Kevin Brianton
Strategic Communication Senior Lecturer, Melbourne: Australia.
The themes raised in High Noon were also picked up by those who supported the investigations. The Bounty Hunter (1954) can be read as a pro-McCarthyite film and as rebuttal of High Noon. Randolph Scott played a bounty hunter who arrived in the frontier town of Twin Peaks on the trail of three armed robbers. The townspeople resented his appearance and some with guilty secrets left town. He had no idea who the culprits were and bided his time. The townspeople want them to leave because they don’t like the past being dug up. The people then tried to buy him off but he would not be deflected from his pursuit of the criminals. The film can be read as a defence of HUAC investigators who had to burrow into the past of respectable people to uncover their dark secrets, no matter what the cost. Some of the criminals occupied high positions. One was even sheriff, but the criminals were only able to maintain their positions by blackmail and threats. By rooting out these criminal elements, true peace was attained in the town.
Director and producer Howard Hawks and actor John Wayne were disgusted by Fred Zinneman’s High Noon and the cycle it created and set out to refute it. Some of that anger can be seen in an interview with John Wayne in 1974 when asked about High Noon screenwriter Carl Foreman:
Hawks was convinced that professional law enforcement officers would refuse help, even in a desperate situation. In High Noon, Gary Cooper rejected the help of two men who offer assistance – a drunk and a kid. The retired marshal refused to help Kane because he would be a burden. In Rio Bravo, Chance chose a drunk, a kid and a retired marshal to help him against the gunfighters. For Hawks and Wayne, authority was responsible and benign. It defended the weak and attacked the guilty and the best people could do was to simply co-operate with it. It was not to be questioned or assisted, it was simply to be obeyed.[4]
What about Carl Foreman? I’ll tell you about Carl Foreman and his rotten High Noon. Everybody says High Noon is a great picture because Tiomkin and Grace Kelly were in it … It’s the most un-American thing I’ve ever seen in my life. The last thing is old Coop putting the United States marshall’s badge under his feet and stepping on it. I’ll never regret having helped run Foreman out of town … Here’s the church, supposed to be an American church and all the women are sitting on one side of the aisle, and all the men on the other. What kind of American church is that? And all those women are getting out there and fight those killers and all the men are afraid. What kind of Western town is that?[1]
Wayne was mistaken about the film, Cooper never stands on the badge. The church also has men and women sitting together on both sides. These statements indicate that Wayne may have either never seen the film or not viewed it closely. Nonetheless, having seen it or not, Wayne despised the film. Hawks, on the other hand, wasn’t as violent in his denunciation of High Noon. He said in an interview about his film:
Rio Bravo was made because I didn’t like a picture called High Noon … I didn’t think a good sheriff was going to go running around town like a chicken with his head off asking for help and finally the Quaker wife had to save him. That isn’t my idea of a good western sheriff.[2]
But Wayne and Hawks were able to have their say in the Rio Bravo (1959). In the film, John T. Chance, played by John Wayne, was the sheriff of Rio Bravo who arrested Joe, the brother of a ruthless rancher Nathan Burdette. The rancher swore that he would get his brother out of jail and began to gather an army of hired guns to do the job. In one scene Chances’ friend Pat Wheeler, played by Ward Bond, asks him if he needs help.
Suppose I got them. What would I have. Some well meaning amateurs. Most of them worried about their wives and kids. Burdette has got 30 to 40 men. All professionals. The only thing that worries them is seeing their pay … All it would be doing is making more targets to shoot at. A lot of people would get hurt. Joe Burdette isn’t worth it. He isn’t worth one of whose who’d be killed.[3]
As a refutation of High Noon and its anti-HUAC sympathies, Rio Bravo was quite weak. The film was made long after the issues raised by the HUAC investigations were gone. If it was a rebuttal at all, it was a rebuttal on the weakest terms. Its conservative message of the responsibility of authority fitted in with many films of the right. Perhaps what made this film so popular was that these authority figures demanded that no freedoms be lost while the fight was on. It was ranked 8th in the 1959 with rentals of $5.2 million.[5]
The persistence of the theme of the relationship between the lone sheriff figure, the violent thereat and townspeople in Westerns from 1952 until the end of the decade showed the relationship between authority and the people was an area of tremendous concern. The answers given in the films were not consistent and came from all points of the political spectrum. The films may not have provided the answers for the audience but their popularity showed that the questions about authority and dealing with threats were being asked.
[1] Playboy May 1974 interview by Mike Parkinson in Donald Shepherd, Robert Slatzer and Dave Grayson, Duke: The Life and Times of John Wayne, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, New York, 1983, p. 244. A careful examination of the badge throwing scene shows a second badge from an earlier take buried behind his foot. It appeared that Cooper was standing on the second badge from an earlier take. Wayne may have heard about this flaw in the film second hand which could have distorted his perception.
[2] Joseph McBride, Hawks on Hawks, University of California Press, London, 1982, p. 136.
[3] Rio Bravo, (d) Howard Hawks, 
Jules Furtham, Leigh Brackett.
[4] This point is remarkably close to the position put by Mankiewicz against DeMille about the role of authority. Adding strength to Elia Kazan’s belief that it was the conservatives that defeated DeMille, rather than the left. Elia Kazan A Life, Doubleday, New York, 1988, p. 393.
[5] Stenberg, Reel Facts, p. 22.
Cinema history 