A Little Late for 'High Noon'

By Katey Rich

When I bemoaned the upcoming remake of the Hitchcock classic The Birds a few weeks ago, I didn't exactly think it would be the last retooling of a cinema classic to come down the pipeline. But did the next one really have to arrive so quickly? The Hollywood Reporter announced that the rights to the 1952 Gary Cooper classic High Noon were picked up at the American Film Market on Monday, which means that a new Marshal Will Kane will be silently stalking the streets of a desolate town.

The weirdest detail in all of this is that actor Christopher Mitchum, son of '40s Hollywood bad boy Robert Mitchum, acquired the rights, along with producers Mark Headley and Toni Covington. Mitchum has done essentially nothing but B-movies over the course of his career, though he did appear in Tombstone and the late John Wayne western Big Jake. He told the Reporter that he has wanted to remake High Noon for years, though the article doesn't suggest that he'll be acting in it.

Honestly, I think the only way I could handle a High Noon remake would be as a B-movie, so incomparably bad as to not even resemble the original. What concerns me isn't so much what they would do to the story-- it's a great, simple plot, and hard to ruin-- but what a film like High Noon would mean today.

Back in 1952, Will Kane was a solitary figure standing up for what was right, ignoring conventional wisdom and the fear of his community to fight back against the bad guys who escaped jail to come after him and him alone. Even though he'd married a pacifist Quaker (Grace Kelly) who was prepared to leave him on his wedding day if he fought this battle, even though a church full of his neighbors and friends said they wouldn't help him, he walked out into the street to face his fate, knowing the record would show he had done the right thing. Screenwriter Carl Foreman wrote it as an allegory for the Hollywood blacklist, as a paean to those who stood up against the witch-hunting of McCarthyism.

John Wayne told Playboy that High Noon was "the most un-American thing I've ever seen in my life," but there aren't too many people who would agree with him today. High Noon has been shown in the White House more than any other film, most recently in late September 2001. As J. Hoberman pointed out in a 2004 New York Times article, the current President has embraced the film, and probably not just because of its striking cinematography and Cooper's Oscar-winning performance.

Given the way things have gone even since Hoberman wrote his article three and a half years ago, is there anyone who can stomach a movie about a man going it alone into battle? The notion of sticking up for what you believe in the face of adversity remains a powerful American ideal, but it seems almost insulting to present a country mired in one man's war with a film venerating that kind of decision-making. We all know Will Kane was right, and most of us know George W. Bush was wrong, but won't we all want to side with the townspeople in that church anyway, unwilling to risk their necks for what's essentially a grudge match?

As my former professor Richard Slotkin taught me well, westerns are made in response to the time and place in which they're made, refracting back something about their society through the prism of men on horseback. High Noon said something brilliant about the 1950s, but its message might be better left there. I'm all for recent attempts to revive the Western, and even reworking the myths that have been handed down to us throughout history. But before we remake an entire story, especially one so specific to its time, we have to question how its meaning may have changed.