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On July 24, 1952, Stanley Kramer’s High Noon was released and subsequently won 4 Oscars. Wikipedia reports that the film was “one of the first 25 films (selected) for preservation in the United States National Film Registry for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” in 1989, the NFR’s first year of existence.” As I see it, the greatness of the movie is in showing how good government depends on the performance of exceptional individuals and just how hard modern centuries make it for those individuals to want to stay in government. The heroes we need are getting harder and harder...

Gary Cooper died relatively young at sixty years of age, six days after his birthday, on the 13th May, in 1961. This was nine years after a sensational understated starring performance in High Noon, the immortal anthem to individual moral courage in the face of criminal danger. When Frank Miller, a criminal who had vowed to kill Kane, is headed back to town on the midday train on Kane's wedding day, Kane tries and fails to rally the support of the terrified towns people. Marshall Kane tells his predecessor: "I'm having trouble getting deputies." Former Marshall Martin Howe explains in...

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexican security forces fought an hour-long gun gunbattle Saturday with suspected cartel gunmen in Villa Union, a town in Coahuila state about an hour’s drive southwest of Eagle Pass, Texas, leaving at least 14 people dead, officials said. Coahuila state Gov. Miguel Angel Riquelme told local media four of the dead were police officers killed in the initial confrontation, and that several municipal workers were missing. He said the armed group stormed the town of 3,000 residents in a convoy of trucks, attacking local government offices and prompting state and federal forces to intervene. Ten alleged...

Elmo Williams, the celebrated Hollywood film editor who won an Academy Award for his clockwork, minute-by-minute efforts on the classic 1952 Gary Cooper Western High Noon, has died. He was 102. Williams, who received another Oscar nom for his editing on the 1954 sci-fi film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, died peacefully Wednesday at his home in Brookings on the coast of Oregon ...

How to Win a Three-Way Gunfight Truels are things guaranteed to make any Western fifty percent better — by adding a third person to a duel. Each person can choose his or her target, and the worst person might very well be the winner — provided they play it smart. Learn how to win yourself a truel, gunslinger-style. Game theorists have thought about the problem of duels for a long time. As much as the Old West was depicted as a lawless place where anything might happen, it was also known for hanging its criminals high — which meant that...

Democrat leadership in the House wants to pass a government run health care bill before Veteran's Day, and it's up to us to make sure this prescription for socialized medicine doesn't pass. If you can come to Washington to look your Member straight in the eye and tell them to keep their hands off your heatlh care, do it. If you can't make it to Washington, go to your Member's district office. And, if you can't do that at least call and email. Also, Americans for Prosperity is organizing a House Call to legislators district offices on Thursday at noon,...

The catastrophe, when it comes, will be beautiful at first. It is a balmy evening in late September 2012. Ever since the sun set, the dimming skies over London have been alive with fire. Pillars of incandescent green writhe like gigantic serpents across the skies. Sheets of orange race across the horizon during the most spectacular display of the aurora borealis seen in southern England for 153 years. And then, 90 seconds later, the lights start to go out. Not the lights in the sky - they will dazzle until dawn - but the lights on the ground. Within an...

Morose that there hasn't been another terrorist attack on American soil for seven long years, liberals were ecstatic when Hurricane Gustav was headed toward New Orleans during the Republican National Convention last week. The networks gave the hurricane plenty of breaking-news coverage -- but unfortunately it was Hurricane Katrina from 2005 they were covering. On Keith Olbermann's Aug. 29 show on MSNBC, Michael Moore said the possibility of a Category 3 hurricane hitting the United States "is proof that there is a God in heaven." Olbermann responded: "A supremely good point." Actually, Olbermann said that a few minutes later to...

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Mexican national Jose Ernesto Medellin has been executed by lethal injection, according to Texas prison officials. Jose Ernesto Medellin was put to death for his part in the gang rape and murder of two Texas girls. Corrections spokeswoman Michelle Lyons said Medellin died at 9:57 CT. The U.S. Supreme Court denied the last-ditch appeal of a Mexican national on Texas' death row late Tuesday, paving the way for him to be executed for a pair of brutal slayings, state corrections officials said. Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokeswoman Michelle Lyons said about 9:15 p.m. that the court...

In a modern-day duel, a restaurant owner and a Colorado security guard simultaneously drew their stun guns and simultaneously zapped each other during a weekend spat over an illegally parked van. The incident is raising questions over whether private citizens should be allowed to buy stun guns to protect themselves. The fight began on Saturday night when Harvey Epstein confronted two private security guards for clamping a metal boot on a company van parked outside his Mexican restaurant in Boulder, Colo. The situation escalated when Mr. Epstein putted out a pair of bolt cutters in an apparent attempt to remove...

In the classic Westerns, before the genre got all psychological and had people kissing everything except their horse and girl friend, there was a mandatory scene with a mandatory line. Early in the movie the bad guy would confront the good guy and say, “This town ain’t big enough for the two of us.” The rest of the movie consisted of everyone choosing sides, then the final, shoot-em-up, in which the good guy (against all odds) prevails. The classic version is Gary Cooper in High Noon. More complex is Clint Eastwood in The Unforgiven. The Byzantine version, in which a...

Foreman on the set of High Noon. It's been 50 years since the release of High Noon, a film that became an American classic not only for stylistic innovations, but as an allegory about the McCarthy era. A documentary scheduled by PBS for September looks at the Hollywood figures behind High Noon and draws explicit parallels between the movie's sheriff who stands alone against the forces of evil and the screenwriter, the late Carl Foreman. During production of the western, Foreman was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee and subsequently blacklisted. "Darkness at High Noon: The Carl Foreman...

The consensus of film critics is that three of the four best Western movies ever made were those starring John Wayne: Stagecoach (1939), Red River (1948), and The Searchers (1956). (The fourth is Gary Cooper’s 1952 High Noon.) Many critics consider The Searchers to be one of the greatest movies, period, and has been the subject of numerous academic seminars. It is a lesser known John Wayne Western, however, that contains an important lesson for our relations with the Moslem world. Directed by John Ford, made in 1948, entitled She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, it stars Wayne as Capt. Nathan...

Some time ago, in my eternal quest to set the record straight, I suggested that the true hero of the motion picture industry wasn’t Thomas Edison or D.W. Griffith, not Chaplin or Keaton, not Jack Warner or Louis B. Mayer, but the anonymous fellow who first came up with the notion of putting salt on popcorn, thus turning packing material into a concession stand bonanza that costs more per-pound than lox and caviar put together. But there are others who, more often than not, get overlooked while far too much praise is lavished on actors and directors. I refer to...

As some newspapers don't know quite yet where to go with the SwiftVet stories, and others are blantantly shilling for John Kerry, perhaps it is time to get this matter settled. By a duel. Not of guns or swords. Of lie detectors. That's right, lie detectors. Steve Gardner, you have throw down the gauntlet. You have accused John Kerry of lying. He has his surrogates attacking you. It is time for you to make the challenge to meet him on a live television event and each man submit to a lie detector test. Perhaps the head of the FBI will...

Western culture Like Gary Cooper in High Noon, President Bush has faced choices in which Eden was not an option IF LIKELY DEMOCRATIC NOMINEE JOHN KERRY BEATS President Bush in November, it may be because Americans don't watch 1950s Westerns any more. Liberals could agree with that statement and say, "Hurrah, we are more sophisticated." But my guess is that we don't understand what it is to be a tragic hero—and that's what a good president in an age of terrorism has to be. Here's a note from a student who's not a Kerry fan but is "very disillusioned about...

<p>August 6, 2003 -- Our presidents may be different as night and day, but they're united when it comes to movies - it turns out that war flicks, shoot-'em-ups and light romantic comedies are tops in the White House. In fact, "High Noon" the classic western with Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly, ranks as the one of the most-screened films at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. over the past 50 years.</p>

Filed at 3:35 p.m. ET LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A ghost is haunting Hollywood -- the specter of the long-abandoned anti-communist blacklist of the 1950s. In a testament to the staying power of the controversial list, the widow of famed liberal film producer Stanley Kramer is thinking of suing the Public Broadcasting Service for a documentary she calls ``a hatchet job'' on her late husband and his relationships with a blacklisted writer of that era. Karen Sharpe Kramer says that the documentary, ``Darkness at High Noon: The Carl Foreman Documents,'' scheduled to air on PBS Sept. 17, defames her husband...