The Good

This is a classic American Film and it deserves all the acclaim it gets on DVD.

The Bad

I wish the packaging had been bolder.Fred Zinneman's High Noon ures such cinema luminaries as Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly in roles that helped to define their careers. Cooper stars as Marshal Will Kane, a man who finds himself alone against some mean varmints when the people of the town he protects turns yellow. Kane's troubles are compounded by the fact that he's not only protecting the cowardly town but also his new wife, Amy (Kelly). As you can guess, High Noon is a classic western of the highest order. Beginning with an event that will set the stage for the whole movie, this is the kind of film that keeps raising the ante of tension until the film's final denouement.

While many westerns were made, High Noon is one that effortlessly stands head and shoulders above a lot of them.

Features

Disc 1:

Audio Commentary

Featured on this track are Maria Cooper-Janis, Jonathan Foreman, Tim Zinnemann and John Ritter. All of these participants lend something interesting to the proceedings as they all come at it from different angles with different histories. The bottom line is that the listener gets to hear about about multiple aspects of High Noon's production, as well as interesting anecdotes about both Cooper and Kelly.

Disc 2:

Featurettes

The second disc of this release offers up the following featurettes:

- Inside High Noon

- Portrait Piece on the Tex Ritter Museum

- The Making of High Noon

- Behind High Noon

I put all of these featurettes together because I think they covered a lot of the same ground. They all offer a glimpse into some behind the scenes aspect of this film. Whether it's a look at the production itself, or a particular actor or production executive who was involved in its making, everything was done with a strong sense of what fans and cinema historians would want to see.

Full Length Tex Ritter Oscar Performance and Radio Broadcast

Video

4x3 - Full Screen Version. While I am sure that some Blu-ray enthusiasts will never see this movie because of its aspect ratio, I am glad that things weren't altered just to appeal to a younger, hipper audience. The print from which this DVD was taken appears to have been cleaned up some. I noticed some moments of dust during some of the scenes, but on the whole this disc looked pretty darn sharp.

Audio

Original restored Dolby Digital audio. Enhanced original restored Dolby Digital audio. English close captioned. English and spanish subtitles. The audio on this movie was pretty darn solid. While I didn't view it on a surround sound set, that made the audio that much better because I heard so much on such a lousy system.

Package

This brown and gold tinted cover features that classic image of a man about to draw a gun, as Grace Kelly's Marshal Kane walks towards him. The back cover gives us a shot of Cooper and Kelly, a Special Features listing, movie description, cast list and technical specs. Both discs in this collection are neatly stored in one amaray case.

Final Word

I loved this movie from the first frame.

I have to give Lionsgate a lot of credit because they didn't have to give this movie the treatment that they did. They could have simply put in an amaray DVD box, slapped some western themed packaging on it and called it day. Yet, they didn't do that at all. They went the extra mile as they filled this movie with extra features and made it not a one but a two disc release. While the image quality wasn't always perfect, things looked really solid on this release.

Having screened a decent amount of western movies in my time as a DVD reviewer for MovieWeb, I was pretty darn excited to finally add High Noon, one of the crown jewels of cinema (not just Western cinema) to my collection.