Following up on my thoughts on Silverado, a 1980s film dripping with nostalgia for Westerns and serials the filmmakers watched in their Boomer youth, I decided I wanted to watch an ur-Western, preferably something without The Duke1 A palate cleanser, if you will; a film to set my understanding of the genre in the right direction. I chose High Noon from my Amazon Prime queue. Many reviewers on IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes called this movie “the greatest Western of all time.”
The epithet is certainly a bit of hyperbole. Perhaps modern reviewers have warm and fuzzy memories of watching it as children, and it has won a bunch of awards, but there are certainly more nuanced Western films. Reading about the production, many see the film as an allegory for the Hollywood blacklist: a man, with his life and livelihood at risk, standing up for what is “right,” is abandoned by the community that he helped to build.2 Helping him in a time of need, they believe, will end their good lives. That theme resonates today.
[Read more…] about High Noon (1952)- John Wayne made a good movie or two in his time. He was also rabidly racist and an arch conservative. His film, The Searchers, is a about a man who spends years trying to find his niece, who’s been “captured” by the Apache. Not to return her to her family, of course, but to murder her. She’s been defiled by a savage, he says. ↩
- the writer, Carl Foreman, was run out of Hollywood and the United States after production wrapped after refusing to name names to the HUAC ↩