As Peter Biskind pointed out in Seeing is Believing: how Hollywood taught us to stop worrying and love the fifties (1983), it is naïve to think that the ideology of Hollywood in the 50s was a fixed and uniform set of political beliefs and values. While many films did reflect common themes with a strong push towards consensus and the need to stick together in the face of adversity (and the enemy, whatever that enemy may be), many also betrayed underlying disagreements within the established and traditional dominant view of society.

It is commonly assumed that most films from the 50s are issued from the same mould, that of conformity and right-wing bourgeois suburban ideology. Yet, High Noon, which received two Oscars in 1953, is usually understood to be a left wing film, one that goes against the norm and the mainstream. After all, John Wayne and Howard Hawks, dismayed by this straying aside in a genre that they believed to be the casket of American family values, remade High Noon a few years later, as Rio Bravo.

It is clear that High Noon is not your usual western, at least not for that period. The marshal receives no help whatsoever from the town people he has saved on several occasions. When faced with the possibility to help the man who was there for them before, they decline, one by one, and let him face his death alone. At the end of the film, having dealt with the brigands who came to town to kill him, the marshal throws his badge in the dirt, at the feet of the people who refused to help him, but who also so quickly came back to him once the threat posed by the villains disappeared. The community fell apart, the bond that helped it stay strong and together dissolved by hypocrisy and cowardice.

Yet, the marshal himself, by refusing to leave town and by accepting to face his destiny and his death with courage and dignity, also shows some good ole’ American values, ones that were dear to the American right of the 50’s. Cary Cooper, who plays the Marshall Will Kane, unless I am mistaken, was not a left wing man. And his determination and stubbornness in the face of sure death and a disintegrating and spineless community around him is a reminder of Howard Roark, the character he played in The Fountainhead. Ayn Rand might have been proud of Will Kane, or perhaps she would have suggested he leave town quickly and not bother with this disgraceful and cowardly community.

Carl Foreman, who wrote High Noon, was a victim of the communist witch-hunt that took place in Hollywood in the 50’s. It has been said that, to a certain degree, the film reflected these events and this ‘exclusion’ from the community that Foreman and others felt at the time. If this is indeed true, the lines between left-wing and right-wing ideology were clearly further blurred by this personal agenda.

High Noon deserves its place in film and Western history. But it seems to me that, without this historical context and perspective, the film appears much less impactful and significant today.