High Noon (1952)

Gary Cooper is retiring law man Will Kane in this bona fide Western classic. On the day of his wedding (to Grace Kelly), Kane has to delay giving up the badge to face a gang of criminals who call him out. Kane finds himself deserted by his townsfolk, and must face the gang's arrival on the noon train.

High Noon ditches traditional Hollywood Western tropes - such as chases and epic scenery - for "a story about a man's conflict of conscience", as director Zinnemann put it. Made against the backdrop of the Hollywood Communist witch-hunt, High Noon is considered an allegory against blacklisting. John Wayne rejected the lead role calling the script "The most un-American thing I've ever seen in my whole life". Wayne teamed up with director Howard Hawks in 1959 to make Rio Bravo (another classic) as a retort. High Noon writer Carl Foreman, a one-time Communist party member, moved to Britain before the film's release as he was expecting to be blacklisted (which he subsequently was). Wayne was a high-profile conservative and later took credit for having "helped run [Foreman] out of the country".

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