Remember, click on the picture to read the balloons.
My friend HAL the Tevo Recorder recently snagged the movie “High Noon”. After watching bits and pieces of it I finished it early this morning. It is a good movie. It somehow had the style of Clint Eastwood’s Spaghetti Westerns, in that the townspeople were just plain scared of the mean guys who were about to come into town and do a lot of mean stuff, which included killing the sheriff (Gary Cooper) for sending the main mean man to prison. At 12 noon the mean guy was to arrive on the train for pay back time. The whole town was sweating it out, including Sheriff Cane and his bride of less than two hours (Grace Kelly).
It is considered a pace setter for adult westerns… or maybe even the first adult western. It was made in 1952. As the movie progresses the suspense builds.
It was the first time I saw the movie. I knew about it and had a pretty good idea of the story line from MAD comicbook #9. The top picture is illustrated by Harvey Kurtzman, the editor of MAD. It was the cover for that issue. Notice how Kurtzman signs his name, a Kurtz then a little man.
Kurtzman also wrote the lampoon in that issue poking at “High Noon” and Jack Davis illustrated it, as the not-so-random pages I picked show.
After I finished watching to movie I refreshed my memory with the MAD story. I think MAD pretty much captured the essence of the movie… one minute the Sheriff was wanting to go and another minute he wanted to stay …. It got confusing.
I always loved the lack of dialogue in spaghetti westerns. It took a long time before I figured out there were so many language barriers involved with making an American western in Italy! They sure came out great. The barrenness of them makes them wonderful.
ReplyDeleteSteve,
ReplyDeleteI think in spaghetti westerns they go along with the theory a picture is worth a thousand words, especially in the opening scene.
I took an AP US History class when I was in high school. One of the great things about it is that the teacher made us watch all sorts of movies on the American experience. "High Noon" was one of them. I liked it a lot, and know I would not otherwise have seen it. (Other goodies included "Citizen Kane," "American Graffiti," and "Inherit the Wind.")
ReplyDeleteSuzanne,
ReplyDelete"High Noon" seems to have it all: a building suspense with a clicking clock, inflated male egos beating their chests when in a crowd, but individually, cowards, and of course a dual romance.
"Citizen Kain" was good, but I haven't really broke it down, and "American Graffiti" brought back so many memories of my own - plus, it had a good beat
"Hah! Noon!" in Mad #9 (March 1954) was also the first time Kurtzman did a parody of a contemporary film. Prior to that he had done older film classics, such as Frankenstein and King Kong. After that, he did Shane (#10) and From Here to Eternity (#12).
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