John Rosenberg has posted on his blog Discriminations an interesting piece drawing an analogy between Gary Cooper in the 1952 western High Noon and President Bush in the current standoff with Saddam Hussein and the international anti-war contingent. It's refreshing to read cultural commentary of this sort that doesn't hysterically caricature the President, and Rosenberg's analogy does seem apt. At the same time, Rosenberg himself points out how High Noon has been both praised and criticized by liberals over time for its message, first as being anti-McCarthyist and then during the Vietnam War for being pro-interventionist. I think what underlies this is a fundamental problem with the movie.

High Noon is so amenable to making analogies with current political situations, in one direction or the other, because it's conceived in extremely simplistic terms. So is the other western of the 1950s that was considered an instant "classic," George Stevens's 1953 Shane. (High Noon and Shane were the only westerns nominated for best picture Academy Awards in that decade.) In terms of narrative structure they are both utterly rudimentary melodramas: the overmatched but thoroughly, unambiguously good guys against the bad guys who are just as unambiguously and hyperbolically evil and who therefore don't let scruples get in the way of their hellish skills. The contest in both movies is streamlined to keep these values clear: in High Noon it's the revenge of a man who escaped hanging on the sheriff who sent him away; in Shane it's a cattle baron's grab for homesteading farmers' land.

The western had great natural advantages for moviemakers: the sublime landscapes, the movement of horses, the Huck Finn appeal of living on the frontier where corrupt, "feminine" civilization was easy to escape, and the ritualized violence due to the very lack of civilization. These turned out to be advantages not only for Americans who could fantasize from their cities and small towns and suburbs about life in physically and morally free spaces, but for the rest of the world as well. Jean Renoir's great 1936 Popular Front comedy The Crime of M. Lange, in which a Parisian publishing collective produces serial western photonovels about Arizona Jim, is as charming an example of the world's love of American westerns as I know of.

But the curse of the western was always the laughably predictable story elements. (Just what made it ripe for Mel Brooks in Blazing Saddles.) The appeal of the fantasy was great enough that the audience wasn't very discerning--by the time sound came in an endless stream of slap-up jobs, cheap to shoot outdoors in Southern California, had already made the genre synonymous with lowest-grade melodrama, and High Noon and Shane aren't really exceptions to this. At some level they certainly are both more ambitious than the average cowboys-and-Indians, but their intentions actually rely on the simplicity of the stories. Both deal with the battle in western towns for law and order but neither profits from the greater dramatic range that this setting makes available.