Quote of the Day (Frank Capra, on Gary Cooper)

“Every line in his face spelled honesty. So innate was his integrity he could be cast in phony parts, but never look phony himself.

“Tall, gaunt as Lincoln, cast in the frontier mold of Daniel Boone, Sam Houston, Kit Carson, this silent Montana cowpuncher embodied the true-blue virtues that won the West: durability, honesty, and native intelligence.”—Frank Capra, The Name Above the Title: An Autobiography (1971)
TV viewers of the April 1961 Academy Awards might have been surprised to see James Stewart take long strides to the stage to pick up an honorary Oscar being awarded that night to his friend Gary Cooper. That surprise probably turned to mass confusion, even consternation, as Stewart became emotional as he spoke of Coop.

Before long, front pages of newspapers around the world provided the answer to the mystery: the prostate and colon cancer that doctors thought they had successfully treated had metastized in the veteran star. The following month--on this day 50 years ago--the embodiment of the slow, laconic, but sure American Everyman had died.

In choosing an image to accompany this post, I thought at first of choosing a photo of the young Cooper, one that would make it understandable why he became one of Hollywood’s romantic leads, a 6-ft.-3-inch man that the always dependably salty Carole Lombard christened “Studs.”

But the more I considered it, there really was only one image for me. Much as I liked them, it wasn’t from one of the two films in which director Capra so shrewdly maximized Cooper’s considerable appeal, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Meet Joe Doe. It wasn’t even from one of the fine romantic comedies he made with Howard Hawks (Ball of Fire) or Billy Wilder (Love in the Afternoon).

No, it was from the genre in which Cooper (whose real first and middle names were Frank James, ironically echoing that of the brother of one of the West’s most notorious outlaws) first made his mark in the talkies, in The Virginian (1929): the western. In fact, it was from one of the truly great westerns of them all: High Noon (1952).

Some people have claimed that the intensity written all over Cooper’s face, in a performance that won him his second Academy Award, resulted not from his assimilation of the mounting tension his character, Marshal Will Kane, faces, but from the actor’s private medical struggle of the time (he was having an ulcer). Don’t you believe them.

There was a reason why Fred Zinnemann cast him: like every other director who ever worked with him, he knew that Cooper could convey volumes without saying a word. And so it was here, in a magnificent performance that returned the actor to the top of Hollywood’s A list, after a dry spell at the start of the 1950s.

By the time of the scene in this still, Cooper is showing that the task facing Kane--to stop a dangerous outlaw and his men before they reach town on the noon train in 90 minutes (reflecting the running time of the film)--has unexpectedly transformed from elemental to monumental. One by one, every able-bodied man in town has come up with an excuse not to help him form a posse to stop the outlaws.

Now, facing them alone, with even his Quaker bride-to-be indicating her disapproval, he’s being called on to summon not only every bit of experience and strength he ever learned in law enforcement, but also reserves within that he’s never known. And all of this still might not be enough. He’s weary and worried, but, as the Capra quote indicates, he is a Cooper stuff, with a common-man's greatness that Americans take to heart.

In other words, the burden on him might be huge and grossly unfair, but he will shoulder it. Like the fictional code created by his good friend, novelist Ernest Hemingway, he embodies the very definition of courage as "grace under pressure."

Cooper’s performance is what makes High Noon one of the most psychologically taut, and deeply satisfying, examples of the western genre created by Hollywood almost as soon as the frontier itself closed down. By film's end, Will Kane has become as toweringly mythic as the heroes to whom Capra likened Coop (yes, he does kill the villains), yet still, recognizably, a man (he flings down his badge in disgust with the town he was willing to save, but who, he now knows, would never do likewise for him).