High Noon (Collector's Edition)
|
List Price: Our Price: $10.99 You Save: $3.99 (27%) Availability: Usually ships in 1 to 2 days Buy Used: from $6.12 (click here) Category: DVD See more DVD releases |
|---|
Buy this DVD movie at online store in your country
Canada
Canada
Movie Reviews of High Noon (Collector's Edition)
Movie Review: Cooper's greatest role but is this is a good story?
Summary: 4 Stars
I enjoyed High Noon quite a bit and despite of my desire to do so, I won't go into the details that have been repeated many times over by others who wrote a review on this movie. This movie was Gary Cooper's finest effort and as a man in trouble, he was totally believable and totally real. But I have to take John Wayne's perception on this movie and states that its not as great as the hype made it up to be. Cooper played a sherriff of this town who is awaiting recently released gunmen from prison. They are professional gunsligners and Cooper's character wanted amatuer townsmen to aid him. Professional killers needs professional lawmen to deal with, Cooper is that man and the burden fall on him. His effort to induced untrained townsmen who are not fit to support him into this situation sounds pretty weak and perhaps in the western mode...unmanly. His new wife played by Grace Kelly only further do damage by trying to make a coward out of a man she married. She failed to see that if she secceded, she would have ruin the man she love by making him what he wasn't. But despite of his doubts, fears and lack of support, Cooper's character does his job effectively and with honor. Maybe it is a great western after all.
Unlike many reviewers before me, I take a very different view of this film. Many believed that Gary Cooper is some sort of victim forced into a confrontation against all odds. I see it differently. Many western fans often compared this with Rio Bravo where the sherriff refused help from town's people he believes to be unfit to do the job, thus keeping them from harm's way - which is his job as well as the job of Will Kane.
Movie Review: Gary Cooper: The symbol of integrity!,
Summary: 5 Stars
For many, Gary Cooper was the Westerner par excellence--cool, taciturn, courageous and just; skilled with a gun but slow to use it; gentlemanly, generous and shy, appealing to men as much as to women... This image reached its culmination in "High Noon" with his characterization of Marshal Will Kane, the brave and stubborn ex-marshal standing alone against the forces of evil, and the prototype for countless Western heroes ever since...
Highly-stylized, carefully and beautifully shot, "High Noon" possibly owes its great popularity to a combination of three things--It's a suspense film in the real sense; the dearly beloved set-piece climax of the gun duel never got better or more thoughtful treatment; it has a theme tune that persistently whines its way into the subconscious... Most people first remember the Dimitri Tiomkin theme tune, then Gary Cooper stalking down the lonely street... The bits and pieces gather from there... The film also ties a small town of do-nothings showing their cowardice by turning their backs on trouble, integrity, and an elected representative...
"High Noon" is also distinguished by many fine images from the incidental (the brief close-up of the wagon wheel revolving against the town's facades as Cooper and Kelly leave the community); to the poignant ( Zinneman's camera drawing back from Cooper's face to show him standing vulnerable and alone in the dust of a deserted main street); to the deliberately melodramatic (Cooper bitterly grinding his marshal's badge in the dirt before riding away for good ).
By means of rapid cross-cutting, Fred Zinnemann gives shots--repeatedly--of the pendulum of the clock, of the empty railroad tracks, and in rapid succession, shots of tense faces--taken at close range--of the townsfolk in the church, in the local saloon, then of the worried face of the marshal, his wife, and of the three criminals ready for the approaching train...
"High Noon" is the simple and forceful tale of an aging lawman on his day of retirement and also on his wedding day...
Will Kane, on a blazing June morning in 1875, has just married a pretty young Quaker girl... The bride feels doubly blessed... She's got her man, and this is the day he will hang his guns... She has firm Quaker convictions and never did imagine herself as a lawman's wife...
But, while it's all being celebrated a badly shaken stationmaster (Ted Stanhope) bursts in with quite the wrong kind of wedding telegram... It states that an outlaw Frank Miller (Ian MacDonald) whom Kane had put behind bars six years ago for terrorizing the town has been released... The stationmaster adds that three members of his old gang are already awaiting his arrival at the depot--their object a reunion with the pardoned man who will get off the train at noon, and presumably settle the score with Kane...
The marshal, like a sensible man, does, in fact, put his wife in the buggy, but then like a man of honor but also a sensible man (for the gang will surely hunt them down wherever they go) changes his mind and heads the horses back to town...
A bride, especially a Quaker bride, can't quite see it this way on her wedding day so she hands him her own ultimatum--if he won't go away with her she'll go alone by train--the one that leaves at twelve...
Everything on this torrid, dusty morning therefore hinges on midday--therefore Kramer's insistence on his clocks. From this point onwards High Noon, although it remains completely classic in Western terms, faithful to period and concerned with an indicative historical situation, takes on wide and profound implications...
It's about group cowardice and short-term interest--particularly the treachery of so-called 'good' people... 'Law abiding,' you feel, doesn't mean what it should mean... When a group of people decide that they must passively refuse to support the law for reasons of personal preservation, who, in fact, are the outlaws?
Thus the marshal's predicament... He is an embarrassment to everyone, from Judge (Otto Kruger)--he's leaving town--to the humblest citizen of Hadleyville... Only one is ready to give assistance and he melts away when he finds there'll be no other volunteers... The marshal's immature deputy (Lloyd Bridges) is willing to take over his job--again, provided Cooper leaves town... But this is absolute ambition at work...
The build-up of tension as the lawman prepares to meet the four thugs and makes fruitless attempts to recruit help from the cowardly citizens has never been handled better, and it is sustained right up to and through the climactic gunfight as the lawman's bride finds herself trapped in the crossfire...
Filmed in Black and White, "High Noon" is among the ten Best Westerns ever made... The film achieved the shape of a democratic allegory which reached people in much the same way and for the same reasons that "The Best Years of Our Lives" had done... Its cutting suspense was the hallmark of Zinneman's mastery of the movie medium...
Gary Cooper's performance, as the very vulnerable, worried man, won him the year's Oscar...
Movie Review: The Immortal Gary Cooper
Summary: 5 Stars
Cooper was always outstanding! In this one, he is brilliant! Not to be missed! Movie Review: A haunting and disturbing movie drama when it first came out
Summary: 5 Stars
I have read a number of good reviews of this DVD on this site, especially the one written by Dennis Littrel. I will thus only add a small personal impression. I remember seeing this movie when it first came out and being troubled by the sight of the 'good guy' so disturbed and unsure of himself. This is not what we were expected to see from Western heroes. Also troubling was the possibility that the good guy somehow might not win. Also troubling was the involvement of the good guy with another woman in a way which could not be understood by a very young person. If he had a fiancee then what was he doing with this elderly Mexican woman?
I am only speaking about my own naivete of course.
I too as a young person was troubled by the ticking clock and the whole mood of anxiety.
This is to say that while I sensed somehow the movie is 'good' I could not because of the perplexity I felt , enjoy it.
The good guy does not run. He does stand up and alone face the bad guys. His fiancee though she has principles of non- violence when it comes down to it does the 'realistic and necessary thing' to save the one she loves.
A realistic moral Hollywood drama , and of course made haunting by the 'Do not Forsake me Oh my darling' in the background.
Movie Review: "I've never run from anybody before."
Summary: 5 Stars
It wouldn't surprise me if this movie is shown in more high school civics classes than any other movie: it's rife for debate. Gary Cooper might stick his neck out once for this bunch of frightened citizens in the face of adversity, but when he throws his badge down onto the dusty street at the end, we know he'd never do it again. Sure he took an oath to uphold justice and does it because "I have to," and all that; but only a fool would think that a place like Hadleyville deserves protection. Can you imagine Clint Eastwood in Cooper's shoes? At least that would be one side of the argument after the movie was shown.
Of course the other side of the debate would say it has nothing to do with Hadleyville and its cowardly citizens, but has everything to do with Cooper and his code of honor. Isn't this the same Gary Cooper who played Frederic Henry in A FAREWELL TO ARMS, based on Hemingway's novel, a writer who also dealt a lot with personal codes of honor and "courage under fire," a character who says in the novel that "abstract words such as glory, honor [and] courage were obscene"? How could he possibly look at himself in the mirror the next day, never mind looking his wife in the eye again, if he'd skadaddled? This existential hero had a choice to make, a life-defining one, and for him it meant only one thing.
It's that kind of movie - meaty and meaningful. The real-time experiment is interesting in these days of TV shows like "24," and the McCarthy-era witch hunt comparisons are worth pondering, too. And let's not forget the music, either. But basically it comes down to Cooper reaching out and finding nobody there, and then doing what he has to do anyway. It's a timeless idea, and the movie is a classic.