High Noon (Collector's Edition)
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Movie Reviews of High Noon (Collector's Edition)
Movie Review: New High Noon 2-disc Ultimate Collector's Edition due out June 10th, 2008!
Summary: 5 Stars
Lionsgate has announced a new DVD release of High Noon with new special features. There is what appears to be a reliable report, though unconfirmed, that it will include a new transfer of the film, restored by Paramount. The current and older DVDs are only of average video and audio quality.
The new features are these:
-- "Inside High Noon," a 50-minute documentary on the making of the film (see below for more on this)
-- "Tex Ritter: A Visit to Carthage, Texas," on the Tex Ritter Museum
-- the full performance of "Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin'" from the Jimmy Dean TV Show
The features carried over from the current release are:
-- commentary with Gary Cooper's daughter Maria Cooper Janis, screenwriter Carl Foreman's son Jonathan Foreman, director Fred Zinneman's son Tim Zinnemann and Tex Ritter's son John Ritter
-- "The Making of High Noon" featurette
-- "Behind High Noon" featurette
-- radio broadcast with Tex Ritter
Whether the new features will warrant an upgrade is a matter of personal preference, of course. A 50-minute documentary could be quite interesting, if it's well done.
It does sound interesting. The "new" documentary, actually made a couple years ago but shelved until now, is by film and Gary Cooper expert John Mulholland. It's expected to cover, among other things, the conflict between Cooper and John Wayne over the participation of the blacklisted screenwriter Carl Foreman. Given that the film appears to be in part an allegory of the public's acquiescence in the Red Scare, this will have more than the usual gossipy behind-the-scenes relevance. It includes interviews with three of the children of the principles who participated in the DVD audio commentary: Cooper's daughter Maria, director Zinneman's son Tim, and Foreman's son Jonathan. There are also interviews with Grace Kelly's son Prince Albert of Monaco, Western and film historians Brian Garfield, Lee Clark Mitchell, Stephen Prince and Meir Ribalow, and High Noon fan President Bill Clinton. The narration is by actor Frank Langella.
Lack of agreement between Paramount and Lionsgate prevented the earlier release of a restored transfer and the documentary, in case you're wondering why this didn't come out before.
Anyway, a heads-up for those looking to get this great classic film on DVD. Amazon is taking orders for the new edition here (where I've included my own observations on the film).
(Amazon has a habit of removing or not even accepting outside links, but if you want to read more about this, some of the more interesting tidbits are from a discussion at hometheaterforum. Just do a web search for "high noon" plus "ultimate collector's edition" or "inside high noon" and such keywords to find the links--easy to find.)
Movie Review: High Noon Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly
Summary: 5 Stars
This is an excellent film made in the 50's starring Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly. This is the collector's edition which is in my opinion much more enjoyable because it goes behind the scenes> Gary Cooper's daughter is the host along with the Director's view. The film is very good quality black and white and the story line is excellent. The music "Do not forsake me Oh My Darling" is sung by Tex Ritter. Beautiful movie all the way.Movie Review: Would have to say it doesn't play as well today.
Summary: 3 Stars
I like the fact that it plays out in real time. I like the story,
the societal commentary, the dialectic between the individual and the society, and the contrast between his wife and ramirez, etc. Unfortuately, the movie does plod at some points, and almost all the scenes of the bad guys at the station are quite dull. The movie is well shot, and excellently edited. The ending gunfight is also rather prosaic. Like Shane, the movie is a fine moral tale, but not great cinema. It isn't as dynamic/epic as the Searchers or Stagecoach. The performances aren't terribly gripping either. It is a good movie,
with pathos, but I don't beleive it has enough juice or complexity to be considered great. Thank you.
Movie Review: High Noon vs. Rio Bravo
Summary: 5 Stars
High Noon vs. Rio Bravo?
Should we think of it as a competition when Rio Bravo was made as a protest against the way Will Kane had to go around the town looking for special deputies only to get turned down?
The behind-the-scenes talk is that both John Wayne and director Howard Hawks had contempt for High Noon and the way its protagonist went looking for help to fight the bad guys. Guess these two guys never heard of the Second Amendment or even of special deputies or posses!
Actually as stand-alone stories both movies have messages worth learning. One should see true life experiences in both of them. In High Noon the town's people all had excuses for why helping out their marshal wasn't good for them at the moment. Good thing the men who fought for us in the Revolutionary War didn't refuse to join the Army because they "got a wife and kids".
And make no mistake, the U.S. Founding Fathers included the Second Amendment in the base of our political system as a way for the citizenry to remain armed in order to oppose tyranny. Now it may be true that they were worried more about tyranny from oppressive governments both foreign and domestic, but just how good would the people of Kane's town be against tyranny on a national scale when they couldn't even be bothered to stand up against it in their own back yard?
In High Noon Will Kane eventually finds help from his own wife who comes to see that she owes more loyalty to her vows to her husband than to some goofy religious belief that says that to fight evil you lie down in front of it and spread your legs -- figuratively, if not literally.
In Rio Bravo the sheriff says upholding the law is the job of professionals, then what does he do? Like his friend says, he employs a drunk and a cripple, and then decides he needs more help and looks to a teenager and deputizes the kid. LOL Said cripple, by the way, who so unprofessionally shoots and nearly blows the head off of a fellow deputy and can't even admit it when he made a mistake. ("How was I supposed to know the Dude was gonna go and git hisself duded up? Huh?... HUH???") And then when Feathers tries to sit guard in the lobby of the hotel and falls asleep Chance treats her tenderly for her effort and carries her off to bed. Looks like Wayne and Hawks couldn't make up their minds just what it was they believed! Sort of schizoid, IMO.
Too bad for them, but no reason for us to not take away some important lessons from both of these movies, one of which is that it seems it is never comfortable or convenient nor can we expect the timing to be "right" when we are called upon to stand up against evil; and having one's personal demons going on inside is no excuse to bow out of the fray, turn inward, and forsake the common good.
Movie Review: Fantastic.
Summary: 4 Stars
High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952)
Note: here be spoilers. On the off chance that you haven't seen or heard anything about the movie, you may want to skip this review.
There's a scene in High Noon that just makes it for me. It's pretty close to the end, right at the point where Will Kane (Gary Cooper) has realized that no one in town is going to help him fight Frank Miller (Ian MacDonald) and his gang, and resigned to his fate, he leaves his office and heads up to the depot to confront Miller. As he walks down the street, the camera pulls away from him to an aerial view, but there's nothing smooth about the pullback; it's jerky and swerving and jolting, as if the whole town is about to fall down around Kane's ears, or as if to simulate what must be going on in Kane's stomach, or both. How often do you see that in a movie nowadays? (,he says just after writing reviews for No Country for Old Men and The Dreamers.) It's not so much the symbolism of the thing as the fact that it seems so natural, as if someone on the set said, "hey, we've got a pullback here, wouldn't it be neat if we did this with it...?".
It's probably inexcusable for someone who fancies himself a media critic to have seen as few Gary Cooper movies as I have in my lifetime, but after finally seeing High Noon, I plan to watch a lot more of them. Cooper is as laconic as he is iconic, the plain-spoken good guy who realizes he's got a job to do whether anyone wants to help him with it or not. He comes off as a bit dour, which makes me wonder why his new Quaker wife Amy (Grace Kelly) would have married him in the first place, but that's a minor thing. Kane's demeanor sets him apart not only from the bad guys (and a fine batch they were-- MacDonald is backed up by country singer Sheb Wooley, prolific character actor Robert Wilke, and a young lee van Cleef), but from the townsfolk; not a coincidence, one thinks, especially given the film's oft-noted red scare subtext (the subtext that caused John Wayne to remark that High Noon was the most anti-American movie ever made).
Honestly, now that I've opened that door, I can't see the red scare subtext as valid to criticism of the movie any more. It was half a century ago, and we all realize it was idiotic (at least, I hope we do). Ignore it when watching the movie now. There are so many other reasons to like the movie. Zinnemann's casting was dead-on for almost every role, even in the places where he ended up using his fifth or sixth choice for a role (Gary Cooper was far from Zinnemann's first choice for Kane, for example). Cooper and Kelly are fantastic, and their odd lack of chemistry is offset by the fact that the two have very few scenes together. The rest of the townsfolk are uniformly excellent, as is to be expected when one's talent pool contains such notables as Harry Morgan, Lon Chaney Jr., Lloyd Bridges, and Katy Jurado. Zinnemann's direction is excellent, coupled with Floyd Crosby's groundbreaking cinematography, which is played up quite nicely with Elmo Williams' editing (Williams is responsible for the real-time aspect of the film, which was originally meant to run a good deal longer; Crosby was the guy who figured out how to make the film look so sere. No, you're not watching a faded print). A number of very talented folks worked on this movie, and they all brought their A games. One for the ages. ****