High noon - 1952

This is a great movie. It's very unusual for a western movie, in the way that nobody goes anywhere. What I mean is, it's 1hour and 23 minutes long more or less, and only after 1hour and 10minutes the bad guy arrives, and the final showdown can take place. This is not about adventures and battles, it's about people and how they are...  I love the beginning, where the three men meet without a word, under the 'High Noon' song, and also the fact that throughout the movie there's the music of that song.
Marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper) just got married to Amy (Grace Kelly) when he gets the news that Frank Miller is coming back to town. Kane arrested him for murder five years ago; he should have been hanged, but it was first changed to life, then he was let free. Now is coming to have his revenge. Kane should have retired as Marshal, but the new one hasn't arrived yet.  Everybody wants him to leave, Amy begs him to go away, but he feels he has to stay. Miller will go after him and he doesn't want to spend his life running away, and also he wants to protect the city that he made a decent place for families by getting rid of people like Miller, and also protect his friends. Unfortunately he only has one deputy: a stupid, jealous guy who acts like a child, and quits refusing to help him. Kane starts asking the townspeople for help, for new special deputies to help him in this trouble. Miller has already three friends waiting for him: his brother Ben plus Pierce and Jack Colby (Lee Van Cleef). Kane tells them he needs men, but the result is: one "friend" has his wife tell him he isn't home, and hides; someone tells him it's his trouble not theirs; someone tells him they pay him to take care of these things, why should they take care of it themselves?!? ; there's even who thinks that business was better with Miller and his friends around... He goes around the city, receiving one disappointment after another. He's desperate. Miller will arrive with the noon train, and Amy will leave with the same. It's almost noon and he hasn't found a simgle man willing to fight with him, to help him in any way.
Noon comes, and Kane finds himself in a deserted town. Miller and his friends go looking for him. Amy is already on the train, but as she hears the first gunshot she can't stay sit anymore. She runs towards the town. She's worried he might be the dead one. She sees Kane has already killed one, then two. She watches while the remaining two keep stalling him from two different directions. She once saw his young brother killed and now she's against violence and guns, but she finds the strength to help him. Nobody knows she's there, so she takes a gun and kills the last of Miller's men. Now aware of her presence, Miller takes her hostage to force Kane to come to the open, but at that point she fights him and frees herself, so Kane can shoot him.
Only now that the four men are all dead the town fills with people. Kane looks at them and the final scene is just perfect. He doesn't exactly throw his badge, he takes it and lets it fall on the floor with despise, but the despise is all for them, for their false friendship and their cowardice. He loved his town and his friends, but now he goes away with Amy without a single word for them.
I didn't know director Fred Zinnemann, but this movie is perfect, and Gary Cooper is great, how he gets more scared as the time passes, how his disappointment towards his friends grows with his desperation, his knowledge that he'll probably die, facing alone four dangerous men.
I liked that when ex-girlfriend Helen told Amy that 'if Kane was her man, she wouldn't leave him, she would take up a gun and fight with him', Amy stands by her anti-violence attitude, but when the moment comes, and she hears a shot, she runs to him, and with pain and difficulty takes up a gun and helps him.
Four men couldn't have stand a chance without a town prepared for their arrival, and yet Kane was left alone. The usual: most of the people in the world are pathetic cowards, that's why people easily turn against each other or against weak, easy targets, instead of going after who they're really angry at. It happens every day. Unfortunately.