High Noon Collector's Edition (1952)
Review by HTQ4
Film:
DVD:

Features:

• The Making of High Noon hosted by Leonard Maltin
  
• Running audio commentary with Maria Cooper-Janis, Jonathan Foreman, Tim Zinnemann, and John Ritter
  
• Behind High Noon documentary with on-screen interviews with Cooper-Janis, Zinnemann, Foreman, and Prince Albert of Monaco
  
• Radio Broadcast with Tex Ritter
  

Released by: Artisan
Rating: NR
Region: 1
Anamorphic: N/A; appears in its original 1.33:1 format

My Advice: Own it.

Marshal Will Kane (Cooper) has just been married to the love of his life, the former Amy Fowler (Kelly). He is about to retire and begin his new life, when he finds out that Frank Miller (MacDonald), a man that he sent away, has been pardoned and is returning to claim his revenge. He is going to be on the train arriving at, you guessed it, High Noon. He begins to scour the town looking for someone to help him with Miller's posse, but the rest of the town doesn't want to risk their own lives to help him. Kane is faced with the dilemma of whether or not he should stand up to Miller and possibly widow his new bride before their wedding night.

This is a classic of the American cinema. It was one of the first films to break the mold of what the American Western Film was supposed to be: a story where there is a clear cut hero, a clear-cut villain, and the hero wins and gets the girl. Here, the hero starts out with the girl, but almost loses her, admits that he is afraid of what may happen, and proceeds to ask everyone in town for assistance--in essence, admitting that he is not up to this challenge. It is also told in near-real time, and emphasis is placed heavily on the passage of that time. Zinnemann uses this beautifully, really taking advantage of the perception of time and the speed at which most events in our lives take place. Attempting to count the number of clocks in this film would be almost as impossible as attempting to count the number of pimples you've had since puberty.

In my review of the first DVD release of this movie, I made mention of the fact that the documentary hosted by Leonard Maltin (which is available on both editions of the DVDs) did nothing more than skim the surface and needed to go a lot deeper. Well, since it's the same documentary, my feelings about it haven't changed, but I have to take my hat off the guys who put this DVD together. First of all, they decided to go ahead and record a commentary track even though most of the principal cast members are no longer with us.

And if you can't get the stars, you can go for the children of the stars. And before you brush this off as a silly notion (which I almost did), I urge you to consider the fact that getting their take on the film is almost as priceless as the men and women who were actually in the thing. Children are very perceptive and probably pick up on much more that we really care to ever know. These children grew up with their parents being attached to this classic film, and it has stuck with them throughout the years, too. The information that is passed along here is invaluable...especially when you consider that we can never have a commentary track from the original cast members. Not only do they pass along their own perceptions and recollections of the movie, but they also pass on some stories that their parents told them over the years. And, why John Ritter, you ask? His father won the Oscar for Best Song that year.

Anyway, I digress. The commentary track is very good. It's filled with the kids (now adults) spitting out a perfect balance of the history behind the film, their own emotional attachment with the film, and their parents' recollections a generation removed. All in all, it's very well done.

The never-before seen documentary is much too short short and doesn't really cover that much more than the Leonard Maltin documentary. It's also filled with interviews with pretty much the same people who are on the commentary track. I'm sorry to say that it just feels forced and not very well thought out. The Radio Program with Tex Ritter is a five minute snippet from Nashville Radio Icon Ralph Emery's radio show. It's difficult to tell, but the quality of the audio sounds like it was recorded very much after the fact and it certainly is quite fluffy. Emery spends most of his time recalling his own recollections of seeing Ritter's pictures as a boy. The conversation is fun, but there's just not much content to it.

Don't get me wrong. It's about time this movie was given the treatment that this DVD affords it. If you call yourself a movie buff, this DVD simply must be on your shelf.