[MarvinStinson]

High Noon was anything but leftist.

It was the leftists up North who changed the killer’s sentence of death by hanging and let him go

so he could come back and try to kill Cooper.

There would have been no story if that hadn’t happened.

[yarddog]

I agree that High Noon was not leftist and Grace Kelly was pretty enough to make it watchable by herself.

On the other hand, Louis L”Amour hated it. He said the idea of the whole town being scared and rescued by the lone hero was bunk. He said most of them would have been veterans of the Civil War and were not afraid of anything.

It is a common theme in Westerns, both movies and TV shows tho.

[Vaquero]

John Wayne told an interviewer that he considered High Noon “the most un-American thing I've ever seen in my whole life”,[33] and later teamed with director Howard Hawks to make Rio Bravo in response. “I made Rio Bravo because I didn't like High Noon,” Hawks explained. “Neither did Duke [Wayne]. I didn't think a good town marshal was going to run around town like a chicken with his head cut off asking everyone to help. And who saves him? His Quaker wife. That isn't my idea of a good Western.”

The screenplay writer was blacklisted shortly after the movie came out.

[YogicCowboy]

Wayne and others did not like the nihilist undertone, or that no one would support the lawman. That mindset is insidiously leftist, which is why (as I recall) John Wayne turned down the role.

He lived in the belly of the Commiewood beast, and was alert to subversive ideas.