Trailer
Plot summary
Marshal Will Kane is preparing to retire in the New Mexico town of Hadleyville, where he has just married Amy Fowler, a Quaker and pacifist. Word arrives that Frank Miller, the outlaw Kane sent to prison for murder, has been pardoned and will reach town on the noon train, one day before the new marshal takes over. Miller's gang, his brother Ben, Jack Colby and Jim Pierce, waits at the depot. Miller had sworn to take revenge on Kane and on the judge who sentenced him. Amy urges her husband to leave with her. Kane refuses and asks the townspeople he has protected for help, but Judge Percy Mettrick packs up, Deputy Harvey Pell is bitter at being passed over, and the congregation argues instead of volunteering.
Cast
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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about High Noon (1952)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- John Wayne was originally offered the lead role but refused it because he believed Foreman's story was an obvious allegory against blacklisting, which he actively supported. He later told an interviewer that he would 'never regret having helped run Foreman out of the country'.
- During production in 1951, screenwriter Carl Foreman was summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He had once been a member of the Communist Party but declined to identify fellow members, so the committee labeled him an 'uncooperative witness', leaving him vulnerable to blacklisting by the movie industry.
- Kramer first offered Lee Van Cleef the Harvey Pell role, after seeing him in a touring production of Mister Roberts, on the condition that Van Cleef have his nose surgically altered to appear less menacing. He refused, and was cast instead as Colby, the only role of his career without a single line of dialogue.
- After Wayne refused the Will Kane role, Kramer offered it to Gregory Peck, who declined because he felt it was too similar to his role in The Gunfighter the year before; Peck later said he considered it the biggest mistake of his career. Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift and Charlton Heston also declined.
- In 1989, 22-year-old Polish graphic designer Tomasz Sarnecki transformed Marian Stachurski's 1959 Polish variant of the High Noon poster into a Solidarity election poster for the first partially free elections in communist Poland.
- Gary Cooper was reluctant to film the fight scene with Bridges because of ongoing problems with his back, but eventually did it without a stunt double. He wore no makeup to emphasise his character's anguish and fear, which was probably intensified by pain from recent surgery to remove a bleeding ulcer.
- The theme song, along with its various instrumental arrangements, is heard 36 times throughout the film, functioning as a recurring musical motif.
