Rewriting High Noon: Transformations in American Popular Political Culture During the Cold War

High Noon (1952) was a landmark artifact of American popular political culture of the high Cold War. Screenwriter Carl Foreman intended it as a commentary on Hollywood capitulation to HUAC. Director Fred Zinneman and star Gary Cooper saw it as a film about the nobility of the individual in the face of a failure of public morality. John Wayne, the film star and conservative archetype of the period declared the film Un-American. One scholar has characterized the film as catering to ideological extremists and challenging the “vital center.” The varied readings of the film, coupled with its critical and commercial success, spawned a sub-genre of politically self-conscious westerns, treating the nature of the American community, the role of the individual within it, and the responsibilities of citizenship and of power, all within a tale of the lone lawman defending a town from a gang of cut-throats. High Noon, in short, became a cinematic and ideological touchstone against which other directors sought to define their own position and visions of the proper role of the individual in American society. This paper explores three of these films: Anthony Mann’s The Tin Star (1957); Edward Dmytryk’s Warlock (1959), and Vincent McAveety’s Firecreek (1968). Setting these films in the changing historical and cultural contexts of the 16 years after the original (1952-1968) reveals transformations in American popular political culture of the Cold War. While often characterized as an age of conformity, recent historical studies have revealed the 1950s as a period of political, economic, and cultural ferment. The high cold war (1947-1963) was an era of social change, with the emergence of a post-industrial economy, the creation of planned communities, and the rise of a national security state of unprecedented power and scope of activity. Within this context of social change a new politics of group interests began to emerge including the civil rights Rewriting High Noon: Transformations in American Popular Political Culture During the Cold War