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Home » Do not forsake me oh my darlin’

Do not forsake me oh my darlin’

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m a big “High Noon” fan, and one of the best things about the movie is the music. It runs throughout the entire film, sometimes as a ballad with lyrics, sometimes as the wordless theme on which many variations are worked in order to accompany the action or augment the emotion.

It’s a deceptively simple song that sounds as though it might be a Western folk song. But it’s not. The music was written by Dimitri Tiomkin, a classically trained musician who was born a Ukrainian Jew and emigrated to this country.

So, how did Tiomkin capture that spirit? Darned if I know (until I looked it up; more about that later). But I do know that the song was instrumental (pun intended) in the movie’s success:

Following his work for Fred Zinnemann on The Men (1950), Tiomkin composed the score for the same director’s High Noon (1952). His theme song was “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin'” (“The Ballad of High Noon”). At its opening preview to the press, the film, which starred Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly, did badly. Tiomkin writes that “film experts agreed that the picture was a flat failure… The producers hesitated to release the picture.” Tiomkin bought the rights to the song and released it as a single for the popular music market, with singer Frankie Laine. The record became an immediate success worldwide.

Based on the song’s popularity, the studio released the film four months later, with the words sung by country western star Tex Ritter. The film received seven Academy Award nominations and won four awards, including two for Tiomkin: Best Original Music and Best Song. Walt Disney presented him with both awards that evening.

Tiomkin composed his entire score around this single western-style ballad. He also eliminated violins from the ensemble. He added a subtle harmonica in the background, to give the film a “rustic, deglamorized sound that suits the anti-heroic sentiments” expressed by the story.

Here’s the background to how he did it:

According to Russian film historian Harlow Robinson, building the score around a single folk tune was typical of many Russian classical composers. Robinson adds that the source of Tiomkin’s score, if indeed folk, has not been proven…

Tiomkin had no illusions about his talent and the nature of his film work when compared to the classical composers. “I am no Prokofiev, I am no Tchaikovsky. But what I write is good for what I write for. So please, boys, help me.” Upon receiving his Oscar in 1955 for The High and the Mighty, he became the first composer to publicly list and thank the great European masters, including Beethoven, Strauss, and Brahms, among others.

Tiomkin didn’t compose the lyrics, by the way. But he composed the music to a lot of other Westerns besides “High Noon,” and the fact that he was good at composing for Westerns in general was apparently no coincidence, either. Music historian Christopher Palmer says:

[Tiomkin] came from a Big Country, too, and in America’s vastness, particularly its vast all-embracingness of sky and plain, he must have seen a reflection of the steppes of his native Ukraine…And as an exile himself, Tiomkin would have identified with the cowboys, pioneers and early settlers who people the world of the Western … . [T]hose like Tiomkin who blazed a trail in Hollywood were actually winning the West all over again.

Tiomkin alluded to this relationship in his autobiography:

“A steppe is a steppe is a steppe… . The problems of the cowboy and the Cossack are very similar. They share a love of nature and a love of animals…and the steppes of Russia are much like the prairies of America.”

Here’s the effective use of his theme in the opening credits for “High Noon”:

I’ve already mentioned the way the theme is carried through in many variations throughout the film. The ending is shown in this clip, an over-8-minute segment that uses the theme over and over in ways that are never boring and are never gimmicky:

Comments

Do not forsake me oh my darlin’ — 73 Comments

  1. Ha. Good theme … that of movie themes and film composers. Was watching the bonus feature included with El Cid last night [I usually watch those rather than the movies] on Miklos Rozsa, when your own miklosrozsa and your blog crossed my mind.

    “High Noon” the movie: I’ve never liked it for a couple of reasons, one of them being the quasi-ideological one that drove John Wayne to make that crappy rejoinder of a movie to it. The reason being the generalized venality, impotence and cowardice of the settler population. These were not Americans. It was obviously some kind of “morality play” or parable in which the characters were dressed up as American westerners for convenience sake. As a child watching it on TV I could not formulate it that way, but I knew that the characters in that film didn’t look like or act like my relatives who did have horses and guns and had been in the military and war.

    From a broader technical point of view, it reminds me of those headache inducing Warner Brothers westerns that played on TV incessantly during the early 1960s. It looks like a television episode … there’s no scope, no feeling of the outdoors, or of America. It’s a dry place with a bunch of cowards living there.

  2. Hey Neo.

    You mentioned a big country. The movie The Big Country, though it is also preachy, and histrionic in parts, and though I can see the manipulation as it is coming, is still at times an interesting view. Especially on the first go-round.

    When I finally caught it on television many years after it had been released, I was shocked to see Charlton Heston playing the role he did. I’d only seen him as a stand alone lead and hero. I found his interactions with Peck and Bickford (who I cannot stand as an actor for some reason), pretty interesting in contrast to what I had been conditioned to expect.

    Heston is at his best when he plays a cocksure, and somewhat callow yet redeemable S.O.B.

    And I think it was his own wife who made that observation first.

  3. We considered this film one of our family favorites when the boys were young, rotated rather frequently with “The Big Country” and “The Quiet Man.”
    Everything Neo said about the music gets a thumbs up from me.

    At its opening preview to the press, the film, which starred Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly, did badly. Tiomkin writes that “film experts agreed that the picture was a flat failure”

    — but it won 7 nominations and 4 Academy Awards, so I had to look it up on Wikipedia to find out what happened, and learned a lot of things I didn’t know 30 years ago.

    Wikipedia places the movie smack in the middle of the “Red Scare” years.
    If it’s an allegory about blacklisting, however, I kind of missed the point somehow.
    (not too surprising; I was born a few days after its initial release!)

    Is Kane supposed to be the HUAC target who defends his friends or.. what??
    Is Kane representing McCarthy, rounding up the posse to fight the Commies or … what??

    Kane’s efforts to round up a posse at the tavern, and then the church, are met with fear and hostility. Some townspeople, worried that a gunfight would damage the town’s reputation, urge Kane to avoid the confrontation entirely. Others are Miller’s friends, and resent that Kane cleaned up the town in the first place.
    …
    John Wayne was originally offered the lead role in the film, but turned it down because he felt that Foreman’s story was an obvious allegory against blacklisting, which he actively supported.
    …
    Gary Cooper was Wayne’s longtime friend, and shared his conservative political views; he had been a “friendly witness” before HUAC, but did not implicate anyone as a suspected Communist, and later became a vigorous opponent of blacklisting.
    …
    The American Left lauded High Noon as an allegory against blacklisting and McCarthyism, but it gained respect in the conservative community as well.[26]

    The film was criticized in the Soviet Union as “glorification of the individual”.[5]

    It appears to be as open to different interpretations as was Obama’s character in his first campaign.*

    It has been cited as a favorite by several U.S. presidents. Dwight Eisenhower screened the film at the White House,[5] and Bill Clinton hosted a record 17 White House screenings.[27] “It’s no accident that politicians see themselves as Gary Cooper in High Noon,” Clinton said. “Not just politicians, but anyone who’s forced to go against the popular will. Any time you’re alone and you feel you’re not getting the support you need, Cooper’s Will Kane becomes the perfect metaphor.”[28][29] Ronald Reagan cited High Noon as his favorite film, due to the protagonist’s strong commitment to duty and the law.[30]

    By contrast, John Wayne told an interviewer that he considered High Noon “the most un-American thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life”,[31] … [Director] Hawks explained. “… I didn’t think a good town marshal was going to run around town like a chicken with his head cut off asking everyone to help. And who saves him? His Quaker wife. That isn’t my idea of a good Western.”[32]

    Zinnemann responded, …”I’m rather surprised at [Hawks’ and Wayne’s] thinking. Sheriffs are people and no two people are alike. The story of High Noon takes place in the Old West but it is really a story about a man’s [and a woman’s!] conflict of conscience. In this sense it is a cousin to A Man for All Seasons. In any event, respect for the Western hero has not been diminished by High Noon.”[34]

    What about the naysayers? They were just not expecting serious drama in a Western, apparently. Film critics are very narrow-minded people sometimes.
    I suspect the press, then as now, had other agendas & narratives that “High Noon” didn’t support.

    Upon its release, critics and audiences expecting chases, fights, spectacular scenery, and other common Western film elements were dismayed to find them largely replaced by emotional and moralistic dialogue until the climactic final scenes.[21] Some critics scoffed at the unorthodox rescue of the hero by the heroine.[22][23] David Bishop argued that had Quaker Amy not helped her husband by shooting a man in the back, such inaction would have pulled pacifism “toward apollonian decadence”

    As with the More drama, the story in High Noon is not a unique one.
    I suspect it is archetypical, in fact, and not just a common theme in Westerns.

    Foreman told Crowther that the film originated from a four-page plot outline he wrote that turned out to be very similar to a short story by John W. Cunningham called “The Tin Star”. Foreman purchased the film rights to Cunningham’s story and wrote the screenplay.
    …
    In Chapter XXXV of The Virginian by Owen Wister, there is a description of an incident very similar to the central plot of High Noon. Trampas (a villain) calls out the Virginian, who has a new bride waiting whom he might lose if he goes ahead with the gunfight. High Noon has even been described as a “straight remake” of the 1929 film version of The Virginian in which Cooper also starred.[35]

    Something else I learned today:

    As former Solidarity leader Lech Wa??sa wrote, in 2004,

    Under the headline “At High Noon” runs the red Solidarity banner and the date—June 4, 1989—of the poll. It was a simple but effective gimmick that, at the time, was misunderstood by the Communists. They, in fact, tried to ridicule the freedom movement in Poland as an invention of the “Wild” West, especially the U.S. But the poster had the opposite impact: Cowboys in Western clothes had become a powerful symbol for Poles. Cowboys fight for justice, fight against evil, and fight for freedom, both physical and spiritual. Solidarity trounced the Communists in that election, paving the way for a democratic government in Poland. It is always so touching when people bring this poster up to me to autograph it. They have cherished it for so many years and it has become the emblem of the battle that we all fought together.[39]

    So, that’s the seminar for today!
    popular culture, music, film, politics, psychology, literature, and history.

    *
    https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/03/06/obama_from_blank_slate_to_empty_suit_109134.html
    In the prologue to the second of his autobiographies, “The Audacity of Hope,” Barack Obama said: “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”

  5. AesopFan:

    If I’m not mistaken (don’t have time to look it up), the film’s director Zinneman did not believe it expressed the McCarthy situation, although others disageed.

  6. DNW

    As a child watching it on TV I could not formulate it that way, but I knew that the characters in that film didn’t look like or act like my relatives who did have horses and guns and had been in the military and war.

    I never liked Westerns. I couldn’t articulate it at the time, but now I see that it was because my relatives out West, who had varying acquaintances with horses, cattle, and dirt farming, were not at all like the people portrayed in Westerns. Nor were the societies portrayed in the movies like the ones where my relatives lived. (Well, some relatives were as laconic as Gary Cooper, I have to admit.. 🙂 ). I was a happy camper one birthday when my grandparents gave me cowboy boots and farmer jeans- just like my grandfather wore.

    …those headache inducing Warner Brothers westerns that played on TV…

    Took the words right out of my mouth.

  7. Too much thinking about a Great Movie. Yes, about a conflicted man and woman and the townspeople, but all the Blacklisting crap is crap.
    Did you notice the great cast members. Lee Van Cleef, Sheb Wooley (from Wagon Train and “The Purple People Eater”, Lloyd Bridges and others. Great cast.

  8. The IMDB trivia has a few items that supports the anti-blacklist theme in the film, though I was skeptical too.

    It’s interesting that the preview audience didn’t think much of the film. We watched the old classic “Some Like It Hot” recently, and it almost didn’t make it past it’s first preview audience as well.

    Another film I hadn’t seen since I was a teenager is “The Bridges at Toko-Ri” co-starring Grace Kelly, with William Holden. It’s noteworthy for its relative lack of a music score, and a sense of the grim reaper that sets in around the middle of the film.

  9. Thanks for this. I have seen the movie and heard the song countless times, but never thought of it the way you presented it, with the exception that I watched the movie with a couple friends and one’s father one rainy Saturday years ago [ OK, nearly 60 of them] and the consensus was that the townspeople were not authentic in that they shied away from a confrontation now, but had left civilization of some degree behind to come west for a fresh start. It didn’t match up.

    While watching the clip today with your thoughts on the origins and variations on the theme in mind, I was reminded of what Richard Rodgers did in producing the score for Victory At Sea, introducing variations of the main theme (which may have been different for different episodes) to reflect the visuals and set the mood.

  10. I love westerns. High Noon is a good one. The real-time element makes it especially unique. High Noon was written by Carl Foreman definitely as an allegory to the Hollywood blacklist. John Wayne and Stanley Kramer put pressure on Foreman to name names, which he refused. He was to be taken off the picture but Gary Cooper and Fred Zinnemann stepped in and prevented that until the film was finished. Foreman then went to England and wrote other screenplays including the early draft for The Bridge on the River Kwai and he was writer and produce for The Guns of Navarone.

    Foreman came back to Hollywood and actually remained on cordial terms with John Wayne. A recent book on the film titled “High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist And The Making Of American Classic” by Glen Frankel apparently goes into detail about all of this. I haven’t read it but I saw the author speak a couple times. Of note, Howard Hawk’s film Rio Bravo was made in response to High Noon.

  11. “I’ve already mentioned the way the theme is carried through in many variations throughout the film. The ending is shown in this clip, an over-8-minute segment that uses the theme over and over in ways that are never boring and are never gimmicky:” — Neo

    The neo-noir film “The Long Goodbye” (1973) comes to mind as a film that uses a theme song repeatedly throughout. In that case, it is gimmicky is places, though I think they were trying for a tongue-in-cheek or satiric tone.

    From IMDB:

    John Williams and Johnny Mercer’s title song crops up in various guises throughout the film, including on the radio, as a dirge played at a funeral by a Mexican marching band, and even as the first couple of notes of the Wades’ doorbell.

    They missed the supermarket muzak playing the theme song.

    The idea to have every playing of the film’s theme song “The Long Goodbye” mixed and/or arranged differently was a concept suggested by director Robert Altman. As such, there are around six different credits for the film’s title song, it is performed in the film by The Dave Grusin Trio, Jack Sheldon, Clydie King, Jack Riley, the Morgan Ames’ Aluminum Band, and also The Tepoztlan Municipal Band.

  12. I’m curious whether Altman’s “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” satisfies non-western movie folk, particularly with the extensive use of Leonard Cohen’s music as soundtracking. Funny to see “The Long Goodbye” precede my attempt to ask.

  13. Thanks for the earworm. At least it’s not as irritating as some. Do not forsake me, oh my earworm. 🙂

  14. “Although you’re grievin’, I can’t be leavin’, until I shoot Frank Miller dead.”

    This line is omitted in almost every version sung outside of the movie, and would be considered completely outrageous today. Frank Miller must be one of the most common names in the country, and the assumption is that there are many psychopaths out there who would be competing to knock them all off. Today, every phone number used in a movie must begin with 555 — as no number really does — so that no idiot will target that number.

  15. These were not Americans. It was obviously some kind of “morality play” or parable in which the characters were dressed up as American westerners for convenience sake.

    I tend to agree with this. One point, though, is that the Quaker wife (Kelly) finally shoots a bad guy.

    Cowboys in Western clothes had become a powerful symbol for Poles. Cowboys fight for justice, fight against evil, and fight for freedom, both physical and spiritual.

    And yet, westerns written by Karl May, who has never been in the US, were great favorites of Hitler.

    Of note is the fact that many Germans immigrated to the west, especially Texas.

  16. “Of note, Howard Hawk’s film Rio Bravo was made in response to High Noon.”

    Oh that was the one.

    Yeah, correct the record by making a western staring Ricky Nelson and Dean Martin. LOL

    Oh well … they are only movies.

    One western movie that continually comes to mind as a pleasant viewing experience is the first 3/4s of The Westerner, with Gary Cooper.

    As with a few scenes in Lonesome Dove, you can almost feel the environment in some scenes. One doesn’t often see low angle sunlight shots in run of the mill westerns. Now and again, of course, but they were probably too much trouble to set up mostly. So, you get that eternal 3 pm on a hot day look, in most of them I can think of. Blech ….

  17. “I’m curious whether Altman’s “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” satisfies non-western movie folk, …” — sdferr

    I love that film and Cohen’s music too. I saw it several years ago, and though it did not hold up perfectly for me, over time, it’s still very good.

    I think Altman really tries to break the mold with both McCabe and Long Goodbye. With McCabe the old western environment is very ugly, until McCabe & Miller build something a little nicer. Then the closing winter scenes are poetically beautiful as the violence unfolds, and it doesn’t unfold the way it “should.”

    Neo’s longer ending clip is unconventional too. I thought the whole lantern as Molotov cocktail scene was curious. Why emphasize the first missed throw? Why did he have to shoot the second lantern, instead just having it smash near the hay?

    Having a pacifist Quaker woman shoot a bad man in the back has got to be a political statement of some sort. Would it have been wrong to shoot Joe McCarthy in the back, for example? Ends justifying the means, anyone?
    _____

    From AesopFan on September 24, 2019 at 2:10 pm:
    Under the headline “At High Noon” runs the red Solidarity banner and the date—June 4, 1989—of the poll. It was a simple but effective gimmick that, at the time, was misunderstood by the Communists.

    There’s a strange documentary entitled “Chuck Norris vs. Communism.” It’s about an underground black market in the old Soviet block Romania, to dub cheesy American action films, such as Chuck Norris films, in the Romanian language and distribute the VHS tapes.

    The lives of the Romanian elites were so drab, that they ultimately preferred to enjoy the films rather than snuff out the black marketers, which they almost do at one point. Even the badly made films with their strong sense of right and wrong purportedly had a big anti-communist impact.

  18. I’m a big fan of Dean Martin, of the period prior to him becoming a winking parody of himself, by the way.

    Great summer cookout music; along with the Sinatra and Fitzgerald of the songbook series.

    Make that martini six to one please

  19. I love westerns and include High Noon in that genre’s pantheon.

    The great Western writer Louis L’Amour claimed that in a typical western town High Noon’s cowardly citizens never would have existed, given the demands living in the West made upon its inhabitants. I suspect most were as L’Amour portrayed them but that more than a few towns were as portrayed in High Noon. Both cowardliness and bravery are part of the human condition.

  20. “Of note is the fact that many Germans immigrated to the west, especially Texas.”

    Many in Texas came up from Mexico…my husband’s great grandfather among them. They came to Mexico as one of Maximillian’s troops, lost to the Mexicans and didn’t get a ride home. Many stayed in Mexico but many went north, crossed the Rio Grande and stayed in Texas.
    My husband’s GGrandfather stayed in the US for a while, went back to Austria, married and then came back to settle in the Midwest, after which, he and his brother settled a farm in Colorado. It’s still in the family.

  21. I’ve always found the townspeople very believable because they reflect an aspect of the human condition. Brave men, men who were not professional fighters, fought evil men to make the town safe and placed under the rule of law. The town prospered, families thrived, but years later evil is about to reenter. It’s not the town itself that’s threatened, but only one man. The brave men are older now and used to peace. I can see where it’d be tempting to think that the trouble can be made to go away if only that man would go away and peace would be kept. No need to again fear dying.

    I never saw Will Kane as an anti-hero. He was always to me the epitome of a Western hero – quietly doing what needs to be done, not running from danger, standing up to evil even if alone.

  22. Ok. I watched the clip. Due diligence and all that.

    It may not be quite as bad as I made out, but it’s not very good.

    And produced by Stanley Kramer? What else needs to be included in the credits to clue you into the fact that “This, is a Social Conscience Production”

    Anyway, I guess they hadn’t discovered shotguns and repeating rifles in the town Sheriff Kane policed. If the population had discovered such advanced technology, Kane could have killed two and wounded two more before they knew what hit them, using the shotgun alone.

    Instead he runs around the backlot like a chicken with it’s head cut off, flicking his 1873 model Single Action Army revolver at the bad guys, as if he can help the bullets along by thrusting the barrel at the foe as the piece discharges.

    Ok. That’s a little exaggerated and not as bad a Jimmy Stewart’s exercise in slinging ball bearings out of a pipe at a target in Destry Rides Again.

    And of course if there is someone who is better at identifying the movie pistols of the Old West than I am – and they would be legion – I’ll be happy to yield on that point too.

  23. I was raised in both Texas and SW Oklahoma and then back to Texas, when I was a grade school kid I loved Westerns of every kind and wanted to go out West where the Cowboys and Indians lived. I had no idea that the Kiowa and Apache Indian kids I went to school with had living grandparents who lived on the plains in tents chasing buffalo. I had no idea that the Western Cattle Trail went within less than a mile of my town as the cattle were moved from Texas to Dodge City Kansas and there were still a few old men around that made the trip as youngsters. All of the Hollywood Cowboy Horse Operas were cobbled up nonsense for the most part until ‘High Noon’ made an adult Western movie, full of drama, an excellent cast and a wonderful theme song.

    Take away all the social implications and just enjoy the story for what it is, a good man doing what a man had to do so he could get on with his life with good music in the background and Grace Kelly, who could ask for anything more.

  24. Stalin liked American westerns. Or so I recall. Anyway, when I finally got around to watching High Noon after hearing all the hype, it was a disappointment. Nothing there, really, just long barren stretches of emptiness. Must have been symbolic of the plains.

    Not that westerns ever captured the West, actual cowboys who were involved in the early movies thought they were pretty much 100% BS. But entertainment is entertainment, reality doesn’t matter.

  25. There’s debate among afficionados as to which is the greatest soundtrack of all time, the two finalists being Ben-Hur by Miklos Rosza and Cleopatra by Alex North. Rosza also composed scores such other Biblical epics as King of Kings, Quo Vadis, Sodom and Gomorrah and the somewhat related The Golden Voyage of Sinbad.

    Alfred Newman and Franz Waxman were other notable soundtrack composers back then, and Alfred Newman’s son Thomas gets a lot of work and has done some excellent music more recently. American Beauty’s score stands alone and I’ve listened to it with pleasure many times without thinking of the film.

    Other great soundtrack composers include Elmer Bernstein, Bernard Herrmann — who did Psycho, and of course Ennio Morricone.

    David Lynch memorably employed Angelo Badalamenti for Twin Peaks, Brian de Palma used Pino Donaggio in Dressed to Kill and elsewhere, invoking the kind of neo-Hitchcockian atmospherics he’s favored at his best.

    Lately, Cliff Martinez and Atticus Ross have been hot composers, both coming from rock bands. The Red Hot Chili Peppers (Martinez was the lead guitarist) while Atticus Ross was in Nine Inch Nails.

    Those who miss old-style symphonies could do worse than investigate the above names for music to listen to newer than Brahms. Some of it is no doubt kitsch, but kitsch has its place, and some of this music referenced is just… good music, which can be divorced from the films to which they were once attached.

  28. IMO, nothing beats Shane as the western most fillled with pathos. The ambiguity of the ending is exquisite. Did Shane surviive or did he die of his wounds as he rode into the night? No one knows.

  29. Somewhere Ayn Rand commented that she didn’t like “High Noon” because of the way the town doesn’t back Cooper, (and other reasons having to do with communistic hints). I tried to find her comments, but I remember it is a long, negative critique. She liked (and may have had something to do with) the movie c alled “Warlock”, with Richard Widmark, Henry Fonda, and Anthony Quinn. It’s one of my favorite movies, I love Richard Widmark in it. Anyway, it’s sort of a reverse “High Noon”, Widmark is the hero, the town turns out in force to back him, the “fallen” woman ends up with Widmark, and the pure, blonde school teacher tries to end up with Fonda but he rides away. Really cool movie.

    As for the beautiful song, “Do Not Forsake Me”, there is a film short that won awards, called “Why’d the Beetle Cross the Road”, with the cinematography switching between a musical beetle on his way somewhere and kids in a classroom, and the beetle spends almost the entire short film humming the song. It is very, very clever, and one of the reasons I love it is the song was dramatically hummed by Brian Morze, one of my older brothers (USMC Viet Nam 1967-1969), and I shut my eyes and imagine he’s alive again. Everyone who knew him, even just a little, hear’s two or three seconds and immediately knows it’s him.

    Neo, thanks for the memory.

  30. In case you’re wondering what the beetle and classroom in my above comment is about, the teacher is asking the class why would someone follow a difficult and hazard-strewn path (in life) and a teenage girl finally concludes that it is because the guy is pursuing his girl. Indeed, at the end, (Spoiler!) the beetle finally makes his dangerous way to a girl beetle. It sounds silly, but it was a Disney-channel short for years. Naturally I’m biased, but the beetle has a rich personality, just like my brother had.

  32. I saw High Noon as a teenager and was totally freaked out. That people would desert in the face of such obvious evil had never been part of my experience to that point. The movie made it believable in a way that stayed with me. I was shocked as the movie unfolded.

    As a farm kid living in rural Illinois with lots of WWII and Korean vets as part of my everyday life, I had assumed that everybody would unite when things called for it, that the good guys would always win.

    Having no knowledge of Quakers, I found her behavior hard to believe as well, but was reassured of the basic goodness of womanhood when she fought for her man.

  34. actual cowboys who were involved in the early movies thought they were pretty much 100% BS.

    Many of the early westerns actually had real cowboys acting in them.
    Tom Mix was an expert horseman and shot although his ranch experience was limited,
    Hoot Gibson was a champion rodeo rider before movies.
    Slim Pickens, famous not just for westerns, was the greatest rodeo clown of all time. The clowns required much greater skills than the riders.

  35. “Shane” was another favorite although the author had never been west of the Mississippi. I read the story in Argosy Magazine, to which I subscribed at the age of 8, in a 1948 serial (I was 10) as “Rider From Nowhere.” When I saw the movie, I immediately recognized the story. There are a couple of endings of the novel. None involve him returning.

  37. Owen Wister was the grandson of a very interesting woman named Fanny Kemble: a famous British actress, she married an American and turned strongly against slavery after seeing it first-hand on his Georgia plantation. She was a keen observer and a good thinker, and her writings on American society and on life in general are well worth reading. One of the people I will invite to my dinner party after time travel is invented.

    https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/55632.html

  38. Things I noticed :

    1. Everybody’s hat must be nailed to their head, because they never fall off.

    2. These guys are improbably good shots – one of them shoots a kerosene lamp, while another shoots out a lock without really aiming at it, while running.

    3. Gary Cooper is improbably good with both hands; he shoots with his left hand but wears his gun on the right hip, and in some scenes his gun magically shifts from his left hand to his right.

    4. The film is often presented as an allegory for the Hollywood Blacklist, because the hero is abandoned by people he thought were his friends. OTOH, he’s trying to defend his community from an external threat – isn’t that what Joe McCarthy claimed to be doing ?

  39. Addendum to above :

    If anyone is interested, they might look up what happened when the Dalton gang tried a robbery in Coffeeville, Kansas – basically the gang was shot to be pieces by local citizens in a matter of minutes.

  40. “miklos000rosza on September 24, 2019 at 9:48 pm said:

    There’s debate among afficionados as to which is the greatest soundtrack of all time, the two finalists being Ben-Hur by Miklos Rosza and Cleopatra by Alex North. Rosza also composed scores such other Biblical epics as King of Kings, Quo Vadis, Sodom and Gomorrah and the somewhat related The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. “

    I suppose that when one judges that this or that work is the greatest soundtrack of all time, or preeminent at least, then there have to be some parameters set … such as “We are stipulating the score (or soundtrack) taken as a whole, and not just a theme or one piece”. And you certainly nailed it there.

    But I think a demurer – or proviso at least to the rule – might be worth including as we consider the noteworthy.

    Because, well, “Laura”, and “Stella by Starlight” and some outstanding romantic intros in lesser recognized films which constitute listenable pieces on their own account. I should include “I Remember April” in that latter class too, which apparently was not only written for a film, but was worked into, by my count 3 film noir products directed by Robert Siodmak: “The Killers”, with Lancaster (it plays in the background of a restaurant scene; “Criss Cross”, with Lancaster again (as DeCarlo casually pecks at it on a piano); and in “Phantom Lady” where it is used in the intro and plays on a jukebox. It is not a film score of course, but rather a notable piece worked into several soundtracks.

    All three of the named tunes have become Jazz classics and American Standards.

    And of course speaking of popularity and of April .. there’s the eponymous “April Love”

    I’d also include the theme from One Eyed Jacks, as a piece worth remarking on, and as one of the lesser but estimable types I was referring to earlier.

    The line where a tune cannot be considered part of a film score so much as a discreet song, seems kind of fuzzy to me; or could be depending on the timeline and sequence of it’s use.

    “The Sound of Music”, is full of songs. “Captain Blood” ’35, and 1938’s “Robin Hood”, are not. Exactly where the cut is made between songs and scores, I’ll leave to the experts.

    “I’m an old cowhand, from the Rio Grande …” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCWH-7_6uB8

    I guess that’s a song …

  41. I’m now going to place my film score remarks in a new context by admitting that I have come to the realization as I write that there is such a superabundance of noteworthy, film scores, of musical riches attached to Hollywood, and other films, that my prior remarks are almost meaningless.

    Having spent about five minutes on YouTube confirming a couple of items, the cascade of amazing works suggested to me for further viewing left me shaking my head.

    There’s just so much good stuff. An expert could not sort and cover 10 percent in a dozen full blog articles. And I’m no expert.

  42. rickf:

    The left felt it was an anti-McCarthy allegory and the right felt it was quite the opposite. The author apparently (I’m in a hurry and won’t bother with finding the source right now) wrote it without the anti-McCarthy agenda but not long after ascribed that agenda to it. The director felt it had nothing to do with McCarthy or with politics, but was far more universal.

    It’s a kind of film Rorschach test. People see many different things in it.

  44. Heh.

    Coffeeville Ks used to celebrate the Dalton gang demise with an annual rodeo (I don’t know whether this continues today). In 1957 my family — passing through from visiting grandparents in nearby Independence and then on the way home to Dallas — was pulled over by the local police chief and mayor to be awarded free tickets to the evening performance, steak dinner in the town’s proudest restaurant, and free lodging overnight in a nice motel. Robert Culp was the headliner, twirling pistols and such, as he had a hit tv cowboy series at that time. I think we were “randomly” selected on account of the unusual and odd looking ’57 Volvo 444 we were in, but I don’t know. A grand time was had by all though.

  45. Mike K:

    Gary Cooper was actually somewhat of a cowboy, at least partly. From his Wiki page:

    When Cooper was fifteen his hip was injured in a car accident. On his doctor’s recommendation he returned to the Seven-Bar-Nine ranch to recuperate by horseback riding. The misguided therapy left him with his characteristic stiff, off-balanced walk and slightly angled riding style. He left Helena High School after two years in 1918 and returned to the family ranch to work full-time as a cowboy. In 1919, Charles arranged for Cooper to attend Gallatin County High School in Bozeman, Montana, where English teacher Ida Davis encouraged him to focus on academics and participate in debating and dramatics. Cooper later called Davis “the woman partly responsible for me giving up cowboy-ing and going to college.

    In Hollywood he worked initially as a stunt cowboy:

    While his skilled horsemanship led to steady work in Westerns, Cooper found the stunt work?—?which sometimes injured horses and riders?—?”tough and cruel”. Hoping to move beyond the risky stunt work and obtain acting roles, Cooper paid for a screen test and hired casting director Nan Collins to work as his agent

  46. According to Russian film historian Harlow Robinson, building the score around a single folk tune was typical of many Russian classical composers.

    I love Khachaturian’s Piano Concerto. It was such a passionate, yet eerie, piece. It sounded alien, as in E.T., and went perfectly with the weird sci-fi I read as a kid — remember all those paperbacks with the faux-abstract-expressionist covers? So I looked into Khachaturian and discovered he was one of those Russian composers and his Piano Concerto, as well as others, was based on a folk melody. I found this hard to process. It didn’t sound like anything Peter, Paul and Mary might have sung.

    This time around I also learned that the weird, warbling sound in the second movement was an odd instrument called a flexatone. Khachaturian wanted a musical saw, but that’s apparently harder to organize.

    Here’s a rousing version played by a pianist with way long fingers who opened his collar a couple buttons to reveal a large green medallion.

    “Khachaturian Piano Concerto in D-flat major – JY Thibaudet”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZQVuQLCk9o

    “Playing the Flexatone part of the Khachaturian Piano Concerto”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGcVkuV-Yek

  48. As it happens, a few weeks ago I was following up on Mongol horsemen for some reason. I looked up “steppe” and realized that steppe is basically Russian for prairie.

    I always wondered what a steppe was.

  49. Somehow I remember Tiomkin as also the composer of “The Third Man” zither theme, but no that Anton Karas, an Austrian. Wiki says the theme was an influence on Nina Rota.

    Hard to believe by today’s standards, such as they are, but “The Third Man” theme was an international hit on the radio.

    The West was a classier place back then. I love the middle-brow culture we had going mid-20th C.

  50. The Coffeeville shootout was memorialized by the Eagles in the Doolin’ Dalton (Reprise) song:

    Go down little Dalton, it must be God’s will
    Two brothers lyin’ dead in Coffeeville.
    Two voices call to you from where they stood,
    “Lay down your law books now, they’re no damn good.”

    Then there was the James-Younger gang bank robbery in Northfield MN, gone bad, leaving two gang members shot dead and two seriously wounded. Townsmen with single shot rifles made those shots after one citizen was shot in the head by the robbers.

  51. DNW,
    Don’t forget a shout out to Mel Brooks for introducing a new generation to Count Basie’s April In Paris. (!)

  52. Molly Brown says,

    DNW,
    Don’t forget a shout out to Mel Brooks for introducing a new generation to Count Basie’s April In Paris. (!)”

    There’s yet another April song! Ha.

    And April in Paris has a number of other good, modestly uptempo jazz versions too. I think the one you are referring to is the most widely heard “jazz” cover [somebody who knows better can chime in and they won’t hurt my feelings] , and probably also the one I remember hearing on the radio – or somewhere – as a kid.

    I gravitate toward the (or one of them) Charlie Parker version, but the one I have in mind gets criticism for being a capitulation to suburban sensibilities and as being way too “sweet”. And yeah, “too much strings”. A little would have gone a long way there.

    On the other hand you can take a kind of superficially sappy song like “My Favorite Things” (redeemed by intent and being written in a minor key) and have Coltrane play it and … well …

  54. On the other hand you can take a kind of superficially sappy song like “My Favorite Things” (redeemed by intent and being written in a minor key) and have Coltrane play it and … well …

    DNW: A jazz friend, who has played professionally, remarked that, once upon a time, recreating popular songs as jazz was a standard strategy, as with Coltrane/”My Favorite Things”, Chet Baker (and others)/”My Funny Valentine”, Miles Davis/”Time After Time,” and many others.

    In 2011 Herbie Hancock devoted an album, “The Imagine Project,” to jazz verseions of rock and soul, but otherwise I haven’t noticed much recent on that front.

    In his retirement my friend is working, in his modest way, to revive that tradition.

  56. “Jonathan and Darleen: April in Paris

    And for bad measure, a bonus!: I love Paris”

    Uhhh … uh? …

    Oh!

    hahahahahaha

  57. DNW: A jazz friend, who has played professionally, remarked that, once upon a time, recreating popular songs as jazz was a standard strategy, as with Coltrane/”My Favorite Things”, Chet Baker (and others)/”My Funny Valentine”, Miles Davis/”Time After Time,” and many others.

    In 2011 Herbie Hancock devoted an album, “The Imagine Project,” to jazz verseions of rock and soul, but otherwise I haven’t noticed much recent on that front.

    In his retirement my friend is working, in his modest way, to revive that tradition.”

    Even Christmas tunes can be done.

    https://youtu.be/hakhNEWY2m0?t=166
    or
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13DfoIi176k&feature=youtu.be&list=PLCD2AF746A278E376&t=79

    Well, I found it kind of hypnotic.
    A cousin however said he would go crazy trying to listen to it.

  58. LTEC on September 24, 2019 at 3:53 pm said:
    “Although you’re grievin’, I can’t be leavin’, until I shoot Frank Miller dead.”

    This line is omitted in almost every version sung outside of the movie, and would be considered completely outrageous today.
    * * *
    Thanks so much for that information — I remember knowing the song for ages, but did NOT remember the last line, so I think the radio replays must have overwritten the movie original in my mind.

  59. Geoffrey Britain on September 24, 2019 at 7:29 pm said:
    …I suspect most were as L’Amour portrayed them but that more than a few towns were as portrayed in High Noon. Both cowardliness and bravery are part of the human condition.
    * * *
    There might be a “mood shift” as towns become more populated, and the original rootin-tootin cowboys become a minority while the less-hardened city-slickers predominate.
    So, L’Amour and Foreman can both be right.

  60. neo on September 25, 2019 at 12:13 pm said:
    The left felt it was an anti-McCarthy allegory and the right felt it was quite the opposite. …
    It’s a kind of film Rorschach test. People see many different things in it.
    * * *
    Exactly so.
    Allegories are often like that.
    The Democrats think “1984” is a warning against Republicans, and the Left thinks “The Handmaid’s Tale” is about theocratic tyranny.
    And “All in the Family” was a favorite of conservative red-necks, because they didn’t “get” that Archie was supposed to be a caricature to be mocked; they saw him as a good ol’ boy to be applauded.

  61. OldTexan – my Grandad was a cowboy, but I never realized that until after I was in college, and going through some of his old photographs, with the stories.
    By the time all us grandkids came along, he and Granny had been “town folk” for many years, although he kept a mare at the rodeo/fairground stables for many years.
    Pretty sure he and his Pa and brothers would have backed Kane.

  62. Mike K – I learn something (plural) new here every day.

    “Shane is a western novel by Jack Schaefer published in 1949. It was initially published in 1946 in three parts in Argosy magazine, and originally titled Rider from Nowhere.[1] The novel has been translated into over 30 languages,[1] and was adapted into the famous 1953 film starring Alan Ladd.[2]” – Wikipedia.

    Another favorite film, of course. I have a copy of the book, but didn’t know it started as a serial.
    FWIW, I also have “The Virginian” and have actually read it.
    The dialectical dialogue is daunting, but the story is more complex than the pulp westerns. There are at least 6 movie versions.

  63. Mike K on September 24, 2019 at 4:15 pm said:
    …
    And yet, westerns written by Karl May, who has never been in the US, were great favorites of Hitler.
    * * *
    Your link isn’t working for me, but he shows up on Wikipedia.
    I have a very old book by one of his contemporaries (May was born in 1842), which is unfortunately in a German Gothic font, so I have not read it yet, but I love the idea of Westerns in German.
    “Amerikanische Jagd- Und Reiseabenteuer” by “Armand” in the 1890 fourth edition of an 1858 original.

    That Hitler enjoyed May’s books is not their problem, anymore than it is a disparagement of “High Noon” that Bill Clinton thought it applied to him.
    An author is not responsible for his readers’ character.

  64. I have always loved Dimitri Tiomkin’s film scores, starting with The Guns of Navarone, which I watched repeatedly as a kid back in the 60’s. His musical style is very distinctive and I find his compositions are easily identifiable. He composed the scores for It’s a Wonderful Life, Lost Horizon and 55 Days at Peking as well as numerous John Wayne westerns such as The Alamo and Rio Bravo. Tiomkin and Elmer Bernstein are my favourite movie composers (the latter known for The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, To Kill a Mockingbird and numerous others). I think when mainstream classical music of the last half of the 20th Century has been deservedly forgotten, people will realize that talented composers like Tiomkin and Bernstein kept the flame alive with their wonderful film scores.

  65. “Even the badly made films with their strong sense of right and wrong purportedly had a big anti-communist impact.” – TommyJay

    Imagine how much impact such films could have in a country that purports to actually believe in right and wrong.
    Is it just a coincidence that our moral and political slide into Leftism came at the same time we were replacing our Western shows with more “modern” and “nuanced” fare?

  66. I think when mainstream classical music of the last half of the 20th Century has been deservedly forgotten, people will realize that talented composers like Tiomkin and Bernstein kept the flame alive with their wonderful film scores.

    TrueNorth: No doubt. Anyone who wonders where classical music went after all the avant musical fads arrived — atonality, serialism, aleatoricism, minimalism* and others I didn’t bother to learn about — the answer is film scores.

    *I confess a great fondness for some minimalism: Philip Glass, Terry Riley, some Steve Reich. Even though they push the repetition slider way up, interesting melodies, arrangements and rhythms are allowed.

  67. There’s fine lyricism in Dario Marianelli’s score for “Pride and Prejudice” (2004) in that regard huxley, at least to my tastes.

  68. DNW — Yeah, I didn’t get into songs which play important roles. That just seems too vast a field.

    Meanwhile for the greatest Westerns in the classic period, before the 60s, are for me The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance. I also greatly enjoy Paul Newman’s neo-James Dean Billy the Kid in The Left Handed Gun, with its memorable rendition of the line “Hey Bob.”

  69. Interesting that miklos000rosza mentioned “The Searchers”, and “Liberty Valance”, because those are two of my favorites as well. In both, John Wayne plays a hero who in many ways isn’t very heroic, and in both he ends up alone. He saves the day but doesn’t really belong among civilized people – at the end of the Searchers everyone else enters the house, while he wearily strides away, back into the wilderness that spawned him.

  70. “He saves the day but doesn’t really belong among civilized people – everyone else enters the house, while he wearily strides away, back into the wilderness that spawned him.” – richf

    Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You? You, Lieutenant Weinberg? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago, and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know — that Santiago’s death, while tragic, probably saved lives; and my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives.
    You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall — you need me on that wall.

    We use words like “honor,” “code,” “loyalty.” We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punch line.

    https://americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/specialengagements/moviespeechafewgoodmencodered.html

  71. There’s fine lyricism in Dario Marianelli’s score for “Pride and Prejudice” (2004) in that regard huxley, at least to my tastes.

    sdferr: I’ll check it out!

    Here’s a good list of great film soundtracks, which includes Tiomkin/”High Noon” and Nina Rota/”La Strada” plus some guy called Miklos Rozsa/”Double Indemnity.” Hits all the bases, or at least composers, I can think of.

    It includes my personal fave, in terms of soundtracks I actually listen to, “The Moderns” (1988), moody, jazzy French cafe music.

    https://www.scaruffi.com/music/soundtra.html

  72. sdferr: I can’t help myself — each time I see your username I try to figure out what Unix error code you are.

  73. Ha! Now you’ll have me doing it. In the interim, let’s just say it’s the Irish error code Ferrell.

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