WESTERNS: High Noon (1952)

Our next film should, by all rights, be one of the greatest all-time Westerns even made. Instead, it's a mealy-mouthed, boring, limp noodle of a movie that's stuck trying too hard to be a Big Deal instead of being the allegory for McCarthyism it was written to be. Fred Zinneman has shots for days, but he can't get convincing performances from his actors, and nobody in the cast can convincingly portray the real tension of this movie. Sure, it makes sense why this resonates today. But overall it's a real slog to sit through. Watch the clocks as we watch 1952's High Noon on Have a Good Movie! You can email us with feedback at [e-mail], or you can connect with us on BlueSky! If you like the podcast, please subscribe, rate and review the show on your favorite podcatcher, and tell your friends. Intro and outro music taken from the Second Movement of Ludwig von Beethoven's 9th Symphony. Licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Hong Kong (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 HK) license. To hear the full performance or get more information, visit the song page at the Internet Archive. Excerpt taken from "The Ballad of High Noon" from the film High Noon, written by Ned Washington, composed by Dimitri Tiomkin, and performed by Tex Ritter. Trademark and Copyright 2007 by Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved. Excerpt taken from the theme to the film The Magnificent Seven, written and composed by Elmer Bernstein. Copyright 1960 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayers Studios Inc. All Rights Reserved.