#74 - High Noon (1952)

The East Detroit Shamrocks are regional champs, and are in the Elite Eight of the State Championship in boys basketball.  Go Shams! The quarterfinals are this coming Tuesday, and are being held at Calihan Hall on the campus of the University of Detroit Mercy.  Combine this event with the fact that tennis season is starting, and it's going to put my weekends at a premium for movie watching!  The goal this weekend (including this one) is six.  Only five left to go.

In High Noon, we have two-time Oscar winner Gary Cooper playing Marshall Will Kane, a man who comes back to the town he once reigned over as lawman when he founds out that the courts have pardoned his old nemesis, Frank Miller, a man he put away.  Miller's back for vengeance, and neither the town, nor Kane especially, is safe.

This film has long been held in high regard, as one of the great westerns, led by superb acting and a tense story.  And while I see all these things, I find it to be overrated.  As Kane, Cooper is an aging lawman, once most highly regarded in his town, but when he comes back to head off Miller, he finds that the entire town (including his new wife) has chosen to abandon him and leave him to either fight Miller alone, or get out of Dodge.  Ninety percent of the movie is Kane trying to get support, and the conflicted emotions of the great majority of the town.  There is quite a bit of tension, but the more and more it becomes apparent that nobody's just dying to help Kane, the more I just wanted it to be over.

You know who I thought was really outstanding? Mexican actress Katy Jurado, who played in a large number of both westerns and Spanish language films throughout six decades, was phenomenal as a likely former lover of Kane who has to skip town also to avoid the wrath of Miller.  She tells the new Mrs. Kane that she basically sucks for leaving and that if Will Kane were still her man, you better believe she'd get a gun and fight with him.  She's the perfect amount of believable, hard and understanding.  Her scenes are among the best in the film.

Overall, I'm glad I saw it, but I'm not dying to re-watch it.  Cooper was Oscar-nomination-worthy to be sure, but whether or not this was the best performance of the year, I really can't say.  I'll tell you one thing, though: this was the year that The Quiet Man won a couple of Oscars (though stars John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara weren't nominated. Hmmm...) and when I had to watch this movie during my internship because the students were reading the short story...  It was awful.  The kids thought it was hysterical.  And I heard that it wasn't appreciated in its own time.  And it certainly doesn't hold up well, so I'm wondering where the hell this cachet comes from.  I might re-watch it this year to see if I missed something (but at 150-some minutes, you can bet I won't be getting it done anytime soon.)

Score: 8/10