ABSTRACT
On the face of it, High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952), has no business in a book on epics. It belongs to a different genre, the Western, and while it is easy enough to imagine some overlap between the Western and the epic-consider Cimarron (Wesley Ruggles, 1931), and Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948), with their overstuffed, nation-spanning narratives and spectacular large-scale action sequences-High Noon does not fit this description.2 The story is classically restrained, limited to a single day in a single town, more driven by conversation than by gunplay, and tightly (although not exclusively) focused on the experience of a single man. Christopher Palmer describes it as “markedly un-epic in character.”3 If there were such a thing as a chamber Western, this would be it.
