Yesterday we saw High Noon (1952). (I think maybe they were going to show it to us in high school, but couldn't get it and showed us A Man for All Seasons instead, so I don't think I've ever seen it before, although I was familiar with the Mad magazine spoof, Hah! Noon!.) David Wood says it's

an allegorical tale about the McCarthy witch hunts, penned by HUAC blacklisted writer Carl Foreman, which also offers a number of well-thought-out observations on the nature of violence.

It's a beautifully composed film - courtesy of Floyd Crosby's picturesque sunlight and shadow compositions - which achieves the difficult task of being about morality while avoiding tart sermonising and hollow admonitions. A film about what it means to be a man that manages to avoid the musk of machismo, "High Noon" is truly a film that improves with each and every viewing.

Dennis Prince says,

Many have proclaimed High Noon to be the definitive western picture ever filmed. And while such assertion can hardly be argued, it seems equally appropriate to broaden that statement by noting this may be one of the best pictures of any genre ever filmed.

Absolutely. I don't think I like most Westerns much, if Gunfight at the O.K. Corral is a typical example. (Hey, Lee Van Cleef is in both!) Tim Dirks, who summarizes the High Noon's story in great detail, says it

has often been interpreted as a morality play or parable, or as a metaphor for the threatened Hollywood blacklisted artists (one of whom was screenwriter Foreman) who faced political persecution from the HUAC during the McCarthy era due to actual or imagined connections to the Communist Party, and made life-altering decisions to stand their ground and defend moral principles according to their consciences.

It also has been interpreted as an allegory of US foreign policy during the Korean War.

Scott McGee & Jeff Stafford quote the director, Fred Zinnemann, who says that the film

seems to mean different things to different people. (Some speculate that it is an allegory on the Korean War!).... [The scriptwriter Carl Foreman] said it was about 'a town that died because no one there had the guts to defend it.' Somehow this seemed to be an incomplete explanation. Foreman saw it as an allegory on his own experience of political pesecution in the McCarthy era. With due respect I felt this to be a narrow point of view. First of all I saw it simply as a great movie yarn, full of enormously interesting people. I vaguely sensed deeper meanings in it; but only later did it dawn on me that this was not a regular Western myth....To me it was the story of a man who must make a decision according to his conscience. His town - symbol of a democracy gone soft - faces a horrendous threat to its people's way of life....It is a story that still happens everywhere, every day....

No kidding. It's not hard to see how one could compare Europeans, unwilling to join the US' war on the "axis of evil" as similar to the queasy citizens of Hadleyville, as former CIA Director James Woolsey did. I can't help but feel that Inigo Thomas misses the point when he argues that

Woolsey's choice of High Noon to characterise George Bush's war on terror is an odd one, however, when one considers the reaction to the film when it first appeared. The movie was admired by American liberals but loathed by conservatives.

Sure, it's ironic. But still, the parable fits in many ways, as Alistair Cooke argues. That doesn't mean that one couldn't interpret it to fit someone like Noam Chomsky, too. I think that's the mark of a great work, in that it appeals to many different people. For my part, I don't think it's just a matter of the story. Moody, minimalist films (no wonder the film itself didn't win an Oscar) seem to appeal to me. Finally, Gary Cooper is better cast than he was in Love in the Afternoon, but Grace Kelly is too young for him as Audrey Hepburn was in the later film.