So when I finished up the last western on the S&S list, I was all relieved that I’d never have to watch a stupid western ever again, but now here we are, with a Gary Cooper movie.

So compared to the various westerns on the S&S list, it’s… blander, for better and worse. It’s not wildly offensive in the way that The Searchers is or as nihilistically violent as The Wild Bunch, but it also has no gorgeous cinematography or nuanced characters or dense action-packed plotting. It’s just kinda… there.

The plot of the movie is dirt simple: Coop is a sheriff, and he’s getting married to Grace Kelly (who is like 30 years younger than him, in one of the least convincing onscreen romances of all time). Right afterward, they get news that some notorious outlaws are out of jail, and are coming to town for revenge on Coop, who put them away in the first place. Grace urges Coop to get out of town with her as they’d planned (because she’s worried about him); the townsfolk tell Coop to just go on and get out (because they’re worried about a shootout in their streets).

But Coop wants to stay and fight. And he keeps going around looking for people to help him out, and they’re all like nah, bro, those outlaws are soooooooo scary, they’re totally unbeatable, you’d be a fool to take them on. This takes up the bulk of the movie. And so finally — like the last ten minutes of the movie — the train carrying the outlaws gets in (at high noon), and Coop has a shoot-out with them, and there are only four of them, and he kills them one by one.

So, uh, I guess they weren’t really that scary after all? Okay, cool, glad we had a good 80 minutes of being scared about those guys who were a minor irritation in the end.

The main virtue of the movie, really, is that it’s under 90 minutes. It doesn’t quite maintain a taut suspense for that whole length, but it almost does. If they’d gotten it down to 60 minutes, it probably would have worked better, but it’s not too sloppy as it is.

But there’s really not much more to it than that. I think it’s better than Rio Bravo, but it’s still in my bottom tier of westerns, which are in turn in my bottom tier of movies.

Also, while I was looking for reviews to see what others saw in this, I found a Roger Ebert piece where he was talking about the AFI list and is all, “I recently screened “High Noon” as a candidate for my Great Movies series, and rejected it as, frankly, just not a very good film,” which: not wrong. But also, he is savage about the list as a whole:

The bottom line: The AFI list is an arbitrary selection of 100 titles from an equally arbitrary selection of 400 titles, chosen by an arbitrary group of voters, many of whom have bad taste and are uninformed about film history.

The tbf is that he’s talking about the original list, which is legit worse than the 2007 update to it that this podcast is using; but fundamentally, it’s still a pretty bad list.