In 1951, after twenty-five years in the business, Cooper's professional reputation declined, and he was dropped from the Motion Picture Herald's list of the top ten box-office performers. Most people now thought he was "only good in a western broad-brimmed hat." The producer Stanley Kramer, who owned a small independent company that released films through Columbia Pictures, was desperately seeking a star for the low-budget film High Noon. After a series of elaborate and expensive flops, Cooper was receptive to a project with a good story and a complex character. He liked the script by Kramer's partner, Carl Foreman, agreed to cut his fee of $275,000 per picture and do the film (getting the same deal as the director, Fred Zinnemann) for $60,000 plus a percentage of the profits.
        Kramer, Foreman and Zinnemann all thought Cooper would be perfect for the troubled character of Marshal Will Kane, whose idealism opposed indifference and evil. Gaunt and slightly stooped, with ulcers and a bad back, he rode with difficulty and walked like a tired panther. Kramer later condescended to Cooper and, emphasizing his heroic image, underestimated his skill and talent: "He was not my favorite actor, my kind of actor. But Cooper belonged in High Noon. That part was made for him, that pebble-kicking, nonreacting, all underneath kind of man who is tight-jawed and restrained. Cooper was interesting to me, but I don't think that what he did was necessarily acting. I think there are a certain number of actors in the world who are not actors. They are merely people who can be believed." Cooper knew otherwise. He felt that his whole background as well as acting career had prepared him to play citizen Kane: "I saw in it a graphic presentation of everything dad had taught me at home." His comments show his natural feel for the part and his grasp of the issues: "My concept of a sheriff [i.e., marshal] was that of a man who represented the people. Alone he could never do his job—he had to have help. The sheriff I was asked to play was different than any I'd ever known or heard about because Sheriff Kane had to stand alone, literally, against the lawless. It was a challenging role—and I loved it.'"
        Kramer bought John Cunningham's story "The Tin Star," published in Collier's in December 1947, for $25,000. In the story a murderer, unexpectedly released from prison, exacts revenge on the marshal who'd captured him by gunning him down on his wedding day. In the movie the marshal kills the gunman and his gang. The budget of High Noon, only $750,000, meant the film had to be made with the greatest speed, concentration and economy. Zinnemann had ten days of rehearsal and shot the picture from September 5 to October 6, 1951, on a tight thirty-two-day schedule. The cast and crew started early every day—beginning with the church scene at the Columbia Pictures ranch in Burbank—and worked late into the evening. The outdoor scenes were shot on location in Sonora, in the High Sierras, where Cooper had made The Virginian and For Whom the Bell Tolls. Zinnemann's meticulous planning enabled him to make four hundred shots in only four weeks.
        The film is set in Hadleyville, population 650, in the New Mexico Territory, on a hot summer Sunday in about 1880. Though the town was fictitious, the name recalled Mark Twain's story "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg" (1900), a satiric attack on complacency, hypocrisy and greed  in a small American town. The picture takes place between 10:3? A.M. and 12:15 P.M.—slightly longer than the eighty-four-minute running time—and observes the classical unities of time, place and action. The cinematographer, Floyd Crosby, gave a vivid description of how Zinnemann directed the dialogue, movement, camera and lighting in the film: "He would get the actors together . . . and he'd start to rehearse a scene. He'd rehearse the dialogue and get the thing going the way he wanted. Then he'd start to block out the scene to get the movements, then I would come in and the rest of the crew, and would watch how the scene was blocked out, we'd get the marks for the actors, and whatever camera moves, we'd mark where he wanted the camera.  He'd very often take a [view] finder—lay it out through the finder, if he had camera moves. And then he'd turn the set over to me and we'd light it with the stand-ins."
        Using black-and-white film (which was cheaper than color), Zinnemann tried to achieve the effect of old newsreels. He studied Mathew Brady's Civil War photographs, and made the flat light and bright sky duplicate the grainy texture of an austere town and windblown street, stripped to their bare essentials. The low-angle shots of the empty railroad tracks anticipated the fatal arrival of the train, and sharp cuts rather than slow dissolves intensified the pace. They wanted gritty realism and, as Crosby said: "decided right from the beginning to avoid pretty photography: not to filter down the skies, to have hot fairly white skies, and make this town look as hot and crummy and dusty and unattractive as a small western town was. . . . We tried to keep it as stark and as natural and as unobtrusive [as possible]." Zinnemann also revealed how he got the desired effects: "We were very careful to omit all clouds in our outdoor shots. In most westerns, beautiful cloud formations are considered de rigueur. But we wanted to emphasise the flatness, the emptiness of the land and inertia of everybody and everything. To contrast all that with the movements of the marshal, we dressed Gary Cooper all in black, so that when his lonely figure issued forth into the stark, bright stillness, his destiny seemed even more poignant."
        The director used the same stark camera work on Cooper's face as he had on the landscape. "We deliberately used flat lighting for Cooper," Zinnemann said, "to make him look as tired and as old as we could, which was a great departure for a western hero," who was always supposed to seem dashing and romantic.  The extreme close-ups and minimal make-up, showing every line and wrinkle of his haggard face, revealed his fear. Zinnemann got the right performance from Cooper, an enormously experienced actor, in one to three takes, and portrayed his gradual change from a well-dressed bridegroom to a disheveled and wounded lawman.
        Unlike Task Force, in which Cooper was late and slow, dissatisfied with the script and with his own performance, he got along perfectly with Zinnemann and cooperated fully on the picture. He worked long hours under difficult conditions, and the film remained right on schedule. Between takes the affable star would chat with the crew or snooze under a tree. He had recently had a hernia operation, and threw his back out while rehearsing the wedding scene and lifting Grace Kelly onto a ledge. Though it was difficult for him, he did the fistfight with Lloyd Bridges without a double. Cooper admired the realism of High Noon and contrasted it to the conventional cowboy movie in which the hero is absurdly superhuman: "Westerns get away with lots of beating up and shooting—but it's so phony, nobody believes in it. A guy can stand up and take a couple of .45 slugs in the belly, and then turn around and shoot a whole posse, or he can take a dozen punches, then roll over and beat up the other guy."
        Cooper's performance impressed the director and screenwriter. Zinnemann, noting how the camera loved him, said that he was marvelous when he had the right part and could act in character. Foreman was even more enthusiastic: "His own character and integrity shone through the image he portrayed on the screen. . . . He was very likely the best film actor in the world. He had mastered the requirements of the camera better than anyone else I know. He communicated—the hallmark of a really great actor."
        Cooper's co-star, the twenty-one-year-old Grace Kelly, also played a character who was close to her age and background. She had had only a small role in one movie, Fourteen Hours (1951), and was acting in summer stock in Denver. Kramer hired her, on a hunch and without a test, for a few hundred a week. The contrast between the rough, experienced marshal and his awkward, straitlaced bride was extremely effective. She was ideal for the civilized Quaker girl, out of her element, unaware of the dangerous currents swirling beneath the surface, a foreigner in the western wilderness. "She was very, very wooden," Zinnemann said, "which fitted perfectly, and her lack of experience and a sort of gauche behaviour was to me very touching—to see this prim Easterner in the wilds of the Burbank Columbia back lot—it worked very well."
         Kelly said she preferred older, more experienced men and was grateful to Cooper for his professional advice: "He's the one who taught me to relax during a scene and let the camera do some of the work. On stage you have to emote not only for the front rows, but for the balcony too, and I'm afraid I overdid it. He taught me that the camera is always in the front row, and how to take it easy." Noting that Kelly combined Rocky's wealthy background with Neal's youth and beauty, and recognizing her potential. Cooper "thought she looked pretty and different. And that maybe she'd be somebody. She looked educated, and as if she came from a nice family." Dressed in slacks and loafers, Kelly drove around the Mother Lode country with Cooper in his sleek silver jaguar.
        Kelly’s prim and virginal looks belied a woman whose passion matched Cooper's. One of her acting teachers, Don Richardson, remembered that she was astonishingly eager for sex. On the night they first met, "we went over to my place. I started a fire, and within forty minutes we were in bed together. It was an amazing sight, seeing a girl as beautiful as Grace lying naked in my bed." Three years later, during the making of High Noon, Cooper told a friend that he was having an affair with Kelly, who was sometimes indiscreet: "when Grace came up to him, just the way she looked at him you could tell she was melting. She'd embarrass him, sometimes, by coming over and putting her arms around him and being obvious in front of other people."  [Cooper’s former lover, Patricia] Neal confirmed the affair with the offhand dismissal, "Listen, she slept with them all!"
        When the affair had ended, Cooper, no longer impressed by her education and nice family, "imitated Grace Kelly's snooty way of speaking and would put his nose in the air—saying it was one of her gestures." He also commented rather ungallantly on the contrast between her frosty demeanor and passionate sexuality: "Looks like she could be a cold dish with a man until you got her pants down and then she'd explode."  In High Noon, however, there's a powerful contrast—as there had been with Lupe Velez and Rocky in real life — between Katy Jurado, the dark, sensual mistress, and Grace Kelly, the restrained and elegant bride who replaces her.
 
 

        In Cunningham's story the marshal is called Deane, but when Jurado had trouble pronouncing it, the name was changed. The hero's first name suggests his will to defy his wife, face his enemies and defeat them. Kane (Cain, the biblical murderer) suggests the dark side of his character: his old affair with Helen Ramirez (Jurado), the men he'd killed while enforcing the law, his capacity for violence. The film begins as three silent horsemen ride into town behind the titles. Tex Ritter, the popular cowboy star, sings the mournful ballad "Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darlin' / On This Our Weddin' Day," which sets the desperate tone and outlines the conflict before the story actually begins.
        Kane (Cooper) blinks and gulps nervously at his wedding to Amy (Kelly) and gives her a shy peck on the cheek as the last ominous words of the ceremony, "till death do you part," suddenly become an immediate possibility. Frank Miller, whom Kane had sent to prison and who was supposed to hang for murder, has been pardoned. His three gang members have already arrived and he's coming in on the noon train to take revenge. It's likely that Kane will not live long enough to consummate his marriage. "They're making me run," he tells Amy. "I never run from anybody before. .. . I've got to [go back]. That's the whole thing." Amy, a Quaker, whose father and brother were killed by guns, intensifies the moral crisis by declaring she won't be around when the fight is over: "I mean it! If you won't go with me now—I'll be on that train when it leaves here."
        The conflict between the woman's plea for safety and the man's sense of honor is exactly the same as in Cooper's The Virginian (1929):
 

Molly:          We can go away—I'll go with you—anywhere.

Virginian:   You mean run away? Where could a man go? You can't run away from yourself. I got to stay.

Molly:          But you can't stay just to kill—or be killed.

Virginian:   You don't think I want to do this?

Molly:          Everybody knows you're not a coward.

Virginian:   No. Molly, there's more to it than that.

Molly:          It's just your pride. Because you've got some idea about your personal honor.

Virginian:   I don't know what you call it—but it's somethin' in the feelin's of a man—deep down inside.
                      Something a man can't go back on.

        High Noon is about duty, self-respect, conscience, honor and the relation of character to destiny. But it's also a political allegory that reflected Carl Foreman's personal experience. Born in Chicago in 1914 and trained as a lawyer. Foreman made military documentaries during the war. In 1948-50, just before High Noon, he wrote the screenplays for four extraordinary films: Home of the Brave, Champion, Young Man with a Horn and The Men (Marion Brando's debut), directed by Zinnemann.
        In 1951, after a four-year hiatus, HUAC resumed its investigation of Communist subversion in Hollywood. At the height of the Cold War and the hysteria engendered by McCarthyism in America, the committee was now more popular and powerful, more vicious and destructive than when Cooper had testified in 1947. Foreman and his wife had joined the Party in Hollywood but dropped out in disillusionment in 1942. Subpoenaed by HUAC in April 1951, while he was writing the script, he was called to Washington to testify on September 24, while working as associate producer during the shooting of the film. Explaining his feelings. Foreman said: "During the so-called McCarthy period here in Hollywood, my problem was that I felt very alone. I wasn't on anybody's side. I was not a member of the Communist Party at that time, so I didn't want to stand with them, but obviously it was unthinkable for me to be an informer. I knew I was dead; I just wanted to die well."
        Foreman knew in April that he'd be blacklisted after refusing to cooperate with HUAC. So he rewrote the script and transformed it into a portrayal of how fear affected people in Hollywood. In the film, he calls Hadleyville (or Hollywood) "a dirty little village in the middle of nowhere." Foreman saw himself in Will Kane, abandoned by everyone and left alone to fight the battle for law, civil rights and justice. "So much of the script became comparable to what was happening," Foreman later wrote. "There are many scenes taken from life. One is a distillation of meetings I had with partners, associates, and lawyers. And there's the scene with the man who offers to help and comes back with his gun. 'Where are the others?' he asks. There are no others,' says Cooper. . - - I used a western background to tell the story of a community corrupted by fear, with the implications I hoped would be obvious to almost everyone who saw the film, at least in America."
        Both Kramer and Cooper approved the changes that sharpened the political meaning of the film. But they adopted very different attitudes to Foreman after he'd testified and taken what was known as "the diminished Fifth." Foreman (unlike the Hollywood Ten) agreed to answer questions and denied he was currently a member of the Party, but he would not state if he'd been a member in the past and refused to name names. When Foreman was blacklisted, Kramer and the studio executives—fearful of their investments and careers—tried to save the picture at the box office by severing their connections with Foreman. Cooper and Zinnemann—like their main backer, Bruce Church, a prosperous California farmer—remained loyal to Foreman.
        Though allowed to keep credit for his screenplay. Foreman was dropped as associate producer. Kramer publicly disavowed him a few days after he'd appeared before the committee, and later that year signed a four-picture deal at Columbia with Edward Dmytryk. (One of the Hollywood Ten, Dmytryk had served his jail sentence, then named names and was "cleared" to work again in Hollywood.) Foreman, in a restrained attack on his old friend, explained : "I got kicked out of my own company by Kramer. We had a contract with Columbia. As a group there was no way our films could have been attacked for being subversive. Instead Columbia said the pressures were too great. I'm not talking only about the right-wingers, who told Kramer. . . to get me to cooperate with HUAC. If Stanley had had the guts to ride it out we might have won—Gary Cooper wanted to invest. But Stanley was scared. In the crunch he said he was not prepared to have his career destroyed by my misguided liberalism."
        In High Noon, when Jonas Henderson (Thomas Mitchell) tells the church congregation, before capitulating to fear—"It's our problem. . . . We got to have the courage to do the right thing"—he means (in political terms) that it's not only the victim's problem, but society's as well.  Everyone urges Kane to leave town and give in to Miller's gang instead of fighting it. Everyone is fearful and deserts him when he seems doomed. In a similar way, people in Hollywood had rejected those associated with Communist views, not out of principle, but out of fear.  Blacklisting was the equivalent of destroying the good men and letting HUAC, the evil outsiders, rule the town.
        During this crisis Cooper, like his father, revealed the liberal strain in his conservative thought. In a fine consistency between screen role and real character. Cooper—as if to atone for his appearance as a "friendly" witness—showed considerable moral courage by supporting Foreman. By the time of the second HUAC investigation of 19? I, Foreman had "set him straight" about many crucial political matters, and he now had a much clearer understanding of how HUAC had persecuted innocent people and destroyed many lives. Pat Neal, a liberal, also helped persuade Cooper to support Foreman. "You mustn't let him down," she said. "You must help him when he's in trouble."
        Foreman wrote that in 1951, the most difficult time to support an accused and then blacklisted writer. Cooper "put his whole career on the block in the face of the McCarthyite witch-hunters who were terrorizing Hollywood." After Foreman was subpoenaed in April, "Cooper was immediately subjected to a violent underground pressure campaign aimed at getting him to leave the film, and he was told that unless he agreed to do so he, too, would be blacklisted in Hollywood for the rest of his life. But Cooper believed in me. He saw it through." After Foreman had testified in September and been abandoned by Kramer, Cooper called Foreman at home and asked him how he could help. When Foreman said he was going to form his own production company. Cooper replied: "Count me in—now. Use my name. I mean it." And he publicly announced: "I like and admire Carl Foreman and am delighted to be in business with him." Cooper was then so popular that even Hedda Hopper couldn't crucify him.
        But Louis Mayer and Walter Wanger warned Cooper that he might never get another decent role if he didn't back off. Foreman later explained that their partnership was also "prevented by the pressure of the Hollywood blacklist. Cooper came under severe attack from John Wayne and Ward Bond, as well as others in the so-called Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, as well as Warner Bros. and various right-wing publications, and I released him from his commitment in order to avoid damage to his career." Realizing that they could never establish a business in this hostile climate. Foreman told Cooper: "I know. Nobody can hold up against this. . . not even you." Though Cooper was finally forced to admit defeat, the grateful Foreman declared: "He was the only big one who tried. The only one."
        Foreman was nominated for an Academy Award for best screenplay.  He emigrated to England in May 1952 and wrote many scripts, including The Bridge on the River Kwai, for which he received no credit. Writing to Cooper from London in June 1957, Foreman reaffirmed their friendship and his desire to work together on another film: "You know how much I have wanted to do another picture with you. I hope this will still be possible. I have some very exciting things coming up after Stella, and it would be my dearest wish that one of them should be the means of our reunion.”

        Despite its taut script, superb direction and effective cinematography, High Noon received a terrible audience response at the previews. Kramer brought in the film editor Elmo Williams to rescue it, and he gave the final form to what is now considered a flawless film. Williams took the rhythm of the picture from Cooper's slow drawl and stiff walk. He trimmed Kelly's role and cut the peripheral stories (which took place outside the town) about characters coming to help Kane, and had the idea of periodically cutting to the clocks to build up suspense. Williams explained how he also increased the importance of sound: "What I wanted to do with the end was to play lonely, simple sounds against the sudden, loud, staccato gunfire. So I have a fly buzzing around in the office, I have the scratch of Cooper's pen as he's writing his last will and testament, I have the ticking of the clock—single, isolated sounds, always with Cooper working and listening for the train." Kramer shot the film at Columbia but planned to release it through United Artists. He thought Harry Cohn, the head of the studio, wouldn't understand the picture and refused to let him see it. Cohn sent his car, with fake "instructions" from Kramer to get the film and bring it to his house for a private screening. When Kramer confronted Cohn about the theft, the mogul coolly replied: "It doesn't matter, since the film's a piece of crap anyway.”
        The press and public were more perceptive. Though Pravda predictably lambasted High Noon as "a glorification of the individual" who triumphs without popular support, the American reviewers appreciated the film's artistry. Hollis Alpert in the Saturday Review wrote: "They have generated suspense . . . they have kept the talk. . . to a minimum, and the film, visually, has been put together like a carefully wrought mosaic." Time, agreeing that "Zinnemann's direction wrings the last ounce from the scenario with a sure sense of timing and sharp, clean cutting," called it "a taut, sense-making horse-opera that deserves to rank with Stagecoach and The Gunfighter.”
        High Noon grossed $3.75 million in America and eventually earned $18 million worldwide, and Cooper was said to have earned $600,000 from this film. He'd been nominated three times for best actor, and won an Academy Award for his role in Sergeant York. High Noon, for which he won a second Oscar in 1953, was a far greater performance and his finest film. He'd met John Wayne by chance while making Blowing Wild in Mexico and asked Wayne to represent him at the ceremony. Cooper had once turned down Stagecoach, and Wayne, accepting the award on his behalf, now declared:"I'm going back and find my business manager and agent, producer and three name writers and find out why I didn't get High Noon instead of Cooper."
        Cooper's second Oscar finally made people realize that he was one of the most subtle actors of his time. He later said, with characteristic modesty: "My whole career has been one of extreme good fortune. I think I'm an average actor. . . . In acting you can do something and maybe . . .some people think it's fine, but you know inside of you that it can be done better. . . . You don't feel that you really attained a goal in the acting business; you always feel that you're still learning." Rocky related his restrained, low-keyed style to his fundamental shyness: "Acting embarrassed Gary. He disliked calling attention to himself. That's how he developed his slow-motion style: by perfecting the absolute minimum. Instead of laughing roguishly, he smiled quietly. Rather than yell or shout in a role, he preferred clenching his teeth and talking in a whisper."
        The English screenwriter Penelope Gilliatt emphasized Cooper's authoritative presence, which had evolved from his Montana background and experience as a stunt rider: "He possessed to a rare degree the instinctive physical style that is part of the heroic actor's equipment." James Harvey concentrated on the disturbing aspects of his character beneath his striking appearance: "Cooper was a man of extraordinary beauty: a troubled beauty, with expressive wounded-animal eyes, with suggestions of cold mischief in them at times, of dumb suffering sensuality at others. . . . The eyes are so stricken, the face so lean and taut and clenched at the jaw when he is young, so collapsed when he is older. In repose, the beauty seems authentically tragic." The screenwriter-director Richard Brooks stressed Cooper's authenticity and riveting self-assurance: " 1 think he's a great movie actor.' 'Why?' 'Because you're looking at him, no matter who else is talking, because when he reaches for a gun, if he's playing in a Western, you believe he's touched that gun before. He works at it. He has your full attention. Not only that, but he can make you feel something, something visceral, something deep, something that matters. He is who he plays.”

        High Noon inspired two important films that reacted against its moral and political message. On the Waterfront (1954) was written by Budd Schulberg and directed by Elia Kazan, who had both appeared before HUAC in 1951 and (unlike Cooper and Foreman) named names. Their political allegory justified their own betrayals by having the stevedore hero, Marion Brando, inform on and condemn his former friends and union comrades. A friendly witness, he testifies against Johnny Friendly and other racketeers (a false analogy to the Communists) before the Waterfront Crime Commission (HUAC) for the greater good of society.  In a self-serving effort to vindicate their own behavior, the traitor becomes a hero. As Victor Navasky wrote, Schulberg and Kazan created "a context in which the naming of names is the only honorable thing to do—the maximum case for informing."
        John Wayne and Howard Hawks responded more directly to High Noon in Rio Bravo (1959). Though Wayne had accepted Cooper's Oscar, he hated the film. He had also attacked Cooper for supporting Foreman, whose only "crime" was refusing to betray his friends. As late as his Playboy interview of 1971, the unregenerate Wayne alluded to the infamous committee and called High Noon "the most un-American thing I've ever seen in my whole life." Inventing a scene that was never in the script in order to impugn Foreman's patriotism, Wayne also claimed: "The last thing in the picture is ole Coop putting the United States marshal's badge under his foot and stepping on it. I'll never regret having helped run Foreman out of this country."
        Howard Hawks, who'd made three films with Cooper, agreed with Wayne that High Noon was not authentic and that a real sheriff would never have to ask for help. Hawks exclaimed: "It's phony. The fellow's supposed to be good. He's supposed to be good with a gun. He runs around like a wet chicken trying to get people to help him. Eventually his Quaker wife saves his guts. That's ridiculous. The man wasn't a professional." Hawks also asked, in the most simple-minded way: "What did he have to have help for? Why didn't he just go out and shoot?"
        Rio Bravo is a derivative and grossly inferior version of High Noon. Angie Dickinson, in the equivalent of Grace Kelly's role, provides the love interest; Walter Brennan, talkative and with the same high cackle as in To Have and Have Not, brings comic relief; and there's even, like Katy Jurado, a Mexican hotelkeeper. An antagonist tells Wayne, who's called Chance and is willing to take one, "You talk awful big for a man who's all alone." Wayne's biographers simplistically wrote: "Every inch a Hawks hero. Chance does not decry his fate or scour his town in search of help. He simply does his job, stoically and without fuss. In the process his friends respond. Without asking for it, he receives help in every crisis, and during the course of the film he is saved by a drunken friend, a crippled old man, a young gunslinger, a dance-hall girl, and a Mexican hotel operator." Wayne, all bluster and bombast, rejects offers from the frightened citizens, telling them: "This is no job for amateurs." But Cooper is alone in High Noon while Wayne has three deputies—the drunken Dean Martin, the lame Walter Brennan and the youthful Ricky Nelson—in Rio Bravo. Cooper asks for help but doesn't need it; Wayne doesn't ask for help but gets and needs it.
        The film critic Andrew Sarris, attempting to argue the case for Rio Bravo, wrote that "Wayne accepts his responsibility without any of Cooper's soul-searching and without passing off responsibility to society. . . . While Cooper is upset because an old ex-sheriff (Lon Chancy, Jr.) will not join him at the barricades, Wayne refuses the assistance of Ward Bond because Bond is not good enough with a gun. . . . [Zinnemann] spends most of the film on the pathos of Cooper's helplessness, and then denies Cooper any sensible defense against three [i.e., four] gunslingers who want to kill him."  But Cooper's anguished soul-searching, opposed to Wayne's mindless machismo, is precisely what makes High Noon a fine film. Cooper's defense—successful, if not "sensible"—is his self-reliance.
        Unlike Wayne, born and bred in Iowa, Cooper was an authentic westerner who didn't have to be taught to ride, carry a gun or walk like a cowboy. He had been doing these things since boyhood. Compared to the gentle but capable Cooper, Wayne was a bully and a boor. He always played a shallow, superhuman hero who solved every crisis with a punch or a shot. Wayne hated Cooper's admission of defeat, but was incapable of expressing his inner conflict and torment. Rio Bravo, as Cooper said of conventional Westerns, was "so phony, nobody believes in it"; High Noon transcended the conventions of the genre and was the greatest Western ever made.