HIGH NOON

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 722, 15 May 1953, Page 21

HIGH NOON

(Stanley Kramer-RKO Radio) T half-past ten on Sunday morning three desperadoes rode through the single street of Hadleyville, a Western cow town. The citizens taking their wives to church and the loafers around the saloon knew it meant only one thing -Frank Miller was out of gaol and was coming back to get his revenge on the man who had put him there. The three gunnies stopped at the station, a shed beside a pair of railway lines stretching across the plains beneath the sun. Perspiration dripped down their faces as they enquired if the noon train (Frank .Miller on board) was on time. In the marshal’s office Kane, the retiring marshal, hung up his gun and his silver star and kissed the woman he had just married, These scenes mark the opening of one of the best Westerns that Hollywood has made, in which Gary Cooper, as the ageing, tired personification of frontier justice, decides to take up his gun again to fight one last battle with the forces of disorder, at the almost impossible odds of four to one. As the plot develops it becomes clear that this is no ordinary gun fight. When Kane goes to the church to ask for volunteers for a posse, no one will help him;/the citizens | would rather have Frank Miller and his three henchmen running the town than gunplay in the,streets, and the certain death of some of thém. They urge the marshal to leave town, but his inexorable sense of duty refuses to let him walk out on his suicidal responsibility as preserver of the law.. As noon approaches ha finds himself deserted by his friends and even at last by his wife, and as the sun beats down on the deserted street he sits down in his office to write out his last will and testament. When the shooting starts he fights it out alone, and by a miracle (and his wife’s last minute assistance) kills his enemies, after which he drops his badge of office in the dust and rides out of the town whose spirit has failed it at the moment of crisis. The film ends as a triumph for an upright, lonely man but a bitter defeat for mankind in general, which has failed to live up to the ideals it has entrusted to its stern protector. _ High Noon has been presented with scrupulous realism and the laconic simplicity of a folk tale, and Stanley Kramer and his director, Fred Zinnemann, have concentrated into its few hours of action about as much suspense as the film-maker’s art can contrive. Thé heat and the passing of time are emphasised by cunningly angled camerawork, by shots of the baking earth or the sweat-lined faces of the protagonists, by the swinging pendulum of a clock on the marshal’s wall. The rich assortment of supporting parts are all excellently sketched in, and include Ian MacDonald as the returning killer, Grace Kelly as the marshal’s bride, Lloyd Bridges as a craven deputy-marshal, and Katy Jurado as the spirited Mexican woman who was once the marshal’s lover,