High Noon tells, it seems, a simple tale. It is a hot Sunday morning-sometime late in the 19th century. Will Kane, the retiring marshal of the small town of Hadleyville, somewhere in western America, is marrying his Quaker bride, Amy, and leaving with her for a new life in another place. News arrives that Frank Miller, a notorious outlaw whom Kane had put away for life, has been paroled after only five years in jail and is arriving on the noon train to fulfil his threat to seek revenge. […] This apparently straightforward story is, however, not just words on the page but a complex, tense and urgent flow of moving images and sounds. It centres on a major cultural icon of the period, Gary Cooper, here summarising and revising his long history of cinematic stardom since the 1920s, and generating complex images of troubled masculinity along the way. As an audiovisual tale, it is also a conspicuously generic construct. It is a western, with all the mythic meanings of tales set in the history of the North American west, told for the pleasure of the mid-20th-century cinema audience. It is an American film, made within the realms of Hollywood cinema, and yet Hollywood cinema of a particular kind — the independent cinema of the postwar years, of Fred Zinnemann, Stanley Kramer, and Carl Foreman. As a particular kind of Hollywood text, it is marked by its relationship to the changing cinematic conditions of the early 1950s, and by the Cold War politics, which find a variety of parallels in the film’s plot and led directly to the sacrifice of its screenwriter amid the frenzied witch-hunts of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Above all, it is a film about ethics and morality, and their intersection with the social world of citizens and law and order – themes which, endearing High Noon to successive generations of the world audience, including US Presidents from Eisenhower to Clinton, draw the film out of the 1950s and project a longer and more complex vision of the cultural and ideological role of popular cinema.

Phillip Drummond, High Noon, BFI, Londra 1997