AEI
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But to read High Noon solely through current events and the biographies of those involved in its making is to short-change this classic. Indeed, the fact that the movie can speak to audiences of different political stripes and generations suggests that it has an underlying meaning that transcends the particulars of any one person or time. As Zinnemann himself noted, the story of High Noon was intended to have "something [both] timely--and timeless--about it."
So, what is the movie about? Like any classic, it raises a number of interesting questions. However, at its core, "the movie is really about Kane and what he will do," as movie historian Michael F. Blake aptly and succinctly puts it.
Virtually everything--script, direction, and editing--in the movie points the audience toward Kane. To start, the film is shot in black and white, with no light filters for the camera. The result is a stark, hot-like feel to the film in which the characters stand out against the town and the nature that surrounds them. As a result, there are no distracting clouds or town color to pull a viewer's eyes away from the key action and actor. To sharpen the viewer's focus, Kane is dressed in black pants, vest, tie, and hat, while the rest of the town is dressed predominantly in grays. Even Frank Miller, whose presence hangs over the whole plot but never appears until the last 20 minutes of the film, gets off the train dressed in a light-colored hat, coat, and tie.
Two cuts in the film further highlight Kane's centrality. In the original script, the opening scene is of Hadleyville as a ghost town, slowly dissolving back into the town in which the gunfight takes place. Likewise, in the original script, the movie's final scene has Kane taking off his badge and then the picture dissolving back to Hadleyville as an abandoned shell of a town. The second cut, typically overlooked by the film's commentators, is of a deputy marshal, Toby, who is trying to make his way back to town but never arrives. In both cases, the scenes were cut: the first for reasons of substance and the second because it would have been a distraction to the central plot. Beginning and ending with the town's eventual state is to put the emphasis not on Kane's own virtues but on the consequences of the town's lack thereof. Similarly, a sub-plot about whether someone can make it back in time to help Kane only acts to pull the viewer's attention away from Kane, his decisions, and his predicament. As the film's editor commented later: "I worked day and night re-cutting the film. I felt the emphasis should be on [Gary] Cooper and his problem, and anything that didn't contribute to this should be eliminated."
One of the striking elements of the film is how little Western-style action there is. Until the last few minutes of the movie--when the gunfight takes place--what action there is, is really the "action" of Kane deciding to stay, failing to rally the town, and yet still doing his duty as he sees it. To drive that point home, the movie takes place in "real time," that is, with the time elapsed on screen matching the time elapsed in the theater. This is dramatically punctuated by a shot of a clock slowly ticking away the time until noon, when Frank Miller's train is scheduled to arrive. The technique serves to draw the viewer into Kane's timeframe and share even more directly his anxiety over the town's failure to help and, quite likely, his own impending death. All of which is brought to a head with perhaps the most famous boom shot in movie history. As the clock strikes noon and a train whistle is heard in the distance, the camera pulls back and up from Kane, showing him alone on the streets of Hadleyville.
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So, who is Kane? The one thing we know for sure is that he's been one heck of a marshal. When Frank Miller and his crowd were allowed to run free, Hadleyville had been a town in which the bar and hotel/brothel were the center of "civic" activities. As one woman reminds the town when Kane comes to the church to appeal for help, Hadleyville had been a place "where a decent woman couldn't walk down the street in broad daylight" and now, as the mayor points out in the same scene, it is a town investors from "the North" are thinking of putting their money into. Kane is obviously a man of extraordinary talents working for, at best, a very ordinary town.
It's striking how the film progressively strips Kane--and hence his decisions--of any conventional cover
How extraordinary, the movie suggests subtly by the women in Kane's life. We are introduced to Kane at his wedding to Amy, a Quaker. On its face, it's an odd match for a man who has lived his adult life as a fairly fearsome lawman and, as the movie makes clear, is not a churchgoer. However, we gain further insight into Kane, the man, when it's revealed that at some earlier point he had a relationship with Helen Ramirez, the town's hotel and saloon owner, and a woman whose reputation is such that normal townsfolk are reluctant to associate with her. (In fact, prior to Helen's relationship with the marshal, she had been Frank Miller's lady.) In both cases, Kane's personal relations are with women who don't fit into the norms of any town, either because they shun what all towns need--guns to uphold the law and protect themselves--or because they ignore the social conventions that bind all towns together. In short, Kane may have been the town's marshal, but he was not really a member of the community--a fact that becomes all too apparent to him as he tries and fails to round up deputies to confront Miller and his gang.
Indeed, it's striking how the film progressively strips Kane--and hence his decisions--of any conventional cover. The first to abandon him is the town's judge, who, having originally sentenced Miller and having no faith in the town's willingness to defend "the law," is seen packing up his law books and heading "out of Dodge." Seemingly confirming what the judge predicted, neither the decent folk in town--gathered for Sunday service in the town church--nor the non-churchgoers--congregated at the saloon--rally to Kane's support. When asked to give his advice, the parson provides a largely incoherent argument about right and wrong while the town's mayor moves from professing his friendship to Kane to arguing against helping him on the grounds that the fighting will prevent outside investment in the town. Finally, someone notes that technically Kane is no longer the marshal, having turned in his badge earlier that day.
What we are left with is Kane, alone, acting on his own internal code of conduct. When the camera pans to Kane driving in a carriage with his new bride, having just left town in advance of Miller's arrival, he is clearly bothered by his decision to leave. He stops and tells Amy, "They're making me run. I've never run from anybody before." When she protests his decision to turn back and appears to leave him for doing so, he simply responds, "I've got to, that's the whole thing."
In the classics' account of courage, fear of violent death--death in battle, in particular--is the situation in which this virtue is most readily seen and defined. Yet, as classical authors also note, this is a somewhat problematic definition in that both patriots and a gang of criminals can conceivably exhibit such courage. As the saying goes, there is "honor even among thieves." Courage, then, must be combined with something else--a standard outside itself--if it is to be considered truly virtuous. The standard that normally applies is either facing death in service of one's country or risking death in service of a noble deed. But, here again, the problem is that praise for such courage is itself contingent on the justness of the country one is willing to die for or, in the case of a noble deed, is limited by imperfect human judgment of what is "noble." Kane's problem is not his willingness to face death but his reason for doing so.
By any reasonable account of his situation, his decision to stay rises "above and beyond the call of duty." The truth is that few would have thought any less of him if he had simply decided to leave. He had fulfilled his duty to Hadleyville--perhaps more than the town deserved. What he had not fulfilled was the duty he owed himself. As High Noon makes clear this is something not easily understood by others: not his wife, not his one-time deputy, not even his closest friend, the retired marshal. As undeniable as the sense of duty to stay and fight is, Kane himself can only utter: "I've got to, that's the whole thing." While that hardly clarifies matters in a philosophic sense, nevertheless, there is only one in a thousand moviegoers who doesn't at the same time understand and admire Kane's decision to return to Hadleyville.
In a different age, such lessons were taught in epic poems, like Homer's Iliad, or the genre known as the "mirrors of princes," such as Xenophon's Cyropaedea. Needless to say, a movie, even a great movie, cannot duplicate the subtlety and complexity set out in such texts. That said, a great movie like High Noon can still raise important questions and make us, in turn, more reflective and, one hopes, better citizens.
High Noon puts the practice of virtue for its own sake--in this case, the martial virtue of courage and, with it, a man's sense of honor--at the heart of the plot. For an audience of Americans, who Tocqueville once described as driven by the maxim of "self-interest rightly understood," the film presents a morality play suggesting that a calculating civic culture may not be enough. Certainly, at the time of the movie's release--when World War II was a recent memory and it was by no means clear that the Cold War would not turn hot--there was a real question about just how much of a burden Americans could take. Yet High Noon's popularity then and its continuing popularity today suggest that Americans have remained open to this older notion of virtue. Somehow, it still makes sense to us, and it's still a pleasure to watch.
Gary J. Schmitt is a resident scholar at AEI.