouldn’t work with him. During one of those times, he was a cameraman for me and I realised he was a brilliant cameraman. Whenever he was available, I always went back to Floyd ... I wasn’t aware of his work for FW Murnau at the time, but I certainly became aware of it [later on]. He was very good and he could work quickly. I found there were cameramen who worked quickly but whose work wasn’t so good. Some cameramen do excellent work but work very slowly. He was the only cameraman I ever met who could work quickly and at the same time do good work.”
- Roger Corman, Little White Lies
Gary Cooper
'Table For One' - Liz Phair
'High Noon' was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" in 1989, the respected cultural body's first year of existence. A television sequel, 'High Noon, Part II : The Return Of Will Kane' (1980), luckily engaged Elmore Leonard to write an original screenplay. Peter Hyams' compelling science-fiction fantasy 'Outland' (1981) draws a high degree of inspiration from 'High Noon'. The film was remade as the television movie 'High Noon' (2000).
