High Noon (1952/Lionsgate 2-Disc
Ultimate Edition/DVD-Video)
Picture:
B- Sound: B- Extras: A- Film: A-
High Noon is one of those few films that
people are familiar with even if they haven’t actually seen the film. The film has been so highly imitated in so
many other mediums including TV shows, comics, commercials, cartoons, you name
it – its been done. And of course the
question that always follows that is, what makes Fred Zinnemann’s 1952 film so
memorable? There probably isn’t a right
or wrong answer to that, but I can certainly tell you that it’s a combination
of all the right things coming together.
The first is the casting, which pairs a middle aged Gary Cooper in one
of his finest roles and with him is Grace Kelly, who always stole the screen,
but their chemistry in this film is definitely one of the factors that make
this film work so well.
Not only
is the film well-cast, but it’s direction is superb as the story never really
loses any momentum and at every second of the film there is something that is
happening that is important in some way or another. Very few films are this tight and that type
of filmmaking is not only hard to accomplish, but nearly impossible with
certain scripts. This is virtuoso
filmmaking at its best and perhaps one of Zinnemann’s finest films. It’s certainly one of the greatest Westerns
of it’s time and remains one of the more important Black & White Westerns
to come out in the 1950’s.
There has
been so much said about this film that it’s becoming harder to find new ways to
talk about it, but even 50+ years after its release it’s hard to think of
cinematic history without this gem.
Hopefully they won’t try and re-make it!
Cooper would even live another decade after the films release and this
is one of his finest films of his late career.
Kelly would only do a few films as well before ending her career long
before she had to, but would work with Hitchcock on several classics before an
early retirement. The film also stars a
young Lloyd Bridges as well as Lon Chaney Jr. and other good supporting cast
members.
The story
centers around the famous standoff scene, which happens of course at noon, but
the buildup to that is what most people forget.
Cooper plays an aging Marshal who is in many ways opposite to his very
conservative wife (Kelly). She is of the
faith that killing is wrong, where the Marshal realizes that killing is part of
the business and that must all come to the surface as a killer breaks free and
is en route to their peaceful town. As I
mentioned earlier there are no wasted scenes and as the tension builds, so do
the layers of each scene as we approach the climax, which in many ways is
open-ended in its deliberation.
Having
owned the previous Artisan DVD release of the film I was well-aware of both the
strong points and problems with that transfer and used it as a reference point
for this review as I did some thorough A/B comparisons. Using three key scenes I toggled back and
forth and noticed immediately that the Artisan release was significantly
brighter and appeared to have a boosted amount of white, which I suspect was an
attempt to flush out some of the poor detail.
Lionsgate
has issued a much superior DVD though in picture with the 1.33 X 1 full-frame
B&W image looking much sharper with a more refined sense of grayscale with
no apparent boosting of whites or blacks.
The dark moments are appropriately so and there does not appear to be
any smudging or excessive grain. Overall
the print looks stunningly clean and with lots of depth for a film of this age,
which only indicates to me that this print must have been in good condition to
begin with.
I could
not detect any difference in the 2 audio tracks that are provided, which appear
to be the same from the previous DVD issue, which includes both a Dolby Digital
1.0 mono mix as well as an enhanced Dolby Digital 3.1 configuration, which
enables a front soundstage to exist with a .1 LFE channel for the low
frequencies, which are not frequent at all, but does enable those who might
have smaller speakers to have the sub take the bulk of the low end. One thing that does seem to be corrected with
this new issue is a few moments of out-of-sync that did appear on the Artisan
release and was one of the factors that always plagued that DVD, which is now a
non-issue with this release. YEAH!
Extras at
first glace appear identical, however, the Lionsgate issue, but the same extras
are recycled here from the previous release AND there are new supplements as
well, which combined with the superior picture and in-sync sound makes this
issue put the all previous version to shame and should be officially
defunct. One can only hope that a
Blu-ray HD 1080p transfer is in the works for this film!
- Nate Goss
