The PANY Bulletin

Psychoanalytic Association of New York
Volume 39, Number 3 Fall 2001

Film Review

High Noon:
Terror in a Western Town,
or Gunfight at the Introitus
by Herbert H. Stein, M.D.

I wrote this before September 11. At this point, the idea of a town under threat from psychopathic killers is almost too close to our real fears to focus on other levels of meaning. High Noon is a film about coping with dangerous bullies, about terror and its effect upon a community. Its pertinence to our current situation is one example of its universal appeal. The outer dangers change in form from generation to generation, while the inner dangers with which they reverberate are more constant.

I must begin by thanking the members of the New York Chapter of the Forum for the Psychoanalytic Study of Film, led by Dr. Bertram Rosen, and particularly those who participated in the discussion of - about two years ago. The writing is mine, but the ideas grew out of that discussion. As anyone who has ever been involved in such a free floating discussion knows, it is impossible to sort out the origin of each idea.

High Noon was released in 1952. Along with Shane, it was heralded as a mature, psychological western. It won awards at the time and quickly became established as a "classic." Most readers have probably seen it, but not in many years. For me, it has held up very well.
The story is about a small town marshall, Wil Kane, who discovers on the morning of his wedding day, as he is about to retire and leave town, that a vicious killer, Frank Miller, has been pardoned and is returning to town on the noon train to exact vengeance on the marshall who arrested him. At first, Wil heads out of town with his new bride as originally planned, urged on by his friends, but he turns back to face Miller and his three cronies. They wait for Miller at the train station while Wil tries to recruit deputies to help him. As he goes through the town, he gets no takers. Most turn him down out of cowardice and practicality. They argue that Frank Miller's only interest is Kane, so that it is in their best interest and Kane's if he would leave. Kane's deputy, Harvey, backs out because he feels slighted that he was not chosen to replace Kane as marshall. The only ones to offer help are an elderly drunk and a boy.

Kane's bride, Amy, became a Quaker after her brother and father were killed in a gunfight. She wants no part of more violence and waits at the hotel near the train station, ready to leave on that same noon train while the film's recurrent theme song keeps wailing, "Do not forsake me, oh, my darling, on this our wedding day."

The story has been generally understood as a psychologically minded tale of a man who has the courage of his convictions. He will not accept somewhat reasonable rationalizations to skirt what he sees as his responsibility, and he knows that running, once begun, can never stop. He is afraid, but knows he must face his fear. One of the powers of the film is that we can easily identify with the fear that Kane and the townspeople fear. The gunmen waiting at the train station look frightening. There are few of us who would not be very tempted to accept the rationalizations to avoid this fight, and at some level we know it.

The film appeals to the tensions of anyone who has ever had to deal with a bully. We learn with experience that the advice to face up to the bully is not always wise, nor is the commonsense urge to run. We are currently well aware of that dilemma. There is no easy and obvious solution, unless you're living in a western movie. Nevertheless, movies like High Noon give us heart and allow us to vicariously stand up to that bully.

I had presumed that this film of courage and cowardice in the face of a gang of bullies must have had a special meaning at the beginning of the McCarthy era, a time when men and women were forced to risk their careers if not their lives, often having to stand alone in front of the House UnAmericans Activities Committee or McCarthy's committee. I became convinced of that when I learned that the film's screenwriter, Carl Foreman, was blacklisted in 1952, the same year that High Noon was released. The context gives added meaning to the cowardly rationalizations of the townspeople as they hide from Wil or argue openly that both he and they would be better off if Wil would just leave town. The one man who is willing to support Kane backs off when he realizes they are alone. The political undertones can also be seen in the character of Helen Ramirez, a proud and somewhat noble figure who must accept her role on the outskirts of society because she is Mexican. But, we've had politics plenty in the last few months. Now, let's look at the film as a fantasy, for a fantasy it is.

The film begins by showing us the faces of evil and good, of outlaw and community. With Tex Ritter singing the theme song in the background, we see a meeting of three gunmen. They look mean, ornery and purposeful, not saying a word to each other as they ride into town. There, people react with fear to the sight of them. One gypsy-looking woman crosses herself. The attendant at the train station treats them with a respect born of obvious fear as they unsmilingly ask him if the noon train is on time. This is the face of terror.

It is in contrast to a scene of warmth, friendship and community as Wil Kane is married to Amy. Here there are smiles, laughter and kisses. Wil Kane is giving up his badge and gun to enter a life of gentle domesticity with his new young bride. When word comes that Frank Miller has been pardoned and his three "gunnies" waiting for the noon train, the mood suddenly changes and Wil is whisked out of town by his friends.

The contrast is one which is particularly familiar to us now-quiet civilian life built around friends, family and social structure suddenly challenged by the threat of violence. Wil is barely out of town when he realizes that he must go back to face the threat against his wife's pleas. He explains his reasons over time. He feels a sense of responsibility. The new marshall won't be arriving until the next day. He also feels that if he runs now he will have to run for the rest of his life. "What's a hundred miles? They'd come after us. We'd never be able to keep that store, Amy. They'd come after us and we'd have to run again, as long as we live." We have all known the fear of a confrontation, the conflicting urges to flee and stay.

A patient described by Arlow (1959, 1969) similarly had to face a man who could hurt him.

"'I went to see Ms. X, the secretary, at the University. ... This time I got the word. "The financial officer wants to see you." I had sent a letter of complaint regarding a delay in getting paid. Now, two weeks later I was told, "Mr. P. Wants to see you about the letter." I had the thought, 'I'll be punished.' I felt scared.'" (Arlow, 1959 p. 616)

As he waited in the outer office, he betrayed the urge to flee with his gaze:

"'Suddenly, I looked out the window at the fields and the surrounding landscape.'"

But the film's theme song, sung repeatedly by a Greek Chorus consisting of Tex Ritter, warns us that there is something Kane fears more than Frank Miller. "Do not forsake me, oh, my darling, on this our wedding day... I'm not afraid of death, but, oh, what will I do if you leave me?"

Amy is a Quaker. Her father and brother were killed defending what was right. Now, she is against all violence. She cannot understand why her husband would stay to fight and decides that if he will she cannot stay with him. She cannot tolerate a violent image of her husband and will not allow herself to be re-traumatized with another violent death of a loved one. She leaves Wil with the intention of taking the noon train out of town. Her abandonment of her new husband is particularly painful as he prepares to face his deadly enemy.

Arlow's patient was also facing a conflict concerning a woman:

"The patient at this time was engaged to an attractive young woman of his own faith and found himself in a serious conflict over whether to have intercourse with her." (1959, page 615-616)

Wil Kane is not engaged, but married; yet, is he conflicted over whether to have intercourse with his bride? The answer is not spelled out in words, but in the subtle communications through which films give us seemingly intuitive understanding.

Amy Kane is an innocent. One of the first things that we notice about her is that she is much younger than her husband. We are not even sure, at first, if this difference is intended or merely an artifact of casting that is meant to be overlooked. But, Wil is not merely older looking, he is more experienced than Amy in the ways of the world.

We get a full sense of this difference in a scene that takes place in the hotel lobby near the train station. Wil enters the lobby and sees Amy there. At first, he thinks she has changed her mind about leaving, but, in fact, she has merely gone there to avoid the leers of the three gunmen waiting for Frank Miller at the train station. The third party to this scene is the smarmy hotel clerk who plays Mephistopheles to Amy's innocence. The hotel clerk liked the business and excitement that Frank Miller's gang brought to the town and is eager to see the marshall get his "come-uppance."

Wil has come to the hotel to look for Helen Ramirez to warn her that Frank Miller is coming into town. He asks if Helen Ramirez is in and starts up the stairs after being told she is. With dripping sarcasm, the clerk asks him, "Think you can find it all right?" The comment is meant as much for Amy as for Wil, and Wil looks back at Amy as he continues up the stairs.

After Kane leaves the hotel, Amy approaches the hotel clerk.

"Who is Miss Ramirez?"

"Mrs. Ramirez? She used to be a friend of your husband's a while back. Before that she was a friend of Frank Miller's."

Wil Kane is a sexually experienced man entering a relationship with a woman who looks virginal, in contrast to Kane's previous girlfriend. Helen Ramirez is presented to us as a brave, intelligent, strong and very sophisticated woman. She is condemned to being a partial outcast in this society because she is Mexican. She uses a store owner as a front for her business interests. In this role, half in and half out of society, she can more comfortably play the part of the sexually knowledgeable woman, the former lover not only of Kane, but also of Frank Miller in contrast to the young, naive Amy in this 50's parable.

Arlow's patient does not describe a former lover, but there is another woman in the vignette, with whom he is less conflicted about his sexuality:

"'I went to Mr. P's office and saw Miss X, his secretary. I've had lots of sexual thoughts about her. I'd often watch her walk down the halls and would have the thought, I'd like to climb into bed with her.'" (1959, p. 616)

In this context, Amy Kane's fear and abhorrence of violence takes on an additional, sexual meaning. It is subtly suggested to us when Frank Miller's younger brother, Ben, leers at Amy at the train station. We are given a hint of sexual danger to come. Ben says to the other two gunmen, "Hey, that wasn't here five years ago." One of them answers with a surly, "So what?," to which Ben replies, "Nothing, yet."

On the surface, Kane's confrontation with Frank Miller has nothing to do with sex, and yet it does. When Kane goes to warn Helen Ramirez, she greets him with hostility, although we have seen her admiring him in front of others, particularly her young jealous lover, Harvey, the former deputy. When Helen sees Kane enter her room, she stares at him, then snaps,

"What are you looking at? You think I have changed? Well what do you want? You want me to help you? You want me to ask Frank to let you go? You want me to beg for you" Well, I would not do it. I would not lift a finger for you."

Hell hath no greater fury than a woman scorned. Clearly, Kane left her.

He explains that he came to warn her that Frank Miller was coming:

"I think you oughta get out of town. I might not be able to ... Well, anything can happen."

"I'm not afraid of him," she answers.

"I know you're not, but you, you know how he is."

"I know how he is. Maybe he doesn't know."

"He's probably got letters."

Without saying anything explicitly, the film has planted in us the seed of an idea that Frank Miller's hatred of Kane goes beyond the arrest. There is a sexual rivalry. Kane has slept with Miller's woman after sending Miller to jail.

It is in the context of that sexual rivalry, not quite fully in our awareness, that we wait for the noon train. For me, one of the most fascinating aspects of High Noon is that it occurs, roughly, in real time, heightening our sense of approaching the conflict. If you start the film at around 10:30 (on a Sunday morning if you really want to be precise) you can look at your own clock to see how close it is until the arrival of the noon train. The film periodically focuses on a clock to let us know just how much time Wil Kane has to gather his deputies, leave town, or face Frank Miller and his gang alone.

With Wil Kane, we follow the morning's events with intense awareness of time and the approaching noon train which the stationmaster repeatedly assures us should be right on time. In our film study group, someone wisely raised the issue of the meaning and significance of that train. It certainly focuses us on the issue of time and the inevitability of that confrontation as it approaches with Mussolinian ruthlessness. In that sense, it gives us a sense of death and all the other inevitabilities that we know we will one day have to face. It is a deadline.

But the train also has another meaning, another inevitable collision, in the language of our unconscious fantasies. A train is a powerful, heavy machine that carries enormous momentum as it speeds towards its destination. Children, particularly boys, are drawn to the phallic image of trains speeding through tunnels, down tracks towards their inevitable destinations. This train will penetrate the town and bring with it seemingly unbridled violence when it plants its evil seed in the form of Frank Miller.

The phallic image of the train approaching the town to deposit it's violent passenger creates a complementary image in the town, which becomes a passive female receptacle ready to be violated. There stands Wil Kane, forced to do battle with the frightening intruder. This brings us back to Arlow's patient.

"As the conflict over whether to have intercourse with his fiancee was becoming more intense," (p.619) the patient's associations linked thinking about having intercourse with her with dreams of snakes attacking him from a woman's vagina and thoughts of crashing his car into another in a tunnel and having fistfights with a man, there.
"Let us compare the objective situation [in the waiting room outside the treaurer's office] with the patient's unconscious fantasy. In reality, the patient found himself with a sexually tempting woman while waiting to enter the inner office. In the office was an authority figure, an adversary, with whom he might quarrel over money. This configuration corresponds to the elements of his unconscious fantasy-namely, an encounter with the father and/or his phallus within the body of the mother. " (Arlow, 1969, p. 12)

Like Arlow's patient (in his unconscious fantasy), Wil Kane is anticipating a violent confrontation, "an encounter with the father and/or his phallus within the body of the mother." As the phallic train comes rushing towards the town, Wil anxiously tries to prepare for this encounter. In fact, I think there is some ambiguity about Frank Miller's role in the fantasy. As an older brother (to Ben), as the seed deposited by the phallic train, as a contemporary of Kane, almost his antithesis, Frank Miller can also be seen as a brother, perhaps an evil twin, who enters into a life and death battle with Kane in the womb.

Arlow's patient gives us a clue as to how that battle is to be won. While waiting with the secretary outside the treasurer's office, he experienced a dejas vu. Looking out of the window at the surrounding landscape, he had the uncanny feeling that he had seen it before and been through it before. The analysis traced that symptom to a defense against his anxiety connected to his memory of the bible story of Jacob stealing his father's blessing with his mother's help. The patient's mother had often reassured him when he had been afraid that he had been through it before and survived.

Like Arlow's patient, like Jacob in the bible, Wil Kane needs the support and approval of the woman to be successful in his encounter. Wil is upset at the failure of the townspeople to help him, but he is most deeply troubled by Amy leaving him, a theme hammered home repeatedly through the song. He needs her to defeat his rival, but there is more.

He also must have her support to overcome her fears. As we have seen, Amy's pacifism is not just a wish for peace and brotherly love; it has a sexual meaning. Amy is an innocent, a virgin. Her fear of violence extends unconsciously to a fear of the aggressiveness of sexuality.

Similarly, Kane is conflicted about deflowering his new virginal bride. As the film's theme song keeps reminding us, this is a film about a wedding day. Frank Miller does not only represent a powerful, aggressive rival. As was quite rightly pointed out by a member of the study group, Miller and his gang, train and all, also represent the aggressive sexual urges that the groom is struggling to come to terms with on his wedding day. Can he tame the violent, sado-masochistic passions in himself without compromising his proper role as a sexual aggressor? These are the conflicts and demons he must face before he can properly ride off with his bride. It is the similarity between Kane and Frank Miller-they are both gunmen-that frightens Amy.

For this reason, despite our wish for Wil to recruit help from the townspeople, this is really a conflict that Wil and Amy must confront themselves. Like Arlow's patient, unconsciously unable to complete intercourse without the woman's approval and support, Kane needs Amy's acceptance, support, and ultimately collusion with his violence in order to consummate the marriage.

This is the key to the film's resolution. Through clever tactics, daring maneuvers and good marksmanship (as well as the bad guys' inability to hit him with their first shots), Wil succeeds in paring down the gang. At a crucial moment, Amy, who has left the train at the first sound of gunfire, thinking Wil has been shot, overcomes her own scruples and fears and shoots one of the gang members. In the final confrontation, Frank Miller grabs Amy and tries to use her as a shield, but she scratches his face and struggles free long enough for Wil to shoot him. Together, the couple have overcome the wedding night jitters. Amy Kane's participation in the violence has not only molded them as a family, but has also given Kane tacit approval to do the loving violence that we know will come as they ride off to begin their new life.

Arlow, J.A. (1959) "The structure of Deja Vu," Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 7: 611-631.

Arlow, J.A. (1969) "Unconscious Fantasy and Disturbances of Conscious Experience," The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 38:1-27.