High Noon

This  is best read while listening to the poignant High Noon Ballad: https://youtu.be/hsDyrZVqipA 

The classic High Noon, like all iconic art, can be contemplated at various levels of meaning.

1. Straightforward. Lean, direct, clear, low-budget, tightly defined by the 80 minute wait for the noon train...it  enacts the primal event of virile loneliness and heroism. At some point, every man must stand alone, without support from family-friends-community, with God only, in the face of death, evil, and his own weakness. This is Jesus in the desert for 40 days. To eventually enter into his vocation as Father, a man enters a solitude and requires a fortitude, in a manner perhaps incomprehensible to a woman. And so, Will Kane (Gary Cooper) simply cannot run away from Frank Miller and his thugs. Everyone, but especially his new wife, thinks he is crazy. In a remarkable performance, Cooper's facial expressions and manner show his fear, ambivalence, insecurity. He has been described as the anti-hero because his emotions register such vulnerability in contrast with the cool confidence reliably shown by John Wayne and similar cowboy heroes. But his solid character overcomes his fears and he emerges victorious. 

Twenty-one year old Grace Kelly, as his wholesome, virginal, innocent, Quaker wife, elegant and voluptuous in her tight-fitting white bridal dress, is sublimely beautiful. She is preternaturally the embodiment of comfort, pleasure, safety and happiness (for any cis-gendered, heterosexual, red-blooded, privileged, walking and breathing man, like Will Kane.) Initially, he flees the fight in the comforting companionship of his young wife.  This is the primal regressive temptation of the man: the retreat to infantile immersion in the maternal as safe, protected, pampered and pleasured (that can find expression in substance abuse, homosexuality, fornication, pornography). Like every man, Kane must renounce this temptation in order to face his own fears, death and loneliness. 

The film's synergistic, serendipitous symphony... Cooper's quiet, tortured expressions/manner, Kelly's exquisite loveliness, the haunting ballad (Do Not Forsake Me O My Darling song by Tex Ritter), and the sparse, lucid script... make for an unparalleled drama of the masculine AGON.

2. POLITICAL. The movie was written and produced in the middle of the McCarthy-Congressional hunt for communists in Hollywood. The film's writer  Carl Forman and the producer Stanley Kramer were caught up in this event. They were close friends, Jewish liberal activists, and had past associations with the Communist Party. Forman, loyal to his friends, evoked this fifth amendment rights and refused to "name names." Kramer broke with him on this. Forman was fired from the project, banned from Hollywood as a "red," and went on to a fine career in England. Writing the script in the midst of this, he self-consciously identified Kane with himself, the thugs with the McCarthy forces in D.C. and the cowardly, disloyal townsfolk with the compliant Hollywood establishment. It was, in short, a condemnation of the "red baiting" and the complicity of the entertainment industry. Kane's final gesture, casting his lawman's star contemptuously into the dirt, does not make sense as the finale of the plot. But it does as Forman's disgust for those who betrayed him. The conservative John Wayne, by contrast, despised the film as anti-American and brought out Rio Bravo a few years later as a rebuttal. To his credit, Cooper, himself a conservative Republican, was a lonely support for Forman, out of personal loyalty rather than ideology. How striking: in an accompanying personal/political drama, Cooper himself reprised the role of the heroic, loyal, lonely Will Kane. The film stands forever as a memorial to that brutal Culture War of the largely tranquil 1950s.

3. ECCLESIAL. John Wayne, and possibly John Ford, may have despised the film for a deeper, religious reason. The film sets the lonely, heroic Kane against the cowardly, disloyal townsfolk. This is a strikingly Protestant perspective: the nobility of the individual conscience against the despicable herd. By sharpest contrast, all the Ford-Wayne movies set the hero-protagonist in the midst of a dazzling community of fascinating, flawed, entertaining, finally loyal and honorable friends and family. This sense of a rich company clearly came from Ford's Irish Catholic background. Wayne himself later became Catholic (as did Cooper which we discuss next.) Ford's formula was patent: the noble Wayne,  some beautiful heroine, and a remarkable ensemble of character actors: Walter Brennan, Ward Bond, Barry Fitzgerald, Victor McLaglen, Hank Warden and others we recognize fondly without recalling their names. These loose bonds of friendship and family are affectionate, humorous, light-hearted and always accepting of each other's (even the Wayne characte'sr) failings and foibles. By contrast, High Noon's supporting characters are sad, heavy, monotonous, cowardly and disloyal. Seeing, or re-seeing any Ford-Wayne movie is like attending a big, happy, Catholic family reunion: memories, warmth, affection and laughter! 

4. Spiritual.  Most fascinating by far is the drama of a tormented soul that accompanied the film. Gary Cooper was in spiritual crisis. His happy marriage to an elegant, devoutly Catholic Veronica was being destroyed by his compulsive affairs. He had a long history of such. It wasn't just that he fell in love with every leading lady, but that every leading lady fell in love with him. A bad combination! Especially in the Hollywood environment bereft of the protections and inhibitions of bourgeois and Christian life. He had been raised Anglican and his choice of roles...honorable, noble, heroic, decent...indicates a delicate conscience. He had a nervous breakdown shortly before his marriage. He was the icon of American masculine virtue on the screen but privately a reckless fornicator-adulterer. He was associated with Marlena Dietrich, Lupe Velez, Carole Lombard, Claudette Colbert, Joan Blondell, Tallulah Bankhead (who famously said "the only reason I went to Hollywood was to f... that divine Gary Cooper.) and others. While filming High Noon, Cooper was entangled in a long-term, shameful affair with Patricia O'Neill which culminated in the abortion of their child. We can easily imagine the torment of this promiscuous but sensitive conscience as it is  display in virtually every scene of the film. He is so persuasive in his pain because he was himself in such pain. He eventually returned to and repaired his marriage and was later drawn into the Catholic Church of his bride, Late in life, but not too late, he found peace and the moral integrity he performed so strikingly on the big screen.

With this background, we see the struggle of Will Kane as iconic of the deeper agony of Gary Cooper. The annoying disparity in age between Kelly and Cooper takes on meaning. There was about a 30 year disparity between the 20 and 50 year olds. But he looks even older due to the stress lines. In his personal life he had multiple affairs with younger women. He clearly suffered a severe love-sex compulsion in his desire for the comfort of a child-bearing-aged woman, his desire to please women, to be close to them. The agony on the face of Will Kane reflected the conflicted soul of Gary Cooper: torn between his desire for virtue, loyalty to his wife and family, disordered attachment to the stunning younger O'Neil and his compulsive lust-covetousness. 

If we are to accept the Ballad of the movie, Kane himself is not afraid of death (he is a tested gunfighter) or of Frank Miller (whom he had already vanquished), but of losing his bride.

"Do not forsake me, oh my darlin, on this our wedding day, I do not know what fate awaits me, I only know I must be brave. And I must face the man who hates me, Or lie a coward, a craven coward, or lie a coward in my grave.

Oh, to be torn twixt love and duty, Suposin I lose my fair haired beauty, look at that big hand move along, nearin high noon. 

He made a vow while in state prison, vowed it would be my life or his'n, I'm not afraid of death but, oh, What will I do if you leave me?

Do not forsake me oh my darlin', You made that promise as a bride, Do not forsake me, oh my darlin, Although your're grievin', don't think of leavin', now that I need you by my side.

Will Kane is terrified by the possible loss of his "fair haired beauty." Gary Cooper is desperately clinging to his "fair haired beauty" in real life. He is destroying his marriage, killing his child, and annihilating his sensitive conscience. Clearly well into middle age, Cooper is facing a life-and-death crisis of the soul and desperate not to lose that which comforts him and eases all his fear.

Well, the story ends even better in real life than in the movie. Cooper starts going to Sunday mass with his wife and daughter. They establish a marvelous tradition, remembered by his daughter, of wearing swim suits under their Sunday clothes and swimming in the ocean before breakfast. He befriends a gifted priest with whom he share a virile camaraderie. At the age of 61 he passes from cancer, with the sacraments, in a serene, holy death. He was ready for the High Noon train!

May he rest in the Peace that eluded him for so long but finally grasped him!