Movie Quote of the Day (‘High Noon,’ on Refusing to Defend Order and Democracy)

Judge Percy Mettrick [played by Otto Kruger]: “In the 5th century B.C., the citizens of Athens, having suffered grievously under a tyrant, managed to depose and banish him. However, when he returned some years later, with an army of mercenaries, those same citizens not only opened the gates for him, but stood by while he executed members of the League of Government. A similar thing happened about eight years ago in a town called Indian Falls. I escaped death only through the intercession of a lady of somewhat dubious reputation—and uh, the cost of a very handsome ring which once belonged to my mother. Unfortunately, I have no more rings.”

Marshal Will Kane [played by Gary Cooper]: “You're a judge!”

Judge Mettrick: “I've been a judge many times in many towns. I hope to live to be a judge again. Why must you be so stupid? Have you forgotten what he is? Have you forgotten what he's done to people? Have your forgotten that he's crazy? Don't you remember when he sat in that chair and said, 'You'll never hang me. I'll come back. I'll kill you, Will Kane. I swear it, I'll kill you'?”—High Noon (1952), screenplay by Carl Foreman, adapted from the short story “The Tin Star,” by John W. Cunningham, directed by Fred Zinnemann

I wish I could simply put up a straight, idealistic post this Fourth of July about the brilliance of the Declaration of Independence and rest easy about the state of the nation it brought into being. But the survival of this country and its institutions has always been tested, and never so much in my lifetime, anyway, as in the last several years.

The American western is a genre adaptable enough to explore all kinds of conflicts, but few were done so searingly as High Noon. As I explained in this blog post from 11 years ago, on the 50^th anniversary of this classic film’s release, many in Hollywood interpreted it as a veiled allegory against McCarthyism.

Although I accept that as the motive for the screenplay by Carl Foreman (who, for his own refusal to “name names” about past Communist associations, was blacklisted by Hollywood after the movie’s release), I believe now that it’s a mistake to view it in such limiting terms.

Nearly 70 years after the Senate finally mustered enough votes to censure Joseph McCarthy for behavior “contrary to senatorial traditions,” and more than 65 years after the Senator from Wisconsin died, alcoholic and ignored by the press corps that fueled his rise, High Noon’s message about the danger to American democracy posed by the exploitation of fear rings more loudly now than ever before.

I tried unsuccessfully to find a film still I could use for the above dialogue between Gary Cooper and Otto Kruger, but maybe it was all for the best. The one I chose powerfully illustrates one of the major themes of High Noon: the overwhelming loneliness of a single man who tries to save a once-bustling community that has suddenly, catastrophically lost the desire to save itself.

Look again at Judge Mettrick’s exchange with Marshal Will Kane. Surely you’ve heard recently about a lawbreaker who somehow slipped through the clutches of civil authority, now vowing “retribution” against those who dared to stop him? About a bully that those who crossed him before now want to avoid encountering at all costs? About his repeated threats made with impunity, just daring the authorities to act against him again—a challenge they are reluctant to accept?

For Marshal Kane, the man who must be confronted is Frank Miller; for contemporary American democracy, it’s Donald Trump.

The good citizens of the New Mexico frontier town of Hadleyville (with its faint echo of “Hollywood”) shirk Kane’s urgent request to join his posse against Miller and his three confederates.

Among the pleasures of the film that I’d forgotten was the absolutely apt dialogue for each character—not only deftly capturing their motivation but also their class, educational level, and other defining socioeconomic and psychological features.

The lines that screenwriter Carl Foreman crafted for Judge Mettrick differ markedly in tone from every other character. They seem almost to have been ripped from the typewriter of Joseph L. Mankiewicz, the All About Eve writer-director famous for his polished, sophisticated, caustic dialogue spoken by well-educated, cultured characters.

You won’t find any other figure in High Noon besides alluding to ancient history—nor one copping, like a man among men, to his sins of the flesh.

The judge should have been the type of person that Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he advocated for “the incalculable advantage of training up able counselors to administer the affairs of our country in all its departments, legislative, executive and judiciary.”

But when a crisis comes, Mettrick—who had officiated at the wedding ceremony for Kane and his bride Amy—now reveals himself to be cynical and craven. Having previously sentenced Miller to death, he can’t wait to pack his precious law books and gallop off—and even insults Kane for not being similarly guided by self-preservation. If he can’t serve as a judge in this town, he’ll find another.

Even so, Mettrick has a ready-made excuse to avoid confronting Miller and his increasingly extortionate demands: “This is just a dirty little town in the middle of nowhere. Nothing that happens here is of any importance.”

Audiences in the aftermath of WWII would have recognized in that rationale an echo of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s explanation that he wouldn’t back Czechoslovakia when threatened by Adolf Hitler because it was all “a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.”

Marshal Kane is his polar opposite: stubbornly committed to sticking to his guns come what may, even though he can only express his reasons why with minimal words (“There’s not enough time,” “I just can’t”), and even though he knows the likelihood is high that he’ll be killed.

Incredibly, it is the forthright Kane who finds himself on the defensive rather than the murderous Miller when he asks for help at a town church service. In anticipating the “What about”-isms that MAGA supporters often hurl at critics of Trump, a parishioner asks why Kane hadn’t jailed the “three killers walking the streets bold as brass.”

But Mettrick’s is an especially egregious abdication of responsibility. By virtue of his education and office, he’s supposed to act differently. But his decision to flee is more hasty, more cowardly and more resounding a civic and moral failure than almost anyone else’s in the community.

During the postwar Red Scare that Joseph McCarthy used as a springboard to influence, Hollywood executives—and more than a few lawmakers on Capitol Hill—reacted in a manner similar to the judge’s, as the senator abused the powers of his office and insulted even members of his own Republican Party.

That scenario will seem oddly familiar to observers of the current Presidential race, as Donald Trump demands the absolute loyalty required of a mafia kingpin and publicly degrades anyone who falls short of that standard.

(Witness his treatment at a South Carolina rally of his almost slavish ally Lindsey Graham, with the bachelor senator smiling and squirming nervously as Trump observed, “You know, you can make mistakes on occasion. Even Lindsey down here, Sen. Lindsey Graham.”)

In Michael Tomasky’s roundtable discussion with four former Republicans printed in the June issue of The New Republic, MCNBC commentator Nicolle Wallace cited Ohio Senator Rob Portman as “the best avatar for why the country is at risk”:

I don’t know of anybody who knows better than Rob Portman. He was George W. Bush’s OMB [Office of Management and Budget] director. He also wore a second hat as sort of wise man and an adviser. And I knew the country was fucked when he didn’t walk away from Trump after good people on both sides did, when he stayed with it after grabbing the you-know-what.

If we are to surmount the legal and political crisis engulfing our republic, we will have to act collectively like Will Kane—counting on years of experience, bravery, and sometimes guile, to defeat the bad guys, even as we fear that much of what we once loved in our community’s institutions and spirit might be irretrievably damaged by a bully with utter contempt for norms.

Movie Quote of the Day (“High Noon,” on ‘How Much You Can Ask a Man’)

Deputy Sheriff Herb Baker (played by James Millican): “Time's gettin' pretty short.”

Marshall Will Kane (played by Gary Cooper): “It sure is.”

Herb: “When are the other boys gonna get here? We gotta make plans.”

Kane: “The other boys? There aren't any other boys, Herb. It's just you and me.”

Herb: [nervously smiles and chuckles] “You're jokin'.”

Kane: “No, I couldn't get anybody.”

Herb: “I don't believe it. This town ain't that low.”

Kane: “I couldn't get anybody.”

Herb: “Then it's just you and me.”

Kane: “I guess so.”

Herb: “You and me against Miller and all the rest of them?”

Kane: “That's right. Do you want out, Herb?”

Herb: “Well, it isn't that I want out, no. You see. Look, I'll tell ya the truth. I didn't figure on anything like this, Will.”

Kane: “Neither did I.”

Herb: “I volunteered. You know I did. You didn't have to come to me. I was ready. Sure, I'm ready now - but this is different, Will. This ain't like what you said it was gonna be. This is just plain committing suicide and for what? Why me? I'm no lawman. I just live here. I got nothin' personal against nobody. I got no stake in this.”

Kane: “I guess not.”

Herb: “There's a limit how much you can ask a man. I got a wife and kids. What about my kids?”

Kane: “Go on home to your kids, Herb.”—High Noon (1952), directed by Fred Zinnemann, screenplay by Carl Foreman from the magazine story “The Tin Star,” by John W. Cunningham

That most taut of classic westerns, High Noon, premiered on this date 60 years ago, in a place far removed from the film’s Hadleyville, New Mexico: New York City. Or maybe the remoteness only related to physical details: dusty vs. concrete streets, open frontier spaces vs. crowded urban squares. Because in the ways that people behaved--the desire to look away when something heinous was about to occur--not much separated Gotham from the film's precarious outpost of civilization on the frontier.

The pleasures of this film are manifold. My earlier post on Gary Cooper only began to hint at its riches, as did a fine piece by blogger Matt Barry that placed it in a trio of great “psychological westerns” along with The Ox-Bow Incident and Shane. 

The movie is, of course, superbly scripted, directed and acted. But what drew so many to the film at the time, and continues to do so, is the identification that so many people feel with the agonizing dilemma faced by Marshal Will Kane: the high cost of doing the right thing. In that sense, the movie shares a common theme with a later Fred Zinnemann classic as totally unlike it as you can get in terms of setting, dialogue and narrative pace: the Oscar-winning biopic about Saint Thomas More, A Man for All Seasons (1966).

Director Howard Hawks and John Wayne, aghast at the silly notion that a lawman would take on a gang of toughs alone, answered in 1959 with Rio Bravo. (Wayne, making no bones about his quarrel with High Noon's mostly liberal filmmakers, went so far as to call it "defeatist" and "un-American.") But a lawman taking on thugs with a hopeless alcoholic, a broken-down old man, and a callow youth doesn’t equalize the odds appreciably compared with the solitary man who will do his duty even when nobody else will.

What Zinnemann and screenwriter Carl Foreman realized so brilliantly here was the unexpected adaptability of cinema’s oldest genre in presenting a distant mirror of their own age of anxiety. Few suspected that this cinema form—even one employed by such masters as Hawks and John Ford—could, amid its venerable conventions, offer as many opportunities to comment on one’s own time and place as Italy presented in the plays of William Shakespeare.

The subject whose name could not be openly broached—particularly for Foreman, about to fall victim to Hollywood’s blacklist—was McCarthyism. Far too many people in America in 1952 would not directly confront the bullying U.S. Senator from Wisconsin—including a genuine war hero, Dwight Eisenhower, who was persuaded to delete from a speech his defense of one of Joseph McCarthy’s targets, General George C. Marshall.

“The awful thing about life is this: Everybody has their reasons,” goes the great line from Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game. Everybody certainly has their reasons for not helping Will Kane: pacifism and fear of widowhood (his fianceé Amy), unwillingness to take part in another man’s quarrel, ambition (young Deputy Marshal Harvey Pell), disgust with the town (Kane’s former lover, the Mexican Helen Ramirez), cowardice, and, as in Herb Baker’s case, family ties. 

Kane’s reasons for avoiding the showdown with the Miller Gang are better than anyone else’s—he’s about to get married, his time as sheriff is up, and Miller is out to get him for putting him in prison—but he can’t turn away. His credo reflects the monosyllabic persona created over two decades in film by Cooper, but it might also be the most eloquent line in the whole movie: “I've got to, that's the whole thing.”

In films and TV series after High Noon, Hollywood would use the Western to draw parallels between 19^th and 20^th century America, in such areas as racism (Ford’s Sergeant Rutledge and John Huston's flawed but stirring The Unforgiven), misadventures abroad (The Wild Bunch), capitalism (McCabe and Mrs. Miller) and anti-Semitism (The “Look to the Stars” episodes of Bonanza, in which the Cartwrights aid the promising young Jewish science student—and future Nobel laureate--Albert Michelson). 

High Noon started it all with the question implicitly posed by Herb Baker: How much can you ask a man? In a small Western town desperately unsure about maintaining its hard-won stability, as with a 20^th and 21^st century superpower concerned about the survival of the democratic values it proclaims, the answer is: Near everything.

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).