Comments on Screen Savour: High Noon (1952)

Oddly enough, Stagecoach and Man Who Shot Liberty ...

2008-08-20T22:52:00.000-04:00

Oddly enough, Stagecoach and Man Who Shot Liberty Valance were Ford films that didn't really click with me on initial viewings though the former has grown in my imagination since. At the time I saw Stagecoach I far preferred the darker, more ambiguous style of 40s and 50s films to the spry, lean studio pictures of the 30s. Since then I've really come to appreciate that clean, economical style and it deserves a revisit.

Have you seen Young Mr. Lincoln? Not a Western (a Midwestern I guess) but it may be my favorite Ford - that or The Searchers.

I do admire the genre (I grew up in a house where ...

2008-08-20T08:48:00.000-04:00

I do admire the genre (I grew up in a house where westerns were always on television), and particularly Ford's work in it. My appreciation of The Searchers grows each time I see it. The same can be said for My Darling Clementine, which also seems to get better the more I watch it. But ultimately neither were films that were instantly likable for me, like Ford's Stagecoach or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Howard Hawks's Red River, William Wellman's The Ox-Bow Incident, or George Stevens' Shane.

Do you generally prefer other westerns to The Sear...

2008-08-19T14:03:00.000-04:00

Do you generally prefer other westerns to The Searchers, or is it a genre as a whole that sort of leaves you cold - or lukewarm?

MovieMan - So true what you've written about how t...

2008-08-18T14:54:00.000-04:00

MovieMan - So true what you've written about how the anti-communist/pro-free-association tension works in High Noon. We only have Foreman's official declaration regarding his script, but the hallmark of any good film (and good audience member) is the ability to see the inherent complexities of it has portraying, sometimes inadvertently, both sides of an issue. And of course the ironic aspect of the Red Scare was that both sides saw themselves as crusaders, standing up against evil (either the far-left communists in Europe or the far-right zealots in America trying to "weed out" communists).

I agree ultimately with you, too, that The Searchers is a superior film, although you'll see later this week that the star rating on both The Searchers and High Noon is the same. I've long struggled to reconcile my feelings of The Searchers with mainstream westerns. It is interesting that, despite their different ways of reaching the status of "preeminent western" in the United States, they both stand outside the circled wagons of the western genre. There are cowboys in the west, but fundamentally they are different. It's a greater compliment to Ford, who was able to perform that task with so many of his films.

I think Gary Cooper was a friendly witness, so the...

2008-08-18T12:06:00.000-04:00

I think Gary Cooper was a friendly witness, so the the film's anti-McCarthy credentials might be more ambiguous than Foreman intended. As with Invasion of the Body Snatchers, it could even be read as an anti-communist screed, with liberal America sticking its head in the sand while the true hero faces up to the commies who are threatening the community which would rather ignore them. Certainly On the Waterfront, a film with a similar plot device to High Noon, was intended this way.

Interesting that you respond similarly to High Noon and The Searchers - I think for a while the latter film was celebrated at almost an underground level (though Buddy Holly did adopt John Wayne's catch phrase for his song "That'll Be the Day"). Only in the 70s did it become a standard classic, while all that while High Noon was an above-ground certified "masterpiece," resented by some film buffs as middlebrow and tepid compared to The Searchers. I like both, but definitely prefer Ford's film.

MovieMan0283
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