The success of the movie High Noon is due to a collaborative effort of several talented people, none of whom had ever made a Western previously. As a result High Noon is often referred to as a Western for those who don’t like Westerns.

Carl Foreman wrote a masterful script. While the opening titles claim the script is based on the story “The Tin Star” by John W. Cunningham, Foreman’s screenplay is in fact an original work. While he was developing it, someone noticed that it had a couple plot elements in common with a short story that had appeared in Collier’s Magazine, so in order to preclude a plagiarism lawsuit, they bought the rights to that story.

It was Foreman’s conception to have the movie run in real time, so he included frequent references to clocks directly in the script, which are faithfully carried out in the finished film. The script is available online at High Noon 1952.

76. INT. HELEN RAMIREZ’ SITTING ROOM.  The table has been
set, and Helen and Harvey are eating breakfast. Helen
looks at the clock. It is five minute to eleven.

By the way, in the script the marshal is named Doane, but 

It was during those first days of rehearsal that Carl and Fred discovered Katy Jurado’s English was poorer than they had thought. Among other things, she couldn’t pronounce Doane, the marshal’s last name. That’s when they decided to change it to Kane, which lent an appropriate Old Testament flavor to a story about vengeance, justice, and a community’s moral failure. They also changed the names of the two bad-guy brothers from Guy and Milt Jordan to Frank and Ben Miller.

— High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic by Glenn Frankel

The director Fred Zinnemann, an Austrian Jew whose parents were killed in the Holocaust, knew he had only a month to shoot the film on a shoestring budget, so he made meticulous notes in his shooting script. He aimed to keep the movie flowing, so he shot it so that wherever possible one scene could blend into another, such as in this early scene where the three gunmen are riding into town and there’s a cut where we see them through a window where a wedding is taking place as the camera pans back.

In addition to frequently showing the clocks, Zinnemann also cuts to the railroad tracks, the looming symbol of how Frank Miller, the convicted murderer out for revenge, is returning to town.

 

Cinematographer Floyd Crosby worked to make the film look less like a western with beautiful vistas and more like a documentary or newsreel. The stark black and white photography (by this time most Westerns were typically shot in bright color) and frequent shots of the lone marshal walking sadly through the town painted a different image of a Western hero.

With a bit more time and a somewhat higher budget, they might even have been able to erase those telephone poles in the upper left.

Film Editor Elmo Williams, who won an Oscar for Best Film Editing, took what Zinnemann and Crosby gave him and wasn’t afraid to cut out some of the fat to make the movie actually come in slightly under the real time. For example, if you check the script, in the confrontation between Amy, the marshal’s new wife, and Helen, his former lover, each of them relates a bit of her backstory. Williams cut that out, even though Zinnemann shot it. While it helped to explain their characters, it also slowed down the story and in the end, it wasn’t necessary.

Finally, composer Dimitri Tiomkin scored the film, again not like a traditional western with a huge symphonic overture to lead off, but— 

Tiomkin won two Oscars, for Best Song and Best Score.

Oh, and that was Tex Ritter singing that title song. Fun Fact: Tex Ritter was the father of John Ritter.

The fourth Oscar that the film won went to Gary Cooper, a richly deserved win.

The entire cast is excellent, from Grace Kelly in only her second appearance on screen as a Quaker bride who is firmly against all gun violence to a very young Harry Morgan as a smarmy fair weather friend of the marshal’s.

The film received excellent reviews and probably would have gone on to win Best Picture except for the campaign mounted against it by right wingers and anti-communist crusaders John Wayne and the vile Hedda Hopper; the Best Picture Oscar instead went to Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth, a circus movie.

 

 

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