High Noon Review

Zinnemann and editor Elmo Williams build the film out of clocks. Pendulums, pocket watches, the station clock, all of it cut so that running time and story time converge on noon, and by the last reel the inserts of clock faces are doing more work than any dialogue could. Floyd Crosby shot it deliberately flat and grey with no filters and no clouds, against every convention of the genre, so the town looks like a documentary rather than a frontier.

Gary Cooper was in real pain from an ulcer and a bad back during production and it reads on screen as exactly the right kind of exhaustion. The picture is a political argument first, written by Carl Foreman while he was being blacklisted, and the townspeople's cowardice is aimed at a specific audience. Grace Kelly is too young for the part and seems to know it. Some of the supporting business is stiff and stagey. But the structure is the achievement, a thriller that generates dread from a timetable and a set of closed doors.