90 Minutes in Hadleyville

“High Noon” takes 85 movie minutes to tell the story of only 90 minutes in the life of Hadleyville, a town that is mostly inhabited by the usual cowards.

The movie’s action starts at 10:40 AM on a Sunday. Sheriff Will Kane (Gary Cooper) has just married Amy, a Quaker (Grace Kelly) and has just resigned as sheriff when he learns that Frank Miller is going to arrive on the noon train.

Kane had cleaned up Hadleyville, liberated it from the rule of Frank Miller’s gang of murders and otherwise undesirables. In the process he sent Frank Miller to prison for murder. Miller gets out of prison early, and comes to kill Kane.

His bride and his friends urge him to get out of town before Frank Miller arrives on the noon train, and he and his three of his gang members start hunting searching for him. But Will reasons that if he does not stay and face the released killer as Hadleyville’s sheriff – presumably with the help of a posse to be recruited – the four killers will follow him out of town anyway and kill him, and maybe Amy, trying to run away, unarmed on the prairie.

So Will Kane decides to put the star back on his vest and assemble a posse of grateful citizens to face Frank Miller and his three fellow gunmen. But one by one the citizens of Hadleyville rationalize their way out of helping Kane face the killers. Each has a superficially plausible excuse. The parson says, "the Bible says 'thou shall not kill'..." A man argues, "We've been paying for law enforcement all along and now when trouble comes, we have to deal with it ourselves?" Another says, "Ain't it true that Kane is really no longer sheriff? That all this is just personal trouble between Kane and Miller?" Another adds, "We put Miller in jail once and the politicians up north released him...I say let the politicians deal with this problem." And the town mayor, in a perfect example of an 'If By Whiskey' speech (see below) says, "...This is our problem, and we need to face it..."(but) if there is gunplay in Hadleyville it will be bad for economic development...so "Will, I think you should run while there is still time..." (The mayor says this when there is about 15 minutes left until Miller arrives on the noon train.)

The real issue in Hadleyville, besides the ordinary reluctance on the part of many people to get into a gunfight with four hard-core killers, is that the business community is divided between those who made money when the town was full of criminal vice and those who made money when things were sweet and quiet like the Chamber of Commerce would prefer. It recalls "The Godfather" system of business operations: not all business interests thrive best under a regime of garden-variety "law and order."

(In general, when reduced by extreme conditions, it seems humanity can be seen as consiting of two general classes: the rabbits and the snakes.)

In the end, of course, Gary Cooper wins, killing 75 percent of his potential killers. The critical kill - the one that evened the score and gave Kane a chance of winning the gunfight - was accomplished by Kane's Quaker wife, who shoots one of the killers in the back.