The Great Opening Of HIGH NOON

With one of the greatest opening sequences in film history, Fred Zinneman’s High Noon kicks-off in an outstanding fashion and this 1952 film just gets better and better as it builds towards its climax. Zinnemann delivers one of the great westerns of all time with this brilliantly composed piece of commercial cinema.

High Noon‘s screenplay from blacklisted writer Carl Foreman packs a tremendous punch and the score from Dimitri Tiomkin is outstanding. The  iconic theme from and opening song from Tiomkin and Ned Washington is off-the-chart great and it was a huge hit in the 1950s. Everything is on-point here. 

A multi-Oscar winner (Actor, Editing, Music-Score, and Music-Song), High Noon is an outstanding achievement in tension (Peter Hyams would riff on the movie with his ’80s sci-fi thriller Outland). All the elements came together for Zinnemann and his cast and crew, culminating in a western which contains a lot of heart as well as brawn. Outstanding.