High Noon

I am rather embarrassed to say I hadn't seen the movie High Noon before tonight when they showed it as part of the outdoor 'movies under the stars' thing that the city does during the Summer. But now I am amazed that it even got made back in 1952. To me it seems like a total indictment of McCarthyism, with the main character, Kane, representing someone who's been 'blacklisted' in a town, and who decides to help the town despite them not wanting him and his being able to leave if he wanted to. It also painted organized religion as a way for people to hide from taking individual responsibility, not something one would expect back then. I'll have to read up on the history of the film because I think there's a lot of stuff 'just under the surface' as it were.

Other parts of the movie that I noticed were that it was done completely in real time, with clocks showing how close it was to noon, when the villain was to come back to town on a train. (Sort of like Speed, only not awful).

Another consistent theme of this movie that was ahead of its time was that the characters that had any depth to them were the ones that didn't fit in in the town, the main character and the Mexican woman who has a history with Kane. Both are left without the support of the society, and have to make it on their own, and become the characters of main interest. Compare this with the John Wayne model Western film where the closer a man is to the conception of a mainstream American ideal the bigger a hero he is and you can see why High Noon is a gem of a film.