by Donald Spoto
“We still needed an attractive young woman to play Kane’s wife,” Fred Zinnemann recalled. “We had expected to have a much younger actor than Cooper, but it was much to our advantage to have him with us. The role of his wife was not demanding, but for some reason we had difficulty finding the right actress at a price Stanley wanted to pay. Then he showed me a photo of Grace Kelly and told me that she had done nothing [in the movies] except a small bit for Henry Hathaway. I said, ‘Well, let’s meet her.’”3* Zinnemann did not know at the time that Kramer had already signed Grace for the movie without a meeting, after seeing her photograph. Kanter negotiated the deal for his client to play Amy Fowler Kane, Will’s bride, for which Grace was paid $750 a week for a guarantee of six weeks of work. Among the opening credits, her name was to appear fifth, after those of Gary Cooper, Thomas Mitchell, Lloyd Bridges and Katy Jurado.
After her first week of performances onstage in Denver, Grace flew to Los Angeles in early July to meet Kramer’s team. “She arrived, very well dressed and wearing white gloves,” Zinnemann recalled. “Our conversation was brief, because she answered most of my questions with a simple yes or no. But I thought she fitted the part [of Amy] admirably, perhaps because she seemed so shy and because technically she was not quite prepared for it. This made her sometimes tense and remote—ideal, in other words, to play this role. The age difference between her and Cooper, almost thirty years, bothered me, but the die was cast. Kramer got her at a low price, and we went forward—with very happy results, I think.” Kramer was more critical: “She was miscast,” he said flatly. “She was just too young for Cooper. She didn’t believe she did well in the role, and I didn’t think so, either.”
On Thursday, July 19, the New York Times announced that Stanley Kramer Productions would begin filming High Noon with Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly in late August or early September, adding, “Miss Kelly is a comparative newcomer.” She could not resist the opportunity to make a film with Cooper, and this was to be a twenty-eight-day shooting schedule—hence, she could be back in New York in early autumn.
Grace read the Cunningham short story along with the script of High Noon. To begin with, she found no Amy Fowler Kane in “The Tin Star,” which is a straightforward story about a small-town Western sheriff named Doane, whom the mayor urges to retire. Doane is past middle age, a widower with severe arthritis. A notorious criminal named Jordan is coming back to town on the 4:10 train, seeking revenge for Doane’s capture of him on a murder charge five years earlier—and Jordan’s gang is ready to join the violence.
Doane visits his wife’s grave every Sunday. On this day, Jordan’s younger brother follows him. As the sheriff sets flowers at his wife’s tombstone, the man unties Doane’s horse and sets it off—forcing Doane to walk back to town. There he finds that Toby, one of his deputies, has killed young Jordan, believing that the returning horse meant Doane was dead. One of Jordan’s gang then shoots Toby in the leg, and the older Jordan shoots Doane several times. Throwing himself on young Toby’s body to prevent him from taking a fatal bullet, Doane is shot dead by the avenging Jordan. Toby kills the murderer and takes over the role of sheriff from his dead friend.
In the screenplay and the finished film of High Noon, very little seems to happen until the final shoot-out. But much is implied and very much indeed is at stake. Will Kane (Cooper) is about to retire from his job in Hadleyville (population four hundred), an arid, no-account patch of land somewhere out west. As the movie begins, he and Amy Fowler (Grace) pronounce wedding vows before the local judge (Otto Kruger). Will looks forward to a quiet life with Amy, a Quaker who deplores violence and condemns killing. As the newlyweds prepare to leave town, Will learns that Frank Miller (Ian Mac-Donald) is returning to Hadleyville. Kane had arrested him five years earlier for murder, but the sentence was commuted, and now Miller and his gang—who once controlled and terrorized the town—want revenge.
At first, heeding everyone’s advice, Kane leaves with his bride. But he returns, for the gang would have pursued them in any case, and the people of Hadleyville once again would have come under the deadly control of the Miller gang, three of whom are already in place, gloating and awaiting Frank’s arrival on the noon train. Kane turns to the people for help, and to his former deputies for support. But everybody abandons him, and each man has an excuse. Harvey, the youngest deputy (Lloyd Bridges), turns away, jealous of Will; others believe that any open trouble with Miller will end only in tragedy for everyone; and others flee out of simple cowardice. At first, even Amy does not remain with Will; she is unable, by virtue of her strong pacifist principles, to understand his conduct.
High noon approaches. After writing his last will and testament, Kane meets the gang alone. In the final shoot-out, he is the only man to survive—and is in fact helped by Amy, who has returned out of loyalty. She has also been sternly counseled by saloon owner Helen Ramirez (Katy Jurado), who was once Frank Miller’s mistress, then Will’s, and is now Harvey’s. (Wise in the ways of men and the world, Helen has certainly lived mighty fully in a town of only four hundred.) At the wordless conclusion to the picture, the four villains lie dead, and Will and Amy leave Hadleyville. Contemptuous of the townspeople’s cowardice and their disregard for their own solidarity as a community, Will removes his tin star and throws it onto the dusty street.
AFTER RETURNING to the Elitch Theatre for her final performances, Grace left Denver on August 27 for wardrobe fittings and makeup tests in Los Angeles. High Noon was filmed from Wednesday, September 5, to Saturday, October 6—an extremely rapid schedule requiring meticulous preparation, a tirelessly efficient crew, a highly professional cast and a first-rate director, all of them working long hours with the production designer and cameraman. Exteriors were shot mostly on the back lot of the Columbia Studios ranch, and at locations in Northern California; the few interior sets were constructed at studios in Burbank.
Six days of labor is the norm in Hollywood, and twelve to fourteen hours a day is standard for all but the most famous and powerful stars and directors. According to call sheets, Grace worked on the picture twenty-two of its twenty-eight days. The summer of 1951 was unusually torrid in Southern California, and the vast bowl of the San Fernando Valley was, typically, ten to fifteen degrees hotter than the West Side of Los Angeles, closer to the Pacific. Thermometers read over 100 degrees before nine o’clock on most mornings, as smog settled into the valley; often it seemed as if there was no air to breathe. The cast of High Noon had to work mostly outside, and the women, dressed in heavy nineteenth-century costumes, were especially uncomfortable.
The Kelly family knew nothing about Gene and Grace, but not long after filming began in September, the gossips began to whisper about Grace and Gary Cooper, and later about Grace and Fred Zinnemann. There is not a shred of evidence to support either rumor, or a single reliable source.4*
When the murmurings from Hollywood drifted eastward, there was disquiet at 3901 Henry Avenue. Lizanne was once again dispatched to live with her sister, and this time they stayed at the Chateau Marmont Hotel, a few steps north of the noisy “Sunset Strip” with its profusion of nightclubs, diners and restaurants. After almost two months, Lizanne had nothing to report to Philadelphia except what she already knew (and what Grace’s letters and postcards confirm). On Sundays, Grace’s only day off from work, Uncle George (then living near Palm Springs) collected them at the hotel; they went to Mass in Beverly Hills; and then he drove his nieces north to Santa Barbara or south to a beach town for lunch. “He and Grace talked constantly about the theatre,” Lizanne recalled. “Usually, I fell asleep on the backseat.”
HIGH NOON is a remarkably quiet film that focuses much of its screen time on the weathered, anxious features of Gary Cooper, who conveyed an anguished fear, atypical of the western hero, with subtle glances and restrained gestures. Here the actor found new resources within himself, and his “acting”—always minimal—virtually vanished. His plain angularity, the lines of gravity and premature old age, seemed
more deeply etched. Members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences voted him Best Actor (his second Oscar in that category, following his performance as the eponymous hero in Sergeant York in 1941).
The story takes place in one morning, from approximately 10:40 to noon, and the action lasts little longer than those eighty minutes. Working with his cameraman and editor, Zinnemann created suspense by rhythmic cuts to close-ups of pendulums, clock hands closing like scissor blades on noon, and the railroad tracks “stretching to the horizon and symbolizing the menace,” as Zinnemann said. “The restless figure of the marshal moving about the town in his search for help and letting the action slow down by degrees were all logically constructed.”
The picture is remarkable for a single theme, relevant to every time and place; for the filmmakers, it was especially significant that year, when Communist witch-hunts were turning the United States into a place of hysterical paranoia where lives were routinely ruined. In Hollywood, careers were destroyed and reputations lost because, ten or twenty or thirty years earlier, a person may or may not have questioned the course of American politics and may or may not have joined informal meetings of the Communist Party—words and deeds protected by their constitutional rights, which were now all but ignored.
The movie’s theme—the necessity of taking and maintaining a moral stance—is contained in an extraordinary crane shot, pulling back from a close-up of Cooper to a high overhead view of him, alone in a bleak town. The streets are dusty paths seeming to lead nowhere; the sky is washed out of clouds; there are no spacious skies, no amber waves of grain; no vast panoramas in which men and animals move in an epic journey; no sense of spectacle, or of colorful, unspoiled nature. Perhaps never before this had the technique of black-and-white moviemaking found a fuller justification in a western. In High Noon there is only a dying town, empty of courage, hope and insight. The street is deserted, the stores and houses gray and empty; just so, the repetition of the (Oscar-winning) song in the picture, “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling,” becomes both ironic and minatory, for everyone abandons the marshal.
Hadleyville is thus no romanticized western refuge from the evils of encroaching civilization. The saloon is not the community meeting place, but the locus of petty jealousies and prejudices. The marshal is not heroic by conscious choice or logical decision; he sees his position as the only possibility, and he is not above weeping with fear. As played by Cooper with a moving sense of accidental heroism, Will Kane emerges as a man whose options have dwindled like his list of friends. He confronts his enemies with the kind of stoic acceptance of the likely outcome that his life is almost over. High Noon is not, then, a western about sheepherders against cattlemen, ranchers against oilmen, white settlers against natives. It concerns the point at which courage is the logical and sometimes the only possible outcome of integrity.
Nor are there any pious pioneers in this movie. The townsfolk are, as Zinnemann said, “examples of human nature in every time and place … [of people] who abandon their loyalties, and one another, with apparently good reasons.” Hence the marshal becomes the prototype of all who find themselves alone, facing an issue while others rationalize themselves out of it. Those who had crowded in to be present at Will’s marriage to Amy and had praised him for once saving the town now find handy reasons for refusing to help him, one another and their community.
Grace arrived for the filming, as she later said, in a state of scarcely concealed anxiety. Fourteen Hours had not prepared her to play a leading role opposite a movie legend like Gary Cooper. At first their mutual shyness and reticence to engage in mere small talk augured a tense collaboration. But when he over heard her laugh at a crewman’s risqué joke, he knew she was nothing like her image, or Kramer’s image of her—and Cooper promptly invited her to lunch. “He was a gentle, shy person,” Grace recalled, “and he greatly underestimated himself as an actor.”
Just as Grace underestimated herself.
“I was very young when I made High Noon,” she continued, referring to that season when she was twenty-one. “Zinnemann was wonderful with people who knew their job and their métier as screen actors. But I wasn’t one of those who did. Early during filming, he said to me, ‘Grace, I’m sorry, I can’t help you the way I should be able to.’ It wasn’t that he didn’t take an interest—he just didn’t know how to instruct me, and of course there was the problem of time. I couldn’t get the kind of direction from him that I needed as a neophyte, and I wasn’t equipped enough for moviemaking at that time to do it for myself. After I saw the finished picture, I was horrified! I remember thinking, ‘Well, this poor girl may never make it unless she does something very quickly.’ I rushed back to New York and started taking classes again, with Sandy Meisner.”
Even before filming began, Kramer made no secret of his un-happiness with Grace. “She was too young, too inexperienced, too nervous.” She was certainly young and inexperienced. But as Zinnemann insisted, her anxiety was entirely appropriate for the role, especially in the opening wedding scene. The virginal, innocent Quaker Amy is a girl who would indeed be nervous at her wedding to any man, especially to a respected marshal very much her senior. In Will’s crowded office moments after the brief ceremony, she smiles, laughs girlishly and creates the only moment of light amid the gathering gloom.
The problem was actually not in Grace’s performance, but in the fact that her character was underwritten. It’s true that many actresses could have portrayed Amy Fowler equally well—but many would have been less satisfactory. Perhaps what remains most in the memory is the alarming and exquisitely appropriate contrast between the giggling bride of the opening sequence and the fearful, worried, perplexed woman she soon becomes. Grace understood this contrast not intellectually, but by imagining “how I would feel if my brand-new husband seemed to abandon me for his duty. Amy had to learn that, because he did his duty—because he did not shrink from it, as she first begged him to do—he could be a wonderful husband. So she learns something. I thought that was very interesting.”
Blond Amy, all in white, exists only as a counterpoint to dark Helen, all in black. Grace’s most dramatic scene is her exchange with Katy Jurado, which Grace performed with complete conviction and a sense that innocence does not mean inanity.
HELEN. How can you leave [Will] like this? Does the sound of guns frighten you that much?
AMY. I’ve heard guns. My father and my brother were killed by guns. They were on the right side, but that didn’t help them when the shooting started. My brother was nineteen. I watched him die. That’s when I became a Quaker. I don’t care who’s right or who’s wrong. There’s got to be some better way for people to live. Will knows how I feel about it.
Grace spoke the words with the terrible memories in her voice: there is a slight quiver of emotion, and an almost imperceptible tremor in her chin, as if she might weep at any moment.
“This movie was her first big break,” said Katy Jurado, who was appearing in her second American film after acting in her native Mexico. “Grace and I were very different and couldn’t be very close, but I saw a girl with a lot of dignity and character who wanted to be somebody. She looked weak and tiny, but she was a very strong person—one of the strongest I worked with. She knew what she wanted, and she worked hard for it.” As Stanley Kramer had to admit years later, “Grace was determined, and she wasn’t overwhelmed in her scenes with the dynamic Katy Jurado, who really chewed up the scenery.”
“When I watched the film with her at home,” recalled Grace’s son, Prince Albert of Monaco, in 2007, “I could see how uncomfortable she was sitting there and seeing it again. She wasn’t at all satisfied with her performance.” But perhaps no serious, conscientious actor is ever satisfied with a performance—and a “neophyte,” as she knew she was, would have been extremely sensitive about what she gave the picture.
In this regard, Grace Kelly was never content with her achievements. “My time in Hollywood was so brief,” she said, “and everythi
ng happened so quickly, that I don’t think I accomplished anything to be proud of. I needed good teachers and directors; I needed understanding actors to work with me. I was grateful for my theatre experience, and for the work I did in television—but none of that really prepares you for movie acting. Scenes are filmed out of context and continuity—the first day’s work can be the last sequence of the picture, and what you’re acting, in which scene and with which actor, is all determined by a set of complicated scheduling mechanisms. This means that a film actor has to have an understanding director who doesn’t mind being a teacher. And it means that the actor has to come prepared for all kinds of variables. You wait for hours, then a shot is filmed, then something goes wrong and you wait again and it’s filmed again. Then you wait some more, and another scene is shot—which may actually occur a half-hour later in the finished picture, or a half-hour earlier, at a completely different stage of the character’s development. Movie acting is more challenging than most people think, and you have to be extremely clever or a seasoned veteran to carry off a credible performance. I wasn’t a seasoned veteran, and I don’t think I was extremely clever.” (According to Zinnemann, “Grace was not self-confident at all—certainly not at this stage.”)