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Moving Pictures
Aug 15, 2025, 06:29AM

People Get Very Passionate

High Noon, The Fly, and Picnic at Hanging Rock (Cinema Survey 27).

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High Noon: Carl Foreman and Fred Zinnemann’s Red Scare Western is written about as much as it’s still seen: the favorite movie of three American Presidents (Eisenhower, Reagan, Clinton), High Noon is also the token Western “for people who don’t like Westerns.” I didn’t care for them as a kid, nor my teens, but had a great history teacher in sixth grade who showed us a solid sampling without entirely sticking to no brainers: Arsenic and Old Lace, Popeye, Oh! What a Lovely War, Bambi, Koyaanisqatsi, the opening speech from Patton, the beer garden scene from Cabaret, and High Noon, among others. I zoned out during the HUAC intro, I’m sure he talked about it—why else would we watch High Noon?—but the movie worked on its own, and I liked it enough to consider it “the one Western I liked.”

Revisiting it in 2020, all I could see was the allegory, and it was annoying; by then, I’d seen all the response and copycat films, and High Noon isn’t a touch on Rio Bravo, which Howard Hawks made because he thought High Noon made Gary Cooper look weak. His star, John Wayne, was even angrier, and less than a decade before his death, Wayne boasted that, “I’ll always be proud of running Carl Foreman out of this country.”

Now, I’m back to the movie itself: running in “real time,” at a brisk 85 minutes, High Noon works because it’s got a bananas cast—Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly (early in her career, buried in the credits), Lloyd Bridges, Lee Van Cleef, Thomas Mitchell, Katy Jurado, Jack Elam, Henry Morgan, Lon Chaney, Otto Kruger—and master cinematographer Floyd Crosby. Deep blacks against a silver sky, a town the shade of gunmetal, emptied out physically and spiritually 17 years before The Wild Bunch began by blowing up main street; here, it’s just empty, all residents hiding wherever they can, making sure they avoid sharpshooting killer Frank Miller, on a death march and set to arrive right at noon.

High Noon is full of talk and little action, and that talk is clearly reiterated from blacklist and anti-Red arguments. The sanctimony is not not-high, but again, Cooper’s such a natural movie star, one of the best ever on screen, that he validates it; Cooper and Crosby’s work keep High Noon from turning into a tract film, something for future Social Studies classes and not much else. Crossfire, the 1947 anti-anti-Semitic movie, is only known as a curio, a piece of movie history; it’s not a bad movie, but it’s certainly not great. However self-righteous it may be in places, High Noon is undeniable.

The Fly: David Cronenberg’s biggest hit, was released the same year as David Lynch’s Blue Velvet; in 1986, the two known simply as “David” by members of Generation Z, brought out their career defining films right alongside each other. Cronenberg had already made Scanners and Videodrome, and Lynch would achieve even greater fame with Twin Peaks, but it was in 1986 that their clichés were born and spread: Blue Velvet was the first significant display of a “Lynchian” aesthetic, and Cronenberg found a Hollywood marriage made in heaven with his work for hire take on The Fly. Given permission to rewrite the script, he saw in it everything he’d been working towards, made on a bigger scale than he’d ever had before. He never made another “mainstream” studio movie, probably because his preoccupations and those of Hollywood hardly ever line up. It’s a miracle that they did in 1986.

The Fly is a stunner, thrilling and tragic, a movie that hasn’t lost any of its power from exposure through pop culture osmosis; I’ve known the ending and the gist of the film since I was a little kid.

You know Jeff Goldblum isn’t going to make it. It doesn’t matter: his relationship with Geena Davis takes you right through the explosive ending, when, completely deformed on a genetic level, begs her to kill him. He can’t talk, but he can lift the barrel of a shotgun up to his head when she loses her courage and backs away. John Getz is the only other actor in the scene, and while he starts off as the clichéd overbearing (and slightly inappropriate) boss, he reveals himself as a full human being when Goldblum’s “Brundlefly” burps up some digestive acid and melts his hand away to the bone. Getz doesn’t abandon Davis, nor does he continue to disrespect the enormity of what’s happening; you hardly ever see stock “asshole” characters like this turn into people you root for, people you want to live. He’s screaming at Davis to “SHOOT IT” without hesitation, but by the end, he’s transcended his stock role, and, like Goldblum’s movie monster, becomes fully human, as he’s genetically reconstituted and blown into a million bits. I was near tears during this scene and am right now as I write this.

Cronenberg has only made one better film: Crash (A History of Violence is an easy third).

Picnic at Hanging Rock: Peter Weir’s turn-of-the-century schoolgirl chiller was revived at The Charles the day after Zach Cregger’s Weapons was released to bustling business; Monday’s screening was even more packed, a mix of fans, the curious, and everyone’s who heard of the movie but never seen it. The premise is remarkably similar to Weapons, although different in tone and execution: a group of boarding school girls go missing by a rock in the bush. Some survive, return, and are either ostracized or killed. One of the “problem children,” at least in the eyes of the battle-axe headmaster, must be killed, for she knows too much—what, exactly? Picnic at Hanging Rock never dwells on its reasons or ever allows any possibility to gain too much credence, too much evidence.

Did the girls go missing because they wanted to? Were they hypnotized, as in Cregger’s film? Did the headmaster have them sacrificed? Did they… time travel? Are they reading this right now? They’re standing right behind you—look. Weir’s film, patient and steady, brooding without ever tipping over, is enthralling, especially in this vivid 4K restoration. Never boring, ever elusive, Picnic at Hanging Rock is a must-see for anyone desperate for anything David Lynch adjacent; I was struck by the remarkable sound design and its powerful low-end, booming through Theater 1 of The Charles, the kind of detail so often missed at home. It’s a beautiful thing to have big, cheap TV’s now, but when is the sound situation going to be resolved? Sell ‘em with soundbars!

—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @MonicaQuibbits

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