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High Noon
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Magazine Story John W. Cunningham
Screenplay by Carl Foreman
Directed by Fred Zinnemann
Gary Cooper ... Marshal Will Kane
Thomas Mitchell ... Mayor Jonas Henderson
Lloyd Bridges ... Deputy Harvey Pell
Katy Jurado ... Helen Ramírez
Grace Kelly ... Amy Fowler Kane
Otto Kruger ... Judge Percy Mettrick
Lon Chaney Jr. ... Martin Howe
Harry Morgan ... Sam Fuller
Ian MacDonald ... Frank Miller
Helen (to Harvey): You're a good-looking
boy: you have big, broad shoulders. But he's a man. And it takes more than big, broad shoulders to make a man.
Helen: I don't understand you. No matter what you say. If Kane was my man, I'd never leave him like this. I'd get a gun. I'd fight.
Amy: Why don't you?
Helen: He is not my man. He's yours.
Helen: Kane will be a dead man in half an hour and nobody's going to do anything about it. And when he dies, this town dies too. I can feel it. I am all alone in the world. I have to make a living. So I'm going someplace else. That's all.
This is a good time in human history to bring up the classic Western that's all about facing up to the need for taking care of business (TCB). We're back in a late-1800s budding town in the West, that wants to shed its reputation as a backwater haven for gunslinging goons and ignorant hillbillies... and become a town where "decent women" feel they can walk down the street. Hadleyville is becoming respectable mainly because Marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper) ran the slimeballs out of town.
Frank Miller and his gang used to run things here, but thanks to Kane, Frank has been sent to prison—presumably for a crime involving gunplay, and likely murder. Well, Frank, after several years in the state slammer, is pissed, and he's coming back to Hadleyville to get revenge on the marshal. Three of his men are going to meet Frank on the noon train, then march into town and TCB in their own way. It's obvious the Miller intentions are deadly to Kane... not to mention destructive in varying degrees to anyone Miller feels has wronged him.[1]
So what's a self-respecting marshal to do?
"Well, let's see, why don't I get married to my young Quaker-girlfriend Amy (Grace Kelly) on the same day Miller and his fellow killers are to bound to arrive!" Yikes! Then inform my new bride that I can't leave town to go on the honeymoon, because I have this unfinished business with these guys. Okay, maybe you can fault Marshal Kane for bad planning, but it seems for some reason he doesn't know about Frank Miller getting out of prison until the very day Frank's going to be coming in on the train gunning for him!
However unlikely the setup may be, the fact remains the bad guys are rolling into respectable Hadleyville this very day, at high noon, so Marshal Kane needs to deputy up and face the bad guys down. This presents some issues: in fact people are coming up with every reason under the sun for not stepping up:
And we're not even talking about the women and old men. In the older -man category is former marshal Martin Howe (Lon Chaney Jr.); he makes a good point. With his crippled hands and old limbs, he would be a hazard to Will Kane... because Kane would have to look after him. Kane would more readily be killed if it were just the two of them. Chaney has some of the best lines regarding the people's lack of fortitude... and re: cops:
Martin: You risk your skin catching killers and the juries turn them loose so they can come back and shoot at you again. If you're honest, you're poor your whole life, and in the end you wind up dying all alone on some dirty street. For what? For nothing. For a tin star.
This is a movie about moral and physical courage. Think Straw Dogs meets High Plains Drifter. It causes you to think about how you yourself would behave in similar circumstances. Most of us prefer not to have to deal with a 900# gorilla or even to acknowledge its existence.
[For modern, immediate "gorilla," think of the 9/11 inside job, the "income" tax, the Fed, the Neocon wars and mass killings launched on lies, the craven Bush-Bama-admin giveaways to international banksters, the government forced-school indoctrination system, depleted uranium, drug-war tyranny, the prison industrial complex, etc.] Paul Douglass in his new book on the Kennedy killing calls it the "citizen denial" complex.
In Douglass's case, citizen denial is of the "unspeakable." In the more routine case of 900# gorilla denial, it's simply denial of an obvious, mundane, and imminent evil. We prefer not to face it. But, politically, anyway, was it always so?
Think back to the time of the country's founding... to the Declaration of Independence and the War for Independence. If ever there were a 900# gorilla, the British Empire was it, equipped with spoils of war up the wazoo, a fleet of, like, whole buncha, warships, not to mention hundreds of slave ships it could impress into duty. Its army was awe-inspiring, the best equipped and trained soldiers in the world. It sported corporate power like no other in the East India Company, a large part of the reason the colonists revolted.
In that day, the so-called common men and women of America—and even the men and women higher in the social strata—faced the fact of British tyranny. They had an active and "in your face" journalistic community that lived on the streets with them. People discussed openly, as matters of great importance, their rights and yours. They lived in actual-and-effective freedom without the central governing authority, AND THEY HAD NO NEED FOR IT. The people of civilization's frontier in America had forged their own lives, learned to govern themselves, and figured it was time to leave the central authority back where it belonged.
All right, I know I just launched into my "thang," there, and everyone has heard it before. Let's get back, though, to the situations we all sometimes face in life. Kane's behavior, by refusing to ignore the harsh reality thrust upon him, and by standing up for what is right regardless of the consequences—don't forget the blond society girl he just married is leaving him in his hour of need, too—sets an example we can all emulate. That's another moral of the movie: if more than a handful of people stand up for what is right (regardless of consequences) they almost always win.
And now I can't help but draw the allegory of High Noon to anyone in the freedom movement who is facing reality, who draws our attention to the 900# gorilla by doing what Will Kane did: simply deciding to stand up and refuse to give in to criminal assault... regardless of what others may do. Like Gandhi, these men and women say, "That's it, I will not comply, I will not run, I will make a stand here, if this has to be 'my Alamo,' bring it on... bitch."[2]
So the movie works for me on a personal level, it inspires me to stand up for what I believe in—Constitutional liberty and the nonaggression principle—and not back down. Everyone knows that liberty is right and liberty is legal... and that for liberty and decent human life to prosper in our society, decent human beings must be prepared to go to the mat for it. At least hitch your pony to the liberty wagon, and give your physical and moral support to those who lead us down the path of righteousness.
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[1] But my favorite character in the whole movie outside of Kane is the fiery, independent, morally righteous Helen Ramirez (played by Mexican beauty Katy Jurado). Helen years ago had been intimate with Marshal Kane, and she knows that what he stands for is the choice we all must make between right and wrong. It's black and white, buster, and if you're not going to help the white, then you're black as coal. I love how she launches into Amy, and into Deputy Pell. And more, I love her with the Marshal, where we see the tenderness and passion with which she still loves him. She is the ultimate "stand by your man" kind of woman in my book.
[2] High Noon came on Turner Classic Movies this week, at the exact period when Pete Hendrickson, author of Cracking the Code: The fascinating truth about taxation in America, was convicted in a kangaroo court for filing truthful income tax returns. Pete is my special hero: a man of principle who is also a man of action. His brilliantly conceived and masterfully written book will liberate thousands of us imminently, and millions of us eventually. I'm dedicating this review and my upcoming column to him... and sending him money.
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