Reviews by JxSxPx

I first encountered these semi-campy, semi-terrifying stop-motion fairy tale films from Ray Harryhausen on a VHS tape collecting hundreds of public domain cartoons. Sandwiched in-between Fleischer cartoons, Little Audrey, Felix the Cat, and Mighty Mouse, these things stuck out not only for their jerky animations but for their joyous expressions of terror and violence.

Granted, “The Story of Little Red Riding Hood” does tame much of the sex, violence, and gore of the original tale. The wolf doesn’t get cut open here only to have his stomach filled with rocks and sewn back together. Nope, he’s merely shot, but makes a quick escape. It’s possible he dies off-screen, but it’s slightly opaque, much like the sexual violence he commits to Red, which is noticeably absent here.

Yet it’s the wolf that’s the most fascinating piece. Harryhausen’s animation of people is rubbery and circumspect; none of them exhibiting much personality here, but his monster is glorious. The wolf looks like what would happen if a Smilodon and a brown mutt performed cross-species mating. His large canine teeth barely fit in his jaws, and he leers with menace and the threat of violence at any second. This comes to a head in the climax where he chases Red up the stairs of her grandma’s house, only to grab hold of the banister and begin to walk on his hind legs. The wolf stops being an exaggerated cartoon of a real animal and begins to drift into horror film territory, looking like a crazed werewolf about to carve into its prey.

But we’re sacked with following around Little Red Riding Hood, and her forced happy ending. Call me crazy if you want, but that wolf possessed more charm than she did and I wouldn’t have complained if he devoured her whole. This life-giving talent for monstrous creations, both mythological and exaggerations of real animals, would make Harryhausen’s career a definitive example of boundless imagination merging with virtuoso technique in the years to come.

“Mother Goose Stories,” or “The Storybook Review” depending on where you’ve learned the title, is a ten minute short film encompassing four nursery rhymes, complete and unabridged. It’s also just absolutely bizarre to watch given that stop-motion animation was nowhere near as fluid as it is now, so the characters frequently have faces that melt from one expression into another. It’s not just this strange misty-faced emotive performing of the dolls that’s unnerving, but the maniacal glee that Ray Harryhausen exudes in animating the more violent and hallucinatory parts of these rhymes.

It starts off innocently enough with a storybook opening to reveal a kindly Mother Goose, and a pet goose that follow her around. This Mother Goose looks less like an Old Timey librarian and more like what happened when your kindergarten teacher dressed up as a witch for Halloween, but a kindly one. She shows us the four stories she’ll be telling us (“Little Miss Muffett,” “Old Mother Hubbard,” “The Queen of Tarts,” and “Humpty Dumpty”), then pulls out a film projector and off we go.

“Humpty Dumpty” is the obvious highlight here, a completely innocuous series of images that add up to something approaching a feverish nightmare. A gigantic egg vibrates of its own volition, magically grows eyes and a mouth, and then sprouts an entire body (and clothing) to go along with it. He climbs up the wall, but his movements are like watching a drunk trying to walk a tightrope and his success is short lived. Then we witness his fall, from a camera planted on the floor so he falls slightly beneath the frame and the shell fragments fly across the bottom of the frame. The sight of the knight sitting among Humpty Dumpty’s viscera calls to mind trying to glue back together a piece of china that’s shattered.

The others vary in quality, with “Little Miss Muffett” being acceptable, “Old Mother Hubbard” being weirder than you remember the rhyme being and “The Queen of Tarts a few minutes of filler with an overly sexy queen and her pervy-looking king. It all ends with Mother Goose making the projector disappear, climbing back into the storybook, and closing the cover. Sweet dreams kids.

“Tulips Shall Grow” is a short film made during WWII that exists to give weight and artistic design to the phrase, “hope springs eternal.” It tells the story of a Dutch boy and girl romancing each other in a storybook Eden before mechanical screws render it a wasteland, only for divine intervention to enact cosmic justice and restore this autumnal paradise. It is not subtle about it’s political convictions, but it is gorgeous to look at.

An uncredited Ray Harryhausen was the primary animator on here, and his genius is all over this production. The Screwballs, a goose-stepping mechanical monsters invading and terrorizing our young lovers, are eccentric designs with the ability to seemingly change their physiological makeup on a whim. Their warplanes resemble the exoskeletons of a avian creatures, and tanks are dropped down from the sky using umbrellas to gently land for causing chaos. If the political allegory gets heavy-handed, then at least “Tulips Shall Grow” offers a variety of quirky sights to enthrall.

The entire short resembles Little People toys running around a pop-up book. Sure it’s propaganda through and through, but I appreciate in the face of potential jingoistic sermonizing it replaces it resilience, faith, and hope. Not only does prayer bring about a torrential storm to turn the Screwballs into rust, cause the earth to swallow up their tanks, and lightning to grasp their warplanes, but it brings about a healing reunion. “Tulips Shall Grow” culminates in the boy and girl reuniting and skipping into the sunshine while tulips blossom immediately in their wake and a giant V forms out of clouds in the sky. Ridiculous? You had better believe it, but a fine caper to a strange, dark little short.

The Heiress is a prime example of the kind of literary adaptations that Hollywood once trafficked in. Films that fashioned intelligent frameworks from great novels allowing for a kind of cinematic poetry between the finely honed performances and staid melodrama, a type of cinematic language that no longer exists. The Heiress is a slow-burning character study, following one woman’s transition from anxious, sweet spinster into a harder persona allowing star Olivia de Havilland to give the greatest performance of her storied career.

The Heiress’ story is simple, Catherine Sloper (de Havilland) lives with her widower father (Ralph Richardson) and aunt (Miriam Hopkins), forever begging her father to love her while accepting his repeated emotional abuse and rejection. One night at a society dance, Catherine meets a young suitor (Montgomery Clift) who sweeps her away with promises of eternal love, devotion, and companionship. This lovesick girl ignores all of the warning signs, arguing with her father about the suitor’s questionable intentions in so brisk a courtship.

All of this drama comes to a head midway through when Catherine receives one last heartbreak that finally cracks her defenseless, sensitive exterior. She jettisons all her prior naiveté and optimism for a steely eyed, slightly bitter person. The flashes of insecurity and deep-rooted resentment in the earliest parts of the film coming roaring to the surface, with Catherine finally striking back at both her absentee father and gold-digging suitor, culminating in a final image of immense cruelty and pleasurable revenge. Director William Wyler deploys these changes of character and cycles of abuse in slow drips, slowly ratcheting up the tension, cloistering so many of the unsaid emotions so that when they’re finally laid bare they hit harder and leave blistering marks on the characters psyches.

The greatest strength of The Heiress is the central performances from the four leads, even more so than the immaculate production values, wonderful score, intelligent script, and solid direction. Ralph Richardson is oily charm as the father. His emotional intelligence and erudite manner masks, only barely, the near complete contempt he feels towards his daughter and her inability to live up to the image he’s built up of his dead wife. By this point, Miriam Hopkins was a reliable supporting player, and she’s the lone character to give Catherine any love or affection from a genuine emotional place. Montgomery Clift was at the height of his romantic leading man looks here, the perfect embodiment of a Gothic romance’s tortured hunk. He’s achingly beautiful here, and blessed with eyes that can sell you a lie straight to your face, an essential trick in making the role work.

But this is Olivia de Havilland’s tour de force performance, and she plays it all like a woman possessed. She was always at her best when her lovely exterior, blushing complexion, large doe eyes, and innate sweetness, are utilized to subvert the emotional undercurrents of her character. This trick was used to effectively portray slowly crumbling sanity (The Snake Pit), a subterranean intelligence and iron core (Gone With the Wind), and a stone cold murderess (Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte), but none of those quite prepare you for the depth she brings to this role. She captures a dark, murky depth beneath the good-girl piety and yearning for love and validation. It’s the eyes that have it, which reveal every crushing blow to her ego and psyche and the eventual poison she spits back out. Olivia de Havilland must carry a complicated load, alternating between crying for affection, a deep-rooted anger, a painful shyness, and craving for revenge, sometimes all at once, sometimes in pieces, and she makes it all look so graceful.

All of these attributes have the markings of making The Heiress a classic, of which it is, but it’s the strength of the narrative, a complicated portrait of one woman coming into her power and shaking off the shackles of social propriety, that elevate it to that level. Not only do they elevate it, but they keep it there. This blossoming of the grittier aspects of her personality play like a hard won battle, finally removing the lack of social graces and fidgeting hands, the eager to please and placating nature like outgrown garments. The scene where Catherine’s father tells her she lacks beauty, charm, and wit is a crushing blow, because it’s so clear that she never stood a chance of blooming when her father ensured her wilting.

“Yes, I can be very cruel. I have been taught by masters.” Indeed. 

Ghostbusters, or Ghostbusters: Answer the Call as it’s dubbed during the end credits, is much better than the loud, annoying crybabies would have you believe. Much like the original, this spin on the material is a herky-jerky ride between improve comedy and jump-scares. When it works, it’s very funny, but when it doesn’t, it’s a little long and too enamored with the source material for its own good.

You know when Ghostbusters is at its most fun? When it merely points at a camera at its four strong leading comediennes and lets them riff off of each other. Granted, without a straight man, these scenes sometimes play out as a live-action cartoon, but the commitment that Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones bring to their roles goes a long way towards making the whole thing charming. The disparate problems of their personalities clashing is the foundation of a lot of hangout comedy, and Ghostbusters does this material well.

Where it stumbles is in the more frequent dispersal of its high-concept plot mechanics, and finding a meeting ground between the ghosts being frightening and the guffaws they must also elicit. The actual nature of going about to busting ghosts grinds the narrative to a screeching halt, with many narrative (forgive the unintentional pun) dead spots. Our MRA-style villain is a smart choice (especially given the man-baby reaction to the very existence of this film), but he doesn’t make much of an impression either way except as a smart concept with a humdrum execution.

Once he releases all hell, the film switches into full-on action movie spectacle. The sight of McKinnon’s character licking her plasma guns and kicking ass is a thrilling bit of a female character taking the major action hero position, made all the better by McKinnon’s oddball character being the general scene-stealer throughout. The only problem here is that the special effects are not up to snuff, with many of the ghosts and ghoulies looking like obviously artificial creations completely lacking in scares and unbelievable as being in the same frame as our heroines. But it’s still a riot to watch the four of them kick ass and break down the doors to the “boys club” of summer blockbusters.

The lowest factor is the fealty that’s paid to the original players, dripped out in a series of winking cameos with many of them repeating verbatim lines from the original that they made famous. It consistently proves a distraction when they make Annie Potts answering a phone with “what do you want?” or Dan Aykroyd drop “I ain’t afraid of no ghost,” but is noticeably better when it’s Sigourney Weaver or Bill Murray in roles completely unrelated to their originals but better woven into the narrative. This comes to a head in the climax, which feels an awful lot like a complete re-do of the originals with an appearance of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man and the original logo ascending to the big bad kaiju.

For all of these problems, I still think the negative reaction to this film is unwarranted. It’s charming in spots, funny in many of them, and blessed with a trio of lead performances that make it worth watching (McKinnon’s puckish tech-nerd, Leslie Jones’ amateur historian whose smarts allow her to keep up with the three degreed scientists, and Chris Hemsworth, most shockingly, deftly playing a gorgeous air-headed bimbo). Two hours is about thirty minutes too long to tell this story, but it’s still a chance to watch four funny women improving off of each other, building a believable comradery, and being surprisingly touching in spots. Let’s stop pretending the original is some golden calf of cinematic arts and just enjoy this reworking for what it is, imperfect but a pleasant and enjoyable way to spend two hours with a major film headlined by four women. That’s a cause for celebration.     

What a mess this is. Everything you’ve ever heard about what a disaster the film version of the Broadway smash Mame is, well, it’s all true, every word of it. There’s no amount of exaggeration that can quite explain just how inept and fascinatingly awful this is. There’s a few bright spots, but it’s mostly an indifferently directed affair with an awkward leading performance that harms to the point of making Mame almost unpalatable to the audience.

Mame was Angela Lansbury’s career-changing show, transitioning the talented actress from film into grand dame of the theater. She would have been a natural choice to reprise the role, and composer Jerry Herman begged the studio to consider her. Alas, the powers that be thought she didn’t have enough box office pull, and Lucille Ball is a towering icon, and on paper not an entirely incorrect choice for the part. But we’re twenty years away from the height of I Love Lucy and Ball’s power as an actress has dimmed here, and one wonders where her lovable quirkiness has gone off to for the duration of this film.

Ball performs everything at half speed, including her line delivers and comic pratfalls. Even worse is how cigarettes, booze, and time have taken their toll on her speaking and singing voice. Her vocals are stitched together piece-by-piece, preventing the belting that’s necessary in certain parts to happen, and making Mame sound eternally winded. By this point, Ball’s about fifteen years too old for the role and the gauzy close-ups hammer this point home throughout. She only gets the role right when interacting with Bea Arthur’s Vera Charles, a meeting of drunken raspy syllables and backhanded bitchery in sublime gay euphoria.

Arthur easily steals the movie, proving the most essential player and an all-around great performance. “Bosom Buddies” is a gas, with Arthur and Ball trading caustic barbs and lovingly shady quips back-and-forth while arm-in-arm or clinging martini glasses together. Arthur, as any fan of The Golden Girls or Maude could tell you, was magical in giving a caustic glance or a withering stare, and she deploys every comedic strength in her arsenal at the material, enlivening the proceedings whenever she’s onscreen.

Arthur’s then-husband, director Gene Saks, is another hindrance towards Mame. He was a director of Broadway, primarily, and his lazy directing here sinks many of the musical numbers and comedic bits. A musical needs energy in order to work, and Mame is distinctly sleepy in this respect. Saks merely points the camera and plants it there too often. There’s not enough cinematic spectacle, and it feels entirely old-fashioned in an era when movies like Cabaret and All That Jazz were redefining the movie musical.

A notorious bomb in its era, so large that it caused Ball to declare that she would never make another film again, it easily slips in with other curios from 70s musicals, like Man of La Mancha and Star! There’s still a certain camp angle to enjoy this film from, but only if you’re a fellow gay boy. I mean, there’s Dorothy Zbornak and Lucy McGillicuddy acting opposite each other, with Arthur going full-on drag queen in a performance that’s the definition of someone's work being a film's life support.

The final big screen pairing of Bob Hope and Lucille Ball, two indomitable performers and towering icons, and it is not worthy of rafter-shaking comedic talents. It plays not dissimilarly to an episode of I Love Lucy where she writes a questionably autobiographical novel and Ricky disapproves, only completely lacking in laughs and charms.

The premise is ripe for an Adam’s Rib style battle of the sexes, but no one’s interested in dynamic sparks or likable characters. Bob Hope is a self-important theater critic who’s quick to tarnish a production and takes glee with getting them closed, only to find his wife has taken up writing a play. He thinks she might be a hack, she might be having an affair with her younger director (Rip Torn, looking hunky and too dangerous for this toothless comedy), and, oh, who cares. It starts middling but passable and quickly dissolves from there. (Even Ball and Hope thought it was trash given the groans they emitted about it on an episode of Dinah.)

Not even appearances from reliable supporting players like Jessie Royce Landis and Jim Backus can save this thing. Part of the problem is that no matter how valiantly Hope tries to make his character human or saw off some of the edges, he’s an irredeemable bastard from start to finish, cruel to Ball, and possessing questionable journalistic standards when we watch him leave one play early that he’s reviewing and showing up stinking drunk to the second. This tanks much of the drama, and the sloppily sentimental ending doesn’t add any favors. At least there are a few good jokes sparsely thrown in to keep our interest during the sagging pace (a verbal cat fight between Marilyn Maxwell and Landis is particularly funny for the politeness of their sparring). Oh well, at least we’ll always have Ball and Hope’s funny skits from their numerous television specials together.

Cary Grant. Grace Kelly. Alfred Hitchcock. The French Riviera.

There’s nothing else you need to make a wildly entertaining thrill ride, complete with some romance, action, and beautiful jewels. It’s charming minor Hitchcock, but an entry that is demonstrative of his range as an artist. After the one-two punch of the prior year’s Dial M for Murder and Rear Window, both claustrophobic movies dripping in suspense, it’s fun to watch him shake loose with this soufflé-light dessert.

At times, To Catch a Thief does play like a trial run for North by Northwest, or even a road map for the eventual James Bond franchise only a few short years away. Mainly, this feeling occurs during the awkward first thirty minutes as we play a waiting game for Grace Kelly to emerge and sit through some awkward dubbing of a few of the French actors. Still, it’s a chance to watch Hitchcock direct Grant and that accounts for a lot of mileage.

No other director did as much to carve into cinematic royalty the visages of Grant or Kelly as Hitchcock, and here he gives them the flimsiest pretense of characters to play. It doesn’t really matter what their names are, we’ve come to watch Grant seduce Kelly, Kelly swoon, Grant look debonair, and bask in the reflected glory of their combined beauty. The main crux of the story is a retired cat burglar (Grant) getting framed for crimes he didn’t commit, and wooing an American heiress (Kelly). That’s it, and that’s more than enough of a framing device to watch them together.

Lovingly dubbed a “snow covered volcano” by the director, Grace Kelly reveals a hitherto unseen penchant for naughtiness. She exhibits a barely concealed carnality here, exemplified by the infamous fireworks scene. Her décolletage on proud display, she bends over to turn off a lamp telling Grant that he’s about to see one of the great sights of the French Riviera before quickly adding that she’s talking about the fireworks. Yeah, right, the fireworks. Hitchcock gave Kelly the best parts of her career, and this role is no different with her rich, glacial beauty embodying all of the alluring schisms in this film.

For all the surface beauty on display here, there’s one stylistic choice that is downright questionable. Late in the film, a green light becomes the default for evening scenes, bathing everything in a sickly glow. This one problem aside, which is easily overpowered by the sheer beauty of the rest of the movie, To Catch a Thief is a high point of cinema-as-travelogue. There’s a blatant worship in the luxury passing before the screen, not only the landscapes but the movie stars, cars, and clothes.

There’s still the unmistakable markings of Hitchcock’s greatness all over To Catch a Thief. The innocent man on the run is a reoccurring theme, as is the remote, cold blonde goddess with undercurrents of explosive sexuality, the daffy mother (Jessie Royce Landis, practically humping Grant’s leg during their first scene together), and the suave elegance of Cary Grant used for darker impulses. It may not be an essential viewing experience in the careers of Grant or Hitchcock (of the four films they made together, either Notorious or North by Northwest earns that title), but it is essential Grace Kelly, with Hitchcock's ultimate frozen blonde goddess slowly thawing in the face of risqué gags and fireworks ejaculating outside the window during a slow burning seduction.

I cannot make any solid arguments against classifying To Catch a Thief as a bauble in-between the more ornate masterpieces, but goddamn is it a blast! In order to celebrate the truly towering works of artistic genius we must also be able to indulge and recognize the great works of popcorn-entertainment. It can’t hold a candle to Rear Window, Vertigo, The Wrong Man, or any of the other stone-cold classics during this incredibly rich period of Hitchcock’s output, but I just really love this movie. Much like Kelly’s icy ingénue, the surfaces are immaculately crafted with some kinky jollies just roaring to break free underneath.

It makes a strange sort of sense that the hero of Rear Window is confined to a wheelchair in his apartment. His immobilization only highlights his character’s obsession and fascination with voyeurism, hinted at with the opening crawl through his apartment that slowly caresses a broken camera and the framed photograph of a car crash. James Stewart’s  L. B. Jeffries is a man more interested in watching what’s going on “out there” then what’s going on in his own life.

The cinema is frequently an exercise in voyeuristic displays, but Rear Window takes that concept to its zenith. Over the course of nearly two hours, Alfred Hitchcock traps us inside of L. B.’s point-of-view, slowly but surely transitioning us away from mere audience and into his accomplice. Not only do we spy in on his various neighbors, but we’re introduced to his lovely girlfriend (Grace Kelly, giving one hell of a performance) in a hazy, sleepy close-up as she leans into him for a kiss. We are L. B., and when his visiting nurse (Thelma Ritter, ever-reliable supporting player) chastises him with “what people ought to do is get outside their own home and look in for a change,” we are just as much the intended targets for her diatribe.

The bulk of Rear Window is spent with a quietly coiling tension and suspicion. Unlike many other tales of suspense from the master, we’re only privy to the small tidbits the characters learn as they learn them, no more and no less. When L. B. awakes in the middle of the night to strange activities and notices a missing wife across the way, we simultaneously mental grasp at the same conclusions and ideas. The neighbor (Raymond Burr) has murdered his wife and done something with the body, but what? When a different neighbor’s dog dies after digging around some flowers, then tension and fears only escalate with no proper outlet. We’re trapped in a hothouse of paranoia and suspicion with only a vague montage of images and odd behaviors as our clues.

Of course, Hitchcock doesn’t throw head-first into this boiler plate environment, oh no, he’s too smart of an artist for that. Instead, we begin with cutesy miniature portraits of various neighbors who have been given various nicknames and narratives. There’s Miss Lonelyhearts, Miss Torso, the Newlyweds, the couple who owns the dog, a struggling composer, and an artist are but a few of the characters we view. Each of their windows a rectangle reflecting the cinema’s screen, becoming something of a screen-within-a-screen as time goes on. Then the rainy night scene changes everything, and Kelly’s character becomes an amateur sleuth and the leg-woman for Stewart’s investigation.

This was the second of three films that Kelly and Hitchcock made together, and she’s positively sublime here. She wafts through the screen as vision of elegance, putting Stewart’s indifference towards her presence in the earliest scenes as an unfathomable event. He only sparks an interest in her when she transitions from flesh-and-blood WASP-y goddess to player in the various channels across the way. There’s a self-descriptive element to Kelly’s character here. She was never convincing as a real human being on screen, but she was most alive and charming in roles that required a certain bit of play acting and posing from her.

For his part, Stewart is a model of neutral acting sometimes being the best choice to get the widest amount of readings. His work here is very good, even if it’s nowhere near the amount of difficulty in Vertigo, there’s still a pleasing amount of perversity in watching the lovable everyman quality of Stewart’s used for such kinky means. Emotionally distant and cold aren’t phrases that typically come to mind with Stewart, but Hitchcock managed to find those in his screen presence, complicating what a “James Stewart” role looked and felt like. His passivity in life is almost an act of repeated cruelty to Kelly, who merely begs him to love her and to pry himself away from the cameras and peeping tom behavior.

After flirting with us for a large chunk of the film, Hitchcock finally causes the players in the apartment to strike back at the voyeur. Well, only one really, but he’s the one they suspect of killing his wife. Turns out they’re right, and the idle peeping turns back violently on the voyeur forcing him to become active in his life. What saves him? Why the flashbulbs from a camera, of course, yet another example of Hitchcock’s mordant humor adding an extra zing to the ending of his films. The violent twisting of that which is being viewed into an aggressor feels preordained, the inevitable tragedy of a passive life spent looking into places and at things that we shouldn’t.

A tough, lean 85 minutes marks High Noon as a study in economy. There’s no fat in any of the stories, the characters feel authentic and lived-in, the pace never wavers, and the tension slowly increases until the nail-biter of a climatic shootout. High Noon uses all of the pieces of a typical western tale, but utilizes them in off-center ways to create a unique, intelligent melodrama wearing spurs and cowboy hats.

While the running time is brief, High Noon spends much of it indulging in talk-heavy scenes of characters moralizing and questioning the motives of each other. It’s a film of ideas and characters, not big action spectacles and chases. This quieter, somber tone is the perfect way to tell the story of a man’s crisis of conscience. Large-scale panoramas and gangs of marauding Indian tribes would prove distracting and out-of-place here.

Is this something of a civics lesson? You bet your ass it is, and that never bothered me. It’s a parable or a morality play, a deeply political allegory about the era it was made. Whether the encroaching band of outlaws represents the Korean War, HUAC, or the Cold War is up for debate, and each reading has some merit depending on how you look at it. High Noon could also be read as something of a deconstruction of the typical western hero – a stoic, taciturn marshal on the brink of retirement, and duty bound to protect his sleepy hamlet.

His cries for help lead to persistent rejection for a variety of reasons, and he’s left alone against the barbaric remnants of the old frontier. This pursuit of help, and constant stream of rejection, makes up a bulk of the film. The reasons for their refusal to help vary, from illness to cowardice to pure self-interest, and by the end, our hero is left embittered and angry towards the townspeople after saving their lives for little thanks or help. Even better is how High Noon allows its hero to break, culminating in a scene of anguish where he breaks down and sobs alone in a bar. You’d never see something like that in a John Wayne film!

Wayne, in fact, hated this film, dubbing it un-American, objecting to the liberal political allegory, and teamed-up up with frequent collaborator Howard Hawks to make a response, Rio Bravo. Hawks equally despised this film, objecting to the Quaker wife aiding in the film’s victory. Ironic that piece, as Hawks was such a strong proponent of feisty, independent women, but only if they didn’t help save the day I guess. In fact, the two female leads in High Noon offer a neat proto-feminist element to the proceedings. Not only does the wife engineer the victory, but the former mistress offers one of the few empathetic voices to the proceedings, even encouraging the current wife to stick it out and stand by her man. It doesn’t surprise me that two good ol’ boy types objected to this work.

But it isn’t just the strong writing that marks High Noon as one of the greatest westerns, and greatest films, but the strong ensemble aids the film immeasurably, well, the strong ensemble barring one performer. Led by Gary Cooper, firmly in his element here as a strong, quiet man; High Noon is a brilliant example of movie star acting. Cooper was a western legend, but his weathered face and emotionally gaunt appearance here immediately brings a weight and presence to the drama at play. Despite it being Gary Cooper, his physically ravaged appearance carries with it the passage of time, the encroaching end of an era he represents, and there’s no guarantee he’ll make it to the end. High Noon rests nearly entirely upon his shoulders, with almost every scene containing him, and he’s up to the task. Cooper begins the film operating under his usual star persona, then he breakdowns, and finally becomes bitter and leaves the town to its own devices. It’s a wonder of a role, and Cooper brings a gravitas to it that is essential and life-giving.

Character actors like Thomas Mitchell, Lloyd Bridges, Ian MacDonald, Lee Van Cleef, Lon Chaney Jr., and Katy Jurado aid his Oscar winning leading work. Jurado and Chaney Jr. earn highest marks among the many supporting players. Jurado is a former lover and owner of the saloon. Her pragmatism and still-burning love for Cooper enliven their moments together, and Jurado gives her character a steely resolve that moves it past any notions of a stereotype. Points also go to bringing in a Mexican woman as a former love interest and not killing her off in the third act. Chaney Jr. is shockingly soulful as a former marshal, left with nothing but scorn for his previous job. The revelation that he’s arthritic is done quietly, and Chaney plays it all in a wonderful minor key.

The lone player to make a negative impression is Grace Kelly. Alfred Hitchcock accurately described her major here by calling her performance mousy and distinctly lacking in her exact star quality. Kelly is the (much younger) Quaker wife, and this film helped launch her into stardom thanks to the lovely close-ups of her delicate face. Her performance is awkward though, with that ridiculous faux-British accent in full effect and still overly mannered in delivering her lines. In two years, these issues would be sorted by Hitchcock’s guiding hand in some of her better vehicles.

But this one stilted major performance cannot undo or even hinder the rest of High Noon’s many strengths. The score by Dimitri Tiomkin is highly pleasing, successfully cranking up the tension and judiciously employed for maximum impact. There’s also the film’s title song, “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin’,” which is mournfully sung over the opening credits by Tex Ritter. There’s the tightly controlled editing by Elmo Williams and Harry W. Gerstad, transforming the clock face into a nightmarish reminder of approaching doom. Then there’s Floyd Crosby’s austere cinematography, a master class in stark images and tightly-constructed space to reflect the characters emotions and mental states. I think that’s more than enough reasons to rightly declare High Noon an immortal piece of American cinema.