How quickly they forget – John Wayne – one of the trure gods of the right wing – hated High Noon – some Wayne quotes taken from emanuellevy.com “In that picture, four guys come in to gun down the sheriff. He goes to the church and asks for help and the guys go, ‘Oh well, Oh. gee.’ And the women stand up and say, ‘You’re rats. You’re rats. You’re rats.’ So Cooper goes out alone.”
“It’s the most un-American thing I’ve seen in my whole life,” charged the actor, for the rugged men of the frontier, who had battled the Indians as well as nature, would not be afraid of four villains. Instead, they would have united, as they had united “to make the land habitable.”
Wayne was humiliated by the movie’s last scene, showing Cooper “putting the United States marshal’s badge under his foot and stepping on it.” Walking away from his job, as Cooper did, was inconceivable to Wayne’s commitment to responsibility and public office.””
