High Noon is a suspenseful western film made in 1952. It is about a man who refuses to leave town, against the advice of everyone, to face some criminal gunmen that plan on killing him. Even though he is freshly married, and a retired marshal, he feels morally obligated to protect the town he worked so hard to keep safe. It wasn't as much shooting, and fighting as we typically see in westerns. The big showdown between the ex-marshal and the gun slingers wouldn't take place until the end of the movie. Each scene was building to this climax.
High Noon was all about suspense. It was filmed in actual time. What I mean by that is for every fifteen minutes that pass in the movie it takes fifteen minutes to watch. This created suspense because you constantly could see how long until the showdown. Another technique involving time is the close-ups of the clocks at various moments in the movie. The clocks had swinging pendulums that really emphasized each passing second. They also repeated a scene of chair with a voice-over. The voice belonged to a spurned convict threatening to kill the protagonist when he gets out of jail. That criminal will be at the showdown. I think they use this scene to strike home the point that he really is in danger and it will be a fight to the death.
He is trying to recruit people to help him but he has a lot of difficulty. No one wants to get involved in this gruesome ordeal. The viewers don't know whether he'll be able to get help by the end. You also don't know if he'll leave town before it's too late (this is an option constantly brought up by his anti-violence wife). Everyone is prodding him to leave and with the lack of eager volunteers you never know if he'll leave or not.
*SPOILER* The best part of the movie is at the end after he kills the four bad guys basically on his own, he throws down his tin star. To me it was like he was saying "I've cleaned up your mess, no thanks to you. You don't deserve someone like me protecting you." I was disappointed that no one was willing to step up and do what was right.
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