Buzzflash: High Noon for Justice and the Rule of Law

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A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL

It's the iconic American Western of one man taking a stand for justice and the rule of law. It's his wedding day to a beautiful, pacifist younger bride (Grace Kelly) -- and his last day as marshal in a frontier town. Gary Cooper (the laconic, lanky marshal) could leave right then to start a family, and set up a new comfortable life as a store owner.

Some interpret "High Noon" (nominated for seven Academy Awards) as a 1952 allegory of principled defiance against the era of McCarthyism, which foreshadowed the courage of Edward R. Murrow in being a lone man with the bravery to challenge and bring down the thuggish, immoral senator from Wisconsin.

Murrow's historical March 9, 1954 broadcast began the unraveling of the reign of uncorroborated witch-hunting, anti-Communist fear (and a watershed moment for broadcast journalism in America): "Our working thesis tonight is this question: If this fight against Communism is made a fight against America’s two great political parties, the American people know that one of those parties will be destroyed and the Republic cannot endure very long as a one party system. We applaud that statement and we think Senator McCarthy ought to. He said it, seventeen months ago in Milwaukee."

It was a brilliant maneuver to hoist the drunken master of intimidation by his own petard. Murrow, like Marshal Will Kane (Cooper) in "High Noon," was taking on someone who had subdued a nation (as the Miller gang did in "High Noon's" Hadleyville) with the assertion of raw power not subject to the restraint of truth, due process, justice, or the law.

Full article here: http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/editorials/143

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