The Women of "High Noon": A Revisionist View

Author(s): Don Graham

Source: Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Autumn, 1980),
pp. 243-251
Published by: Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1347397
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 THE WOMEN OF HIGH NOON: A REVISIONIST
VIEW

by Don Graham*

"My family didn't want me to marry Will in the first pla

seem to make them unhappy no matter what I do. Back
they think I'm very strange. I'm a feminist. You kn
women's rights-things like that. .."
Amy Fowler Kane in the screenplay High No

Traditionally Western movies have not granted women ch

ters much strength, respect, or importance except as they se
support the stronger male roles. Indeed, one critic, Philip F
has reduced the role of women in Westerns to a pair of stereo
"In the model, traditional Western there is the unsullied pio
heroine: virtuous wife, rancher's virginal daughter, schooltea
etc.; on the other hand there is the saloon girl with her entourag
dancers."2 Until recently, Western movies that departed from
ironclad stereotypes were more notable for their eccentricit
than for their artistry.3 The Oxbow Incident (1943), a quite in
film, is, from the viewpoint of women's roles, a misogynic w
the.first order. The saloon girl, Rose Mapen, is a disloyal an
gerous flirt, which does not surprise us, but what does is that
is no counterbalancing image of woman in the film. Jenny
known as Ma, is a travesty of a transvestite, eager to ride with m
hungry to lynch the innocent. Two more intelligent works, F
Guns (1957) and Johnny Guitar (1953), are special cases, f
directed by idiosyncratic auteurs, Samuel Fuller and Nichola
Though their women characters are indeed interesting, being
like and powerful to the fullest degree, yet in the end each h
must yield her whip or gun to the brave manliness of the film's

*DON GRAHAM, Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas, A

is the author of The Fiction of Frank Norris: The Aesthetic Context (Univers
Missouri Press, 1978); co-editor, with William T. Pilkington, of Western M
(University of New Mexico Press, 1979); and editor of Critical Essays on Frank
(G. K. Hall, 1980).

1. Carl Foreman, High Noon in Three Major Screenplays, eds. Marvin

and Michael Werner (New York: Globe Book Company, 1972), p. 242. Hereaf
quotations from High Noon are from this text; pagination will be cited paren
cally in the essay.
2. Westerns: Aspects of a Movie Genre (New York: The Viking Press, 19
62.

3. In post-Sixties Westerns there have been glimmerings of attempts to re-

define the function of women in this male-dominated genre. Comes a Horseman
(1978), The Missouri Breaks (1976), Going South (1979), and somewhat earlier, The
Hired Hand (1971), should be cited among such efforts.

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Don Graham

protagonist. None of these films attains either the artistry

conviction of another Western made during the same era,
Noon (1952). Much celebrated at the time of its release-and
condemned by later critics-High Noon represents a notable
advance in the portrayal of women in Westerns.4 Working firmly
within generic patterns, High Noon offers some vital and original
innovations upon the familiar archetypes. The result is a work that
brings new strength and integrity to the hackneyed presentation of
women in Western.
A glance at the immediate literary source for High Noon sh
how the movie changes the masculine emphasis of John M. C
ningham's pulp formula story, "The Tin Star."5 In Cunningh
story, there is only one woman character, Cecilia Doane, wife o
main character, Sheriff Doane. But, because the wife is dead, her
only "appearance" in the story occurs in a scene at her graveside
where the aging, arthritic sheriff goes to pay his respects. The rest
of Cunningham's story also differs greatly from the version given
us by scriptwriter Carl Foreman and director Fred Zimmerman.
Cunningham's story is about professionalism, with the main
emphasis falling on the old sheriff and his young deputy Toby. Here
the sheriff is not deserted; indeed, Toby comes to accept the same
idealistic definition of a lawman's vocation as the sheriff: a man
does a difficult, dangerous job for himself and not for mater
social rewards. To clinch the lesson for the deputy, the old sh
takes a death-dealing bullet in the back to save Toby from the
outlaw's gun. Toby then finishes off the outlaw and the story ends.6
Obviously High Noon is a radical revision of Cunningham's
work. It displaces Cunningham's professionalism with social com-
mentary directed at the hypocrisy and weakness of the general
populace of Hadleyville, a name that does not appear in the story.7

4. Criticism of High Noon has usually focussed on the allegorical and political
implications of the man-alone theme. For a review of criticism plus commentary on
other aspects of the film, see my "High Noon" in Western Movies, eds. William T.
Pilkington and Don Graham (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1979),
pp. 51-61.
5. "The Tin Star" is reprinted in The Western Story: Fact, Fiction, and Myth,
eds. Philip Durham and Everett L. Jones (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1975), pp. 209-222.
6. The character Toby is preserved in the screenplay but not in the film. In the
screenplay Toby, away on business, is returning to Hadleyville by horseback but is
delayed in route and does not arrive in time. The two scenes depicting his character
were devised, Foreman has said, for purposes of suspense and as insurance in case
the film with its emphasis on one setting, seemed to be too "claustrophobic." The
film seems to benefit from the exclusion of the two scenes, however. See Carl
Foreman, "Dialogue on Film," American Film, IV (April 1979), 38-39.
7. For a discussion of possible connections between Foreman's Hadleyville and
Mark Twain's Hadleyburg, see "High Noon," Western Movies, pp. 55-56.

244 VOL. 34, NO. 4 (FALL 1980)

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 The Women of High Noon

But perhaps the greatest difference between the two works is the
expanded presence of women in the film. By enlarging the part
women play, High Noon draws upon genre elements more familiar
from movies than from pulp Westerns. At the simplest level, the
dead wife in Cunningham is transformed into the youthful bride in
High Noon, Amy Fowler Kane (Grace Kelly). To counterpoint that
role, another woman character is imported from the genre store-
house of archetypal images. This is the Mexican woman, Helen
Ramirez (Katy Jurado). But it is only on the surface that High Noon
seems to conform to the genre stereotypes of white maiden-
schoolmarm and dark experienced saloon girl.
To see how High Noon resuscitates moribund types requires a
brief review of some previous instances of the light-dark woman
contrast in Western movies. As has been noted by several
observers, High Noon consciously evokes and revises The Virginian
of 1929, where a young, gangly Gary Cooper has a final showdown
with the villain Trampas while his Eastern bride-to-be waits shud-
dering in her hotel room. The similarity between this ending and
High Noon's is apparent. Less memorable, perhaps, is the saloon
girl in The Virginian. An obvious tart, she appears in an early scene
where she is the object of the first rivalry between Trampas and the
Virginian. Over her body as it were, is spoken the famous line
"When you call me that ["son of a ----"], smile," which is delivered
over a poker game in Wister's novel. Though the opposition
between lady and saloon girl is present in the film, it is not deve-
loped in any meaningful way.
The pattern appears fullblown in a John Ford Western, My
Darling Clementine (1946). In this film the Mexican saloon girl,
Chihuahua, is in love with the doomed Doc Holliday, but flirts
outrageously with other men, including Wyatt Earp. Her affair
with Ike Clanton precipitates the resolution of every plot strand,
from her death to the defeat of the Clantons. Cloying, lascivious,
utterly dependent upon her sexuality for whatever regard she can
find in the world of men, Chihuahua is set off in bold relief by her
angelic opposite, Clementine Carter a young woman from the East
who has come to Tombstone to join Doc Holliday, to whom she is
engaged to be married. Demure, chaste, and genteel, Clementine is
standard-issue schoolmarm material, a model of the type that, if we
believe Hollywood and Owen Wister, was New England's leading
export to the West in the post-Civil War years.
While Chihuahua seems now to be an acutely embarrassing
version of the stereotype, her counterpoint in High Noon, Helen
Ramirez, conforms in only one respect to genre expectations. Sexu-
ally, Helen is Chihuahua's sister to the extent that she is expe-
rienced. Helen has been the successive mistress of three men:

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Don Graham

Frank Miller, the outlaw; Will Kane, the marshal; and Harv
the deputy. This gives her special, intimate knowledge th
actions in the film exemplify: Miller is a psychotic sadist,
gentle and manly, and Harv is a boy with "big wide shoulde
still a boy (pp. 211-212). None of these men has been willing to
her, and in the case of Will Kane it is not clear why their r
ship came to an end. They both still care about each other
much is certain. She fears Will's death; he wants her to leave town
before Frank Miller returns: "You know how he is," Will reminds
her (p. 193).
In other respects, though, the differences between Chihuahua
and Helen Ramirez are most emphatic. Helen displays a precise
understanding of her relationship with the community: "I hate this
town. I've always hated it. To be a Mexican woman in a town like
this.. ." (p. 242). Yet Helen has not let her inferior position ruin her
life. On the contrary, she has derived pleasure from a covert van-
tage point of power: "I bought the biggest store in town. I hired a big
citizen to run it for me. Nobody knew that either. Big citizens do
many things for money... And all the fine ladies, who never saw me
when they passed me on the street, they paid me their money and
they never knew.. ." (p. 242). Clearly Helen has achieved a revenge,
even if private, by gaining economic advantages against a society
bent on using and scorning her.
Helen's economic status explains several aspects of her charac-
ter. She leaves Hadleyville primarily for economic reasons; with
Will Kane dead, as she believes will be the case, the town will die.
She says of herself, a single woman: "I'm all alone in the world. I
have to make a living. So-I'm going somewhere else" (p. 212).
Helen's economic power is evident in her relationship with two
older men. One is something like her personal agent; she sends him
on a couple of errands, and he seems to have as his main function
the job of carrying out her business interests. The other man is a
respectable businessman; in fact, he is summoned from church to
hear what Helen has to say. He is the front man who operates the
other business, the store, apparently under his name. Helen sells
him her share at a fair price, and he clumsily praises her for being a
fair and capable business woman.
This triangular relationship between Helen and two men is but
one of a number of such configurations in the film. Indeed, we are
always aware of Helen in relation to two others. Besides the one
noted above, there are the following triangles: Helen, Frank Miller,
Will Kane; Helen, Harvey Pell, Will Kane; Helen, Amy Kane, and
Will Kane. It is probably no accident that her hotel room number is
three.
Helen's relation to Amy Kane bears special notice because it is

246 VOL. 34, NO. 4 (FALL 1980)

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 The Women of High Noon

through the dynamics of their encounter that the eventual course

of Amy's actions is predicated. Curious about the terms of Helen's
former relationship with Will Kane, Amy goes to Helen's room
where Helen tells her, as she has earlier told Harvey Pell, that there
is no longer anything between herself and Kane. But she also tells
Amy what she would do if Kane were her man: "I'd never leave
here. I'd get a gun-I'd fight" (p. 243). No character in the film,
excepting Will Kane, possesses as much knowledge or as much
integrity as Helen Ramirez. A woman who has been misused at the
hands of men, she has developed into a strong resilient person of
great dignity.
Helen's opposite, Amy Fowler Kane, is an obvious incarnation
of the Eastern-virgin archetype that we have seen in Clementine of
Ford's film and Molly of The Virginian. Like them, she is fair,
genteel, and well-spoken. She also embodies some standard ideas
that charcterize young brides from the East. She opposes her hus-
band's profession and has already, when the film open, persuaded
him to give up his job as lawman and move to another town to work
in a store. Like Molly, like dozens of other schoolmarm types from
the East, Amy abhors violence and insists that her husband avoid
killing at any cost. A pacifist, indeed a Quaker, Amy, until the last
few minutes of the film, argues for and acts upon nonviolent
premises. But however much Amy may sound like Molly in arguing
against violence, her reasons are based not upon abstract principle
or a desiccated gentility. For as she tells Helen Ramirez, she has
heard the sounds of guns: "My father and my brother were killed by
guns. They were on the right side, but it didn't help them when the
shooting started-my brother was nineteen. I watched him die...
That's when I became a Quaker-because every other religion said
it was all right for people to kill each other at least once in a while"
(p. 230). Thus Amy's pacifism and her religion are grounded in
personal experience. In the case of Molly and other conventional
Eastern stereotypes, the argument against violence is usually ethi-
cal but not based upon such searing actuality. We discover a new
respect for Amy's beliefs when we see their source.
Just as Helen Ramirez transcends the limitations of her genre
role, so does Amy. She listens hard to Helen's conviction about what
a woman ought to do to help her husband, and after driving to the
railroad depot with Helen and boarding the train, she gets off
immediately upon hearing the first shot in the gunfight between
Will Kane and Frank Miller's gang, and rushes back to town. There
she encounters a dead member of the gang, Ben Miller, the first one
slain. Then she enters the marshal's office from where, as the fight
swirls about the streets, she shoots at point-blank range another

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Don Graham

of mankind living together. The nature of this relationship is per-

ceived by some as " ... un cambio mutuo de servicios reciprocos."'15
Larra, quick to correct this mistaken view, offers us his, while
rectifying the first definition. "i Grave error!; es todo lo contrario:
nadie concurre a la reunion para prestarle servicios, sino para
recibirlos de ella. Es un fondo comun donde acuden todos a sacar, y
donde nadie deja . ..16
While the above definition is broad and abstract, the context in
which its defects are shown is narrow and quite specific, namely
that of the society of early nineteenth-century middle-class Mad-
rid. However, as Larra seems to imply, if the institution of society is
severely and characteristically defective then so are all of its parts,
be they the upper, middle, or lower facets. Figaro exposes the
flawed nature of this specific example of society through an anec-
dote which features the narrator and his young cousin who pass
first through illusion and then disillusion in respect to society. This
young man with money in his pocket and enjoying the protection of
his older relative feels that society is utterly delightful: "Es encan-
tadora-medigo-lasociedad. i Que alegria! iQue generosidad!"17
The two separate, four years pass, and they meet by chance on
the streets of Madrid. This time the young cousin projects a differ-
ent view. It seems that time has taught him what his older and
wiser relative did not, namely the great difference that separates
appearance from reality. What the young cousin reveals to his
former protector and to the reader is a litany of hypocritical behav-
ior, some examples of which are the defaming of an outgoing,
attractive, but virtuous young lady because of her unwillingness to
compromise her principles by the young men who vie for her
affections, and the praise garnered by the woman who gives the
appearance of modesty but is in reality quite the opposite.18
The article ends with the narrator turning to the reader and
reiterating that only by heeding the perceptive individual who has
profited by the lessons learned in his dealings with society can one
clearly understand its defective nature and take the proper steps to
better it.
"El castellano viejo" is particularly noteworthy because it
uncovers the flaw inherent in the manner in which certain middle
class Spaniards view themselves. This article begins when the nar-
rator reveals that he is a creature of habit and as such does not relish
the idea of changing his daily schedule, unless it is done in the name
of courtesy and in response to certain kinds of social invitations: ...

15. Ibid., p. 72.

16. Ibid., p. 187.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., p. 189.

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 The Women of High Noon

outlaw, Pierce, who is busy loading his guns. This action cuts the
odds to one on one, Frank Miller versus Will Kane.
The remarkable thing about her action is the visual impact
made by her dress. For Amy here, as throughout the film, is dressed
in her white bridal gown. It is hard to recall a more stunning
reversal of the traditional imagery of women's clothing in West-
erns. Typically, the woman who commits herself to manly acts
whether it's riding a horse well or firing a gun, dons male attire to
carry out the act. For example Calamity Jane in Cecil B. DeMille's
The Plainsman (1940) wears male clothes virtually all the time, and
is not taken seriously when she tries to dress like a proper lady.
Another example, in broad parody, is Caroline, Jack Crabb's sister
in Little Big Man (1970), who carries the masculine-clothes motif to
absurd lengths. In Westerns we expect to see women who are
dressed like ladies behave that way, and the women who dress
mannishly are usually shown to be confused about their sexual
identity in some fundamental way.
Amy's clothing is further bound up in an intricate pattern of
imagery that underlies the final violent scenes of the film. After
shooting the outlaw in the back, she is seized by Frank Miller, who
takes her into the street, using her as a shield and a decoy to draw
out Will Kane. But Amy's resourcefulness and bravery save her
and her husband's life; she rakes her fingernails down the side of
Frank Miller's face, thereby freeing herself and exposing him to
Will's aim. This moment, with the raked face, is very interesting in
light of the film's opening. There, a lone rider (Lee Van Cleef) is
silhouetted against the horizon, his guns hung at a sharp angle from
his thighs. When we see him from the side, in silhouette, his face
bears three striations, three claw marks. These two scarred faces
-one at the beginning, one at the end-frame the threat that Frank
Miller and his gang pose to the women of the town. To return to
Amy's clothing: it is here that the pattern receives its violent
climax. As the four members of the gang walk down the street to
find the marshal, one, the weakest, Ben Miller (Sheb Woolley),
smashes a storefront window and plucks from the display of lady's
millinery a fancy bonnet which he tucks into his belt like a trophy, a
scalp. Earlier, this same outlaw had made a leering remark about
Amy Kane, when she arrived at the station to buy a ticket to leave
town. The only article of Amy's formal and pristine attire that is
disturbed during the action is her bonnet, which she leaves on the
train in her hurry to return to town. Clearly, the breaking of the
glass is suggestive, as is the promise of rape and oppression symbol-
ized by the stolen bonnet. Further, Ben Miller, whose rash act alerts
the marshal and leads to Ben's being the first to die, is a double for
the other most fully drawn weak man in the movie, the deputy

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Don Graham

Harvey Pell (Lloyd Bridges). Like Pell, Ben Miller swaggers, dr

too much, and fancies himself a stud around women. Finally,
sidering the care with which details are handled in this movie,
think it is reasonable to infer that the store that is broken into is the
very store in which Helen Ramirez owned a silent interest.
The pattern of implicit threat to women exhibited in the most
minor details surrounding the presentation of the Miller gang is
corroborated.by other details involving the role of women in the
movie. A few examples will show what I mean. As the three
members of the gang ride into town in the opening minutes of the
film, several townspeople react nervously or portentously to their
arrival. One is a Mexican woman who crosses herself. Her gesture
conveys a stronger sense of impending evil than is evident in any of
the other preliminary reactions to the gang's arrival. Another tell-
ing reference to women occurs in the cynical farewell speech made
by the judge who performed the marriage ceremony for his friend
Will Kane. Five years ago he had sentenced Frank Miller to prison.
Now, in a hurry to leave town before Miller arrives, the judge says
he doesn't have time for a "lesson in civics," and then recounts how
he. once fled from another town when trouble was closing in on him:
"I escaped death only through the intercession of a lady of some-
what dubious reputation, and at the cost of a handsome ring that
once belonged to my mother. .. Unfortunately, I have no more
rings. .." (p. 175). Another example involving male cowardice at a
woman's expense occurs when Will Kane seeks help from a friend,
Sam Fuller. While Will asks Fuller's wife where her husband is,
Fuller hides inside the house. Deeply shamed, his wife has to lie,
saying that her husband is at church.
The sum of such references to women reinforces the picture of
a town terribly demoralized by the failures of the male members of
the community. Interestingly, the only negative impression of
women is created in the one scene in which women are represented
as members of a group. This is the scene at the church, where Will
makes a simple, moving appeal for help and is met by a chorus of
voices, both female and male, that signify a dispirited body politic.
Here, en masse, the women appear to be just as self-interested,
expedient, and compromising as their male counterparts. But
taken as a whole, the film indicts men, not women, except when
they participate in public forums where the political structure,
dominated by men, is shown to express the community's corrupt
values.8

8. For an excellent discussion of the political implications underlying many

Western films, see Frank McConnell, "Warlock and the Western" in The Spoken
Seen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), pp. 146-161.

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 The Women of High Noon

High Noon ends as many Westerns do, with hero and heroine,
gunfighter and schoolmarm, united. But for once, we are not left
with the image of a superior male hero and a beautiful but genteely
supportive female. Amy Kane's strength impresses us as much as
her beauty. Having endured the violent assault upon her husband
from hardened gunmen, she now is ready to reject, with him, the
town's hypocrisy, its chorus of praise that neither she nor her
husband will stay one second to hear.
Implicit in my discussion of the strength of the principal
women characters in High Noon is the notion that, as far as the
genre could conceivably admit, both Helen and Amy Kane are
protofeminists.9 This hunch is borne out to a surprising degree, I
think, by a passage contained in the screenplay but not in the film
itself. Amy Kane is talking to Helen Ramirez, explaining herself
and her past, and this is what she says:

My family didn't want me to marry Will in the first place... I

seem to make then unhappy no matter what I do. Back home
they think I'm strange. I'm a feminist. You know, women's
right-things like that. . . (p. 242)

It is easy to understand why such a passage, in 1952, was not

included in the film; surely the effect would be to make Amy seem
too doctrinaire, too stern; surely such a statement would diminish
the audience's sympathy for Amy's character and beliefs. Still, it is
a remarkable passage, and a sure clue, it seems to me, of the film's
implicit intentions in its portrayal of women.

9. Feminist-oriented criticism of High Noon takes a completely different view

of the film. For example, Joan Mellen's Big Bad Wolves: Masculinity In The Ameri-
can Film (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971), examines High Noon in a tradition of
macho individualism and faults the movie for its reversion "to the most conserva-
tive, traditional, and damaging norms of male behavior" (p. 228). Not surprisingly
she also deplores the corresponding treatment of women, calling Amy Kane "pas-
sive, cloying," and "weak and stupid" (p. 204-209). Similarly, Marjorie Rosen, in
Popcorn Venus (New York: Avon, 1973), finds Grace Kelly one of many American
film heroines who are "patient, sniveling, and passively loving appendages support-
ing their heroes" (p. 265). But as I have tried to show, from both a generic and critica
perspective, High Noon is bolder and less reactionary than such views will allow

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