Whether or not Tony\u2019s misread was intentional on the part Sopranos<\/em> creator David Chase, it\u2019s actually quite fitting. Ever since its release 70 years ago, High Noon <\/em>has proven one of the slipperiest of films when it comes to squaring what it\u2019s attempting to say about the world with what it actually shows. Things get even more slippery when you look at the numerous films it inspired, both directly and indirectly. <\/p>\n\n\n\n High Noon<\/em> is one of those movies that, even if you\u2019ve never seen it, you probably know exactly what its about, being that it set the template for so many films that followed. The set-up is as neat and gripping as they come: on the day of his wedding and his retirement, Sheriff Will Kane leans that an outlaw he previously sent to prison has been pardoned and is headed back to town on the noon train, where he\u2019ll be met by three members of his gang and seek to make good on his threats of vengeance. Over the course of the next hour and a half (presented in real time), Kane attempts to round up a posse of townsfolk to meet the threat head-on, only to be rejected by his fellow lawmen, his supposed friends, the town leadership and even his new bride (Grace Kelly). While he does eventually vanquish the threat on his own (with the help of his wife, who eventually comes around to his side), his idealism is fatally wounded, and he rides off only after throwing his badge into the dirt in disgust. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Penned by Carl Foreman, a one-time member of the Communist Party who was summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee during production, and who was subsequently blacklisted and forced to move to Britain to find work following his refusal to testify and name names, the film was an obvious statement on the times, not so much the tenets of McCarthyism, but rather the craven cowardice of the American public in the face of it. Despite the controversy surrounding the film\u2014which extended beyond its politics, with many a viewer and critic voicing their ire at the lack of expected action set pieces in favor of dialog-driven emotional drama\u2014it would go on to rack up seven Academy Award nominations, including Best Actor for Cooper, which he won.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cooper\u2014a staunch conservative who testified before HUAC as a \u201cfriendly witness\u201d (although he would later come out against blacklisting)\u2014couldn\u2019t attend the ceremonies due to a scheduling conflict, so he asked his good buddy, John Wayne, to accept the award on his behalf. Wayne gave a very loving tribute to Cooper in his acceptance speech, joking that he was going to give his own agent hell for not getting him the part. But in fact, Wayne\u2014a staunch red baiter and gleeful participant in the HUAC hearings\u2014had been offered the role, turning it down because he recognized its anti-McCarthyite themes. Ever the two-face, Wayne would later declaim it as \u201cthe most un-American thing I\u2019ve ever seen in my life\u201d and publicly boast about how proud he was to have driven Foreman out of the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wayne\u2019s campaign against High Noon<\/em> didn\u2019t stop there. Still stewing about it seven years later, he, reteamed with his Red River<\/em> (1948) director Howard Hawks, whose own antipathy towards Zimmerman\u2019s film stemmed from his disapproval over how it subverted the tropes of the western\u2013”I didn’t think a good town marshal was going to run around town like a chicken with his head cut off asking everyone to help. And who saves him? His Quaker wife. That isn’t my idea of a good Western\u201d–to make a feature-length rebuttal. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Looking back on it all, it was odd stance for both men to take, given that Red River<\/em>, along with various other of Wayne\u2019s movies\u2013including and especially his magnum opus of three years prior, The Searchers<\/em>\u2013work just as hard to subvert the figure of the western hero and the American myth of manifest destiny. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Regardless, Rio Bravo<\/em> does stand in stark contrast to High Noon<\/em>, the cinematic equivalent of Lynyrd Skynyrd\u2019s \u201cSweet Home Alabama\u201d to Neil Young\u2019s \u201cAlabama\u201d. In it, Wayne plays a small town sheriff who, along with a ragtag group of allies\u2014including Dean Martin\u2019s heartsick drunk, Ricky Nelson\u2019s cocky young sharp shooter, Walter Brenan\u2019s hobbled old coot, and Angie Dickinson\u2019s woman of ill repute (with a heart of gold)\u2014defends the local jailhouse from a wealthy land baron seeking to free his murderous brother from incarceration with the help of dozens of hired guns.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n In place of High Noon\u2019s<\/em> noose-tight narrative, shot in stark black and white and clocking in at 85 minutes, Rio Bravo<\/em> is a shaggy, baggy ensemble piece painted in technicolor and wrapping up in just under two-and-a-half hours. Unlike Cooper\u2019s Kane, Wayne\u2019s Sheriff John T. Chance is never in doubt as to the moral or strategic rightness of his choices, and rather than going around begging for help, he\u2019s constantly turning it down when volunteered from his friends, colleagues and civic-minded townsfolk (although he ultimately ends up accepting it). In place of any existentialist drama about man\u2019s utter loneliness in the universe and the failure of societal institutions, Rio Bravo<\/em> spends its time watching friends vibe out with one another (Quentin Tarantino called it the first \u201changout movie<\/a>\u201d) while simultaneously defending a literal institution. <\/p>\n\n\n\n (About the only thing the two movies have in common are surprisingly progressive\u2014for the time, at least\u2014depictions of Mexican characters, although Katy Jurado\u2019s performance as a local entrepreneur and Kane\u2019s former flame in High Noon<\/em> is far more interesting than the loyal and likeable Mexican hoteliers in Rio Bravo<\/em>, who are mostly there for comic relief.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet, for as different as the movies are on the surface, and for as sucessful as Rio Bravo<\/em> is in and of itself\u2014today it is largely (and rightly) considered the better of the two films\u2014it doesn\u2019t really succeed as a rebuttal to High Noon<\/em>, at least not politically. <\/p>\n\n\n\n If you were to watch High Noon<\/em> ignorant of its origins and production history, you couldn\u2019t be blamed for reading it as a staunchly rightwing work, one which feels much more in line with Wayne and especially Hawks’<\/a> brand of conservative pessimism. Take away the thematic parallels to McCarthyism and what you\u2019re left with is a testament to the triumph of the individual over the collective, one which depicts human nature as so majorly flawed\u2014inherently weak, craven and greedy\u2014that society requires a strong authoritarian hand to protect it. It repudiates non-violence and pacifism (as represented by Kelly\u2019s Quaker character, who saves the day by killing a man) and makes it clear that the entire ordeal at center is the result of \u201cNorthern\u201d judges and politicians being bought off. A speech from Kane\u2019s former mentor on the life of a lawman would feel right at home in any reactionary action movie from the decades that followed:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s a great life. You risk your skin catching killers and the juries turn them loose so they can come back and shoot at you again\u2026People got to talk themselves into law and order before they do anything about it. Maybe because down deep they don\u2019t care. They just don\u2019t care.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Few films have proven as obviously influential as High Noon<\/em>. The image of Cooper, alone and outnumbered, walking tall on his way towards certain (or so it would seem) doom has been recreated in countless movies, many of them iconic in their own right\u2014everything from Akira Kurosawa\u2019s Yojimbo<\/em> to Segio Leone\u2019s A Fistful of Dollars <\/em>and especially the opening of Once Upon a Time in the West<\/em> (which features the great western character actor Jack Elam, who also has a tiny role in High Noon<\/em>), to George Miller\u2019s Mad Max<\/em>\u2014while the basics of its plot and\/or real-time mechanics have been recalibrated in the likes of The Border<\/em>, One False Move<\/em>, Speed<\/em>, Cop Land<\/em>, Nick of Time<\/em> and many, many more. The film itself is also referenced in everything from Die Hard<\/em> to Belfast<\/em>. There are also a number of movies that stand as full-on reimaginings of High Noon\u2013<\/em>and that\u2019s not even counting the 1980, Elmore Leonard-scripted TV movie sequel High Noon, Part II: The Return of Will Kane<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Don Seigel and Clint Eastwood\u2019s blockbuster police procedural from 1971, Dirty Harry<\/em>, is an updated version of the story, in which a lone San Francisco police detective has to make a stand against a vicious killer after the effete, ineffectual bureaucracy he serves fails to back him up. That film ends on the same exact note as High Noon<\/em>, with Harry discarding his badge in disgust after getting the job done. (Fittingly, the politics of the larger Dirty Harry<\/em> franchise<\/a> are as muddled as those of High Noon<\/em>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the other end of the ideological spectrum, you have Peter Hyams\u2019 sci-fi remake Outland<\/em> (1981), a nakedly leftist critique on capitalist exploitation of labor, which sees Sean Connery step into Cooper\u2019s cowboy (now space) boots, playing an earth marshal assigned to a colony on one of Jupiter\u2019s moons, where a major corporation has leased the rights to a profitable mining operation. When he uncovers a deadly narcotics ring responsible for a number of grisly deaths in the name of worker productivity, he makes a one man stand against the company and their gun thugs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n High Noon<\/em> would undergo another loose, but obvious, update 5 years after Outland<\/em> by way Three O\u2019Clock High<\/em>, which swaps a shootout in the town square for a fist fight in a high school parking lot. Arguably the best of the bunch\u2014and it truly is one of the great underrated teen comedies\u2014it doesn\u2019t really posit any philosophy beyond \u2018Don\u2019t be a pussy.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n Given that there would be no Rio Bravo<\/em> without High Noon<\/em>, we can also count the various reimaginings of that picture\u2013including two more collaborations between Hawks and Wayne that used pretty much the exact same template, El Dorado<\/em><\/a> (1966) and Rio Lobo<\/em> (1971), as well as John Carpenter\u2019s gnarly exploitation spin, Assault on Precinct 13 <\/em>(1976), its own 2005 remake of the same name, and the even more extreme VFW<\/em> from 2019\u2014amongst its progeny.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The fact that High Noon<\/em> could beget films of such disparate political bents is mirrored by the reactions it inspired in individuals and organizations. Despite the script\u2019s Red bonafides, the USSR<\/a> hated it as much hardline anti-communists Wayne and Hawks, denouncing it for its \u201cglorification of the individual.” Meanwhile, once the second Red Scare died down (but with the Cold War still raging), Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower screened the film<\/a> several times at the White House during his tenure as President, although not as much as Democrat Bill Clinton. Clinton, who holds High Noon<\/em> up as his favorite film, screened it 20 times during his eight years in office. Following him, George W. Bush watched it only once, although he did present the movie\u2019s poster to the Japanese prime minister. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Speaking of the movie\u2019s poster, it was reworked by the Polish trade union Solidarity and used, to great success, during that still- communist nation\u2019s reform elections, which took place on the precipice of the Soviet Union\u2019s collapse. <\/p>\n\n\n\n That High Noon<\/em> could mean so many different things to so many different people speaks to the resonance of the film 70 years on. But it also goes a long way in highlighting how narrow most arguments over the supposedly inherent political nature of art. High Noon<\/em> is an undeniably political film, but ultimately its ideology is ephemeral, proving no match for its emotive and aesthetic power. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Like Cooper in the film itself, those elements stand alone.\u00a0 “High Noon” is available for digital rental or purchase<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/rio-bravo-1024x576.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/high-noon-2-1024x576.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/crookedc-01.svg\")
<\/p>\n\n\n\n