High Noon (1952)
High Noon has very high esteem in the world of westerns, and even in the bigger realm of film history as well. Gary Cooper won an Oscar for his performance as the lone hero, Marshal Will Kane. The film is text-book material for black-and-white cinematography, and I would also comment that the film’s “real time” element (where the film’s 85 minutes tells the story of Will Kane’s an hour and a half on a Sunday morning) was 24 before Kiefer Sutherland was even born.
All the praise aside, this is not really my kind of western though. Perhaps the film’s values are a bit dated, but the whole story appears relatively tame and (childishly) unrealistic. But maybe that’s because my own taste for westerns had always been heavily influenced by Clint Eastwood’s body of work – I have a natural inclination for films where the protagonist is a man with real faults instead of a saintly figure, and is put through hard ordeals before getting his reward. In other words, I like gritty, dark westerns, instead of swashbuckling, melodramatic ones. High Noon unfortunately falls closer to the latter category.
But really, this is a matter of style and presentation. Gary Cooper’s protagonist is by most standards the definitive hero. He doesn’t need to stay and fight, and the is swimming against the tide with no one by his side. But he does it anyway. He does it because he holds morals and values above life, and he doesn’t know any other way to live but to stand tall whatever the odds. This makes him stand out against the rest of his fellow-men, who are cowards regardless of being friend or foe. This may very well be a social metaphor for the times, since the 1950s was the era of McCarthyism and Hollywood was certainly a battleground.
I have little misgivings about the character; I just didn’t like the presentation very much. The “real time” element works well in building tension – every clock in the film took on an ominous meaning as the harbinger of doom – and the symbolic montage as noon arrived is certainly a classic one minute of film, but other than that I found the film somewhat dreary and lacking in suspense. I know I’m judging the film against decades of storytelling evolution whereby Hollywood has since mastered the art of delivering action-packed thrills, and therefore is being inherently biased, but I couldn’t help feeling how slow sometimes the film was, and the action sequences just didn’t deliver enough satisfaction compared to the previous hour of build-up narrative. At the end of the day, I guess what I mean is that this film just hasn’t aged well (e.g. watch Dr. No and compare it to the latest Bond film, it’s really hard to say the first film was a good film in any regard.)
7/10