One Paragraph Movie Review: High Noon

Two hundred and twenty-sixth film: High Noon, a classic Western starring Gary Cooper in his last film-acting decade and Grace Kelly in her first. He was 50 and she was 21 and they play a freshly-married couple, so it’s also a classically off-putting age difference, but WHATEVER, 1952. The story of this movie — a town’s marshal trying fruitlessly to gather a posse to defend against a bad guy who arrives on the noon train — would be unremarkable if it wasn’t for the really quite good film-making. Starting with the marshal’s wedding an hour before the train’s arrival, we watch in real time as the town panics and makes excuses, all the while glancing at clocks throughout the so-western-it’s-cliched dusty wooden setting. There’s a pile of hay on fire, a bunch of good, suspenseful, sweaty close-ups, endless bullet-heavy holster belts worn over pre-jeans business trousers, and a climactic shoot-out where more than one man’s five-o’-clock shadow is in serious danger of getting blown clean off. Look. It’s a Western. It’s fine. It’s another thing where men make dumb decisions to show how tough they are and women make much better decisions in much better clothing. Not really my shot of whiskey, but it’ll do. Two rudely interrupted honeymoons out of five.