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.
Article comments
1 - Rodney Welch
I enjoy both films enormously -- and while your reductive comments are interesting and intelligent, they come across as rather horribly snotty. I mean, come on -- The Faerie Queen? That's not even a fair comparison. "Highly developed levels of meaning" aren't neccessarily what one yearns for in a Western film -- especially ones such as these, which draw so much of their strength from their leanness, their focus, and their single-mindedness of purpose. If you want an ambiguous Western, maybe you should have watched a Sam Peckinpah film or a Monte Hellman film or one by Anthony Mann -- but don't blame Stevens and Zinnemen for not being them. What grips the viewer in Shane and High Noon is the starkness of the situations.
You say: "There's almost nothing else to do while watching it but think about more complicated situations and issues." I'm all for the critical assumption that one's own objections to a work of art will be experienced by all others, but both these films show this view has its limitations. It's fair to say that almost no one watching these films for the first time is going to be wondering about "more complicated situations and issues."
You state that "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" -- I find the opposite to be true. Both films, especially Shane. employ landscape for dramatic purposes; I am thinking in particular of the low-angle shots of Ladd as he rides to the showdown with Jack Palance, and the ending as well -- where he is silhouetted against the sky.
2 - robert mittoo
Everytime I watch Shane I see something that I did not see before. From a kid to a grown up this movie
keep adding dimensions of the human condition that are truly universal.
bob
The passing away today of Jack Palance marks the end of an era for me.