High Noon is a 1952 western film which tells the story of a town sheriff, who has just married a pacifist Quaker woman. Upon giving up his office immediately after the wedding, he must take on a gang of outlaws, even though the entire town deserts him. It stars:

• Gary Cooper — Marshal Will Kane
• Thomas Mitchell — Mayor Jonas Henderson
• Lloyd Bridges — Deputy Sheriff Harvey Pell
• Katy Jurado — Helen Ramirez
• Grace Kelly — Amy (Fowler) Kane
• Otto Kruger — Judge Percy Mettrick
• Lon Chaney Jr. — Martin Howe (as Lon Chaney)
• Harry Morgan — Sam Fuller (as Henry Morgan)
• Ian MacDonald — Frank Miller
• Eve McVeagh — Mildred Fuller
• Morgan Farley — Dr. Mahin, Minister
• Harry Shannon — Cooper
• Lee Van Cleef — Jack Colby
• Robert J. Wilke — Pierce (as Robert Wilke)
• Sheb Wooley — Ben Miller

The movie was written by John W. Cunningham (story) and Carl Foreman , based on a pulp short story, The Tin Star. It was directed by Fred Zinnemann, a controversial choice, since the producers were uncertain that an Austrian Jew would be able to direct the quintessential American genre: the Western. Zinnemann himself was highly influenced by the books of Karl May that he had read as a child. Writer Carl Foreman was also the producer of the film, but he was uncredited because he was blacklisted by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee.

High Noon is a generally praised but somewhat controversial western in which a lawman in a western town feels obliged to face down a bunch of bad men coming into town. Cooper's character is betrayed by all the "good" men in town who won't take up arms for a good cause. It is often an interpreted as an allegory of contemporary McCarthyism.

There was some controversy over the casting of Gary Cooper in the lead role. Although he had already won an Oscar for his performance in Sergeant York, he was considered too old for the part, and was, in fact, thirty years older than Grace Kelly, who plays his wife.

In the film she is a young woman who wants her husband to leave town and has a religious aversion to violence of any kind. Still, she stays with him when he fights — and even kills one of her husband's assailants herself.

Grace Kelly and Katy Jurado in High Noon

One of the interesting techniques used in filming High Noon was to have the sequence of events occur in "real time." When a clock is shown in a scene, an event the audience expects to occur at another given time will occur that number of minutes later in the movie.

The director intended to capture the atmosphere of old Civil War photographs, with an austere gray sky as a backdrop. (This effect results from the fact that early film emulsions were most sensitive to blue (and uv) light; Zinneman's attempts to reproduce this effect in the film were one of the reasons he strongly opposed its proposed 'colourisation'). Despite the constraints of a limited budget ($750,000) and only 28 days to film, he was able to obtain this even though most of the film was shot on a Hollywood lot by taking advantage of the smog in Los Angeles to darken the sky.

High Noon is consistently on the Internet Movie Database's list of top 250 films, was #33 on American Film Institute's 100 Years, 100 Movies, and has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. Its haunting theme music is still popular.

A made-for-TV sequel, "High Noon Part II: The Return Of Will Kane" (produced in 1980, 28 years after the original movie was released), featured Lee Majors in the Cooper role.

The 1980 science fiction film Outland borrowed from the story of High Noon for its plot. The movie starred Sean Connery.

And finally, in 2000, "High Noon" was entirely re-worked for cable television with Tom Skerritt in the lead role.

Some speculate that High Noon provided inspiration for Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai.

High Noon is the film most requested by American Presidents.

External links and references

• A detailed site
• The Ballad of High Noon & The Rise of the Movie Theme Song (Senses of Cinema)