High Noon (1952)

"In the end, he must meet his chosen fate all by himself, his town’s doors and windows firmly locked against him. It is a story that still happens everywhere, every day" ~ Fred Zinnemann.

"...The beauty of High Noon is that its themes are universal. On the surface it may be a western, but its themes of conscience, fearlessness and a sense of both what is right and of duty – not just to the law, a cause, or even to others; but to yourself and how you wish to live and be perceived –  transcends the trappings of the genre to connect with audiences who perhaps would never consider themselves as horse opera aficionados. That High Noon has been uprooted from its old west setting time and again to effectively be remade or paid homage to in everything from the 1981 sci-fi actioner Outland to a 2010 episode of the Jimmy McGovern Manchester-set drama The Street starring Bob Hoskins, serves as a testimony to the strength and continuing relevance of the film’s human story of a man who feels compelled to fight rather than flee..."

Read my full review at The Geek Show

High Noon (1952)

The beauty of High Noon is that its themes are universal. On the surface it may be a western, but its themes of conscience, fearlessness and a sense of what is right and of duty, not just to the law, a cause, or even to others, but to yourself and how you wish to live and be perceived, transcends the trappings of the genre to connect with audiences who perhaps would never consider themselves as horse opera aficionados. That High Noon has been uprooted from its old west setting to be effectively been remade or paid homage to time and again in everything from sci-fi actioner Outland (1981) to a 2010 episode of the Jimmy McGovern Manchester-set drama The Street, starring Bob Hoskins, serves as a testimony to the strength and continuing relevance of the film's human story of a man who feels compelled to fight rather than run.

The film's screenwriter Carl Foreman intended High Noon to be an allegory of the McCarthy witch hunts that plagued Hollywood and destroyed the lives and careers of many involved in the business at that time. The House Un-American Activities Committee sought to investigate 'Communist propaganda and influence' in the film industry and declared Foreman, a former Communist Party member who declined to identify any of his colleagues and contemporaries of being fellow members, to be an 'unreliable witness'. He was subsequently blacklisted and moved to the UK. 

However, when you add Fred Zinnemann to the mix as the film director, you get a further resonance to the metaphorical aspect of High Noon and one that supports the theory that the film is a film that just so happens to be set in the west, rather than being a western. As Zinnemann said; "High Noon is not a Western, as far as I'm concerned; it just happens to be set in the Old West". His shooting style certainly supports this too - out goes the traditional landscapes and painterly panoramas of John Ford, in favour of tight close-ups and crisp newsreel style footage in keeping with the social realist approach the director worked in, which reaches its zenith here with the real time setting that makes the tense atmosphere really palpable. 

The critic Stephen Price believes that the Polish-born Zinnemann progressed the anti-McCarthy allegory by allying himself to the core values of Gary Cooper's character, seeing what he represented as being the physical embodiment of his greatest wish for all his films to be about "trying to preserve our civilisation". Price argues that it is easy to see the outlaws arriving to wreak terror and revenge upon the town as a threat to their way of life akin to the fascism of the Nazis who killed Zinnemann's parents in the Holocaust in the previous decade.

Such resonance has run throughout the intervening years and rightly continues to do so to this day, as Zinnemann himself said in his autobiography "In the end, he must meet his chosen fate all by himself, his town's doors and windows firmly locked against him. It is a story that still happens everywhere, every day" This was certainly proved in 1989 when the then 22-year-old Polish graphic designer Tomasz Sarnecki adapted the original Polish language poster for the film by Marian Stachurski as part of the campaign for Solidarity in the first partially free elections in Communist Poland. Referring to his very own High Noon on 4th June, 1989 Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa discussed the metaphor the film presents and its relevance to his politics; "Cowboys in Western clothes had become a powerful symbol for Poles. Cowboys fight for justice, fight against evil, and fight for freedom, both physical and spiritual" Call me an idealistic Corbynista (which I am) if you will, but Labour wouldn't go far wrong if they adopted it for their campaign now - like Gary Cooper, Corbyn seems to stand alone, shunned by a soft and self serving, blissfully and blithely ignorant society but compelled to do what is right for them nonetheless, as an encroaching dangerously fascistic menace appears over the horizon.

Rightly regarded as a classic film, not just a classic western, HUAC poster boy John Wayne hated it, calling it "the most un-American thing I've ever seen in my whole life" and went off to make Rio Bravo with Howard Hawks (who also detested High Noon, disparagingly believing that no good Marshall should "run around town like a chicken with his head cut off asking everyone to help", only to be saved by his 'Quaker wife' in the final reel) as a direct result. And if the likes of John Wayne hating High Noon and believing it to be unpatriotic doesn't immediately make High Noon a five star film then I don't know what does.

Dial M For Murder (1954)

When it comes to Hitchcock, I always seem to be out of step. Vertigo is often proclaimed to be 'the greatest movie ever made', but I've never rated it. I love Rope, and apparently that's not always held in huge esteem among Hitch aficionados. I love his early films in the UK and believe them to be terribly underrated simply because of the great critical and commercial acclaim he achieved in Hollywood. I can agree on Psycho being excellent however.

But even Hitchcock himself hated Dial M for Murder. And watching it on BBC2 at the weekend, I'm struggling to see why.

The film based on a successful play by Frederick Knott, and Hitchcock took on the screen adaptation to fulfill his contract with  Warner Brothers before making the move to Paramount. He was, as he said to Francois Truffaut in the French filmmaker's A Definitive Study of Alfred Hitchcock, "coasting, playing it safe" He believed he phoned in his direction and that the action wouldn't have been any more exciting if it was set within a phonebox. But I wholeheartedly disagree. Whatever Hitchcock's issue with the film, I know other directors would kill to make just one movie like Dial M for Murder - his 45th film.

Ray Milland stars as former tennis-pro Tony Wendice who, fearing he is about to lose his wife, Margot (the utterly divine Grace Kelly) and her money to Robert Cummings' American crime writer Mark Halliday, whom she has had an affair with, hatches a plan to have her  murdered so he can collect on her life insurance policy. Wendice  blackmails an old university friend, Swann (Anthony Dawson) to do the dirty deed, using a boys' night out with Halliday as his alibi. Inevitably, it all goes wrong and Margot kills her would-be killer, leaving the slippery and quick-witted Wendice with no alternative but to improvise.

The cast is absolutely first rate; Milland is a wonderful mix of the urbane and the devious as Wendice, portraying the kind of man who is used to falling on his feet. This is in stark contrast to his hapless patsy Swann - was there ever a better actor at portraying this type of dishonourable gentleman as Antony Dawson? With his sports jacket and pencil moustache he's like the living embodiment of some public service warning about not cashing just anyone's cheques. There was always something about him, something in those wild eyes, that suggested that, beneath the clubbable affability there was more than a hint of the cornered animal. 

Grace Kelly, acting here for Hitchcock for the very first time, is very convincing as Margot and of course utterly flawless too. But it's worth mentioning her acting chops in her final scenes; washed out, haunted, wounded and confused. There's a lovely, near scene-stealing performance from John Williams as Hubbard, the detective on the case that's a joy to behold too. Admittedly Cummings is the least interesting in the cast, but that is perhaps because he has the least to do with the role of the pure and virtuous good guy determined to saved his loved one from the hangman's noose. The fact that he's an adulterer doesn't factor into the characterisation or performance.

Like Rope and Rear Window, Hitchcock places the vast majority of the action within one single set, in this case Wendice's flat. Such a decision, whilst totally faithful to Knott's original play, could lead to charges of staginess on the big screen, but Hitchcock neatly averts these by offering up some wonderfully tricksy camera work, most notably in the scene where Wendice explains his plan to Swann - the camera rising up to the ceiling to point down over our plotters in a way that foreshadows the space as a crime scene in waiting. Equally the setpiece of the attempted murder is just as impressive; wrought with tension, Dawson strangles Kelly with a silk scarf as she scrabbles wildly for something - anything - that can save her life. When her hand grasps a pair of scissors, we're instantly relieved...only to be totally sickened a second later when she plunges them between Dawson's shoulder blades, getting further embedded as he falls to the floor.

Dial M For Murder possesses all the great strengths of Hitchcock, it is suspenseful, dark, stylish and blackly comic. He may have believed he was coasting, but it's further proof that, even on a bad day, he was utterly unique.

Rear Window (1954)

One of Hitch's greatest talents was in creating a world unique to his storytelling and visual style. In Rear Window these talents really are to the fore, using  the teeming tenements of New York as his playground, embellishing it with great colour (both socially and cinematically) and detail.

An essay in big city loneliness and morbid curiosity, Rear Window has much to say about Hitch's gleeful reliance on voyeurism both of his audience at the cinema and of the outside world in general, tapping into how we perhaps live(d) via witty symbolism and analogy. I wonder if such a film, if made today, could grab an audiences attention and capture something of urban life now given that as a society we seem to be living a more insular and detached life, reliant on the screens of our laptops and PC's than the window to the streets outside. 

A film about 'spectacle', Rear Window gives us just that and how, thanks to the great aforementioned symbolism and the equally subtle analogies that can be made between Stewart and Kelly's characters, or more specifically, their relationship, and those they are peeping on (as cited in Tania Modleski's excellent book 'The Women Who Knew Too Much'). It goes without saying that Stewart and Kelly are at the top of their game and they're ably provided with some comedic support from Thelma Ritter, adding some of Hitch's typically ghoulish delight to the proceedings. 

All in all, this remains one of Hitchcock's finest.

- I hate that he killed the dog though :(

Grace & Danger

Grace Kelly

Just spent the afternoon watching Grace in Hitch's Rear Window on BBC2; lovely Sunday matinee stuff.

The above photograph is from another Hitch classic however, To Catch A Thief 

Smoking Hot

Grace Kelly in Rear Window