Updated 11.18.09

Synopsis (from Wikipedia) “Will Kane (Gary Cooper), the Marshal of Hadleyville, Kansas, has just married pacifist Quaker Amy (Grace Kelly) turned in his badge, and is preparing to move away to become a storekeeper. Then, however, the town learns that Frank Miller (Ian MacDonald), a psychopathic criminal Kane once sent to the gallows, has been pardoned. Miller is due to arrive on the noon train and his gang is waiting for him at the station. The worried townspeople encourage Kane to leave to defuse Miller’s desire for revenge.

“Kane and his wife leave town; however, Kane has a crisis of conscience and turns back. He reclaims his badge and tries to swear in deputies to back him up against Miller and his three gang members, but as time goes on, it becomes clear that no one is willing to get involved. Many want Kane to go away, hoping that with him gone, the Miller gang will not cause any trouble. Even his deputy, Harvey Pell (Lloyd Bridges), refuses to help. Only his former lover, an implied madam named Helen Ramírez (Katy Jurado), supports him, but there is little she can do to help. His wife threatens to leave on the noon train without him if he stays, but he stubbornly refuses to give in.

“In the end, Kane is forced to face down the four gunmen by himself. He guns down two of Miller’s men. Helen Ramirez has left town with the same train Miller had arrived on, but Amy, who had boarded the train with her, leaves again when she hears the sound of gunfire. Amy chooses her husband’s life over her religious beliefs and kills the third gunman by shooting him in the back. Miller then takes her hostage and offers to trade her for Kane. Kane agrees, coming out into the open. Amy, however, struggles with Miller, clawing his face, which causes him to release her. Kane then shoots and kills Miller. In front of the cowardly townspeople who have come out of hiding, Kane contemptuously throws his Marshal’s Star in the dirt and leaves town with his wife.”

Reflections. High Noon won four academy awards on its release and went on to achieve classic status, as much for its real-time plot and its innovative camera work as for its taut direction and fine acting. But it was also condemned for its anti-Western (genre and culture), anti-triumphal portrayal of the man of conscience set against a society that refuses to speak out against injustice. (In this case the blacklist. John Wayne, a blacklist supporter, considered it “the most un-American thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life.”)

While Cooper’s Will Kane carries most of the symbolic and dramatic weight, Grace Kelly’s Amy remains the pivotal character in the dilemma of conscience: she, not Will, is the dedicated “pacifist” who implores her new husband to forego violence and danger, who allows her pacifist conscience to abandon her human loyalties. In the end, however, abstract moral convictions must give way to real life, and Amy (much to the audience’s delight) raises that six-shooter and blows away that third gunman. She then uses her bare hands to put Frank Miller into the line of Will’s fire. A pacifist, faced with her first real test, has just brought two men to their violent deaths; and as she leaves town with her man, she looks a bit haggard but also as if she couldn’t care less. We’re certainly happy for her and Will, and happy they’ve given their cowardly neighbors their comeuppance too.

So what does this iconic American film tell us about peacemakers? Not much that’s useful. For one thing, they’re haughty, prone to stand on abstract principles, aloof from real-world fights. The are, in fact, everything we’ve always associated with the word “pacifist.” Then, of course, they’re generally not quite real people either: Grace Kelly’s icy and naive Amy is no match for Katy Jurado’s sensuous and knowing Helen. Her view of the world is untested, based on a virgin’s inexperience. Only when faced by the stark reality of Will’s impending murder does she come to grips with the world and with her own innate violence. She resolves abstract — and useless — moral dilemmas into real-life choices, and does what any real man or woman would do and chooses blood over the Bible. Her wedding day sheds buckets of blood and brings her into full womanhood.

It’s hard to argue against the logic and dramatic appeal of High Noon’s scenario: in the world of the Western bravery of any type, even moral bravery, must take on the form of external action. That is, after all, what the Western is all about: a mythic drama about both America’s imagined heroic past and a projection of its values, fears and aspirations set out in very simple, black-and-white terms. While High Noon was unique in its time for its psychological stillness and ticking inner tension, it still remained true to its action genre and resolved all conflict with that greatest of American magical symbols: the handgun.

High Noon is certainly asking us, on a deep mythic level, to understand conflict and courage. But it’s also implicitly asking us to believe that its mythic categories tell us something about real peacemakers. But is what’s fair in fiction fair in real life? Can Amy’s choices really be set both inside and outside the Western’s mythic structures? Can we judge her both as a fictive character torn by conflicting dramatic emotions and as a representative of larger realms of moral action in that real world it purportedly reflects? And whose real world is it portraying? History has shown that nonviolence and peacemaking are active social, political and certainly moral positions. They act out in the larger context of these social and political arenas, in community, and rarely through isolated action. While they certainly involve personal courage and moral qualities, these are largely determined by contexts that allow and require witness and commitment on many public levels, and over the long-term.

Placing Amy’s nonviolence in the midst of a Western myth where, by genre definition, personal violence is the only way to resolve moral issues, is ultimately a bit unfair. We’re probably asking the wrong questions from both our fictional characters and our own moral categories when we do so. So what then are the right questions? Amy’s dilemma is not that she is an unworldly moral person but that she is a fictional character: she faces a real, modern existential crisis plugged into a genre Western town on the frontiers of reality. Here gunplay is the only means allowed to resolve conflict.

But that is where the confusion sets in: trying to see these films as a reflection of ethical situations in our complicated — and well-bounded — modern life through the mythic structure of the Western. Myth can offer a convenient shorthand for modern dilemmas, a deep subconscious realm in which to work out conflict, but like any symbolic system, if not handled properly it can also backfire on both the user and the audience.

Despite Fred Zinnemann’s best intentions and profound skills, most viewers will buggy away from High Noon with the idea that peacemakers have no choices in the world, and that the violence of enemies is the only available tool, that all social institutions and networks have already failed, that personal, isolated courage is all we have left, and that solutions for good or bad are as final as a shoot-out. In the end we need modern myths better able to deal with the complexities and dense contexts of our lives in the real world. We, society, our friends and enemies are here to stay: those we oppose are not psychopaths, our neighbors not all cowards, the issues we face not all that black and white. Real-life solutions are less than satisfactory, and certainly not final. As Will and Amy turn that buggy out of town their real-life choices are only just beginning.

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