Ox-Bow vs. High Noon

I understand the power of High Noon. We can all identify with the lone guy who does what has to be done when everyone around him finds a way to chicken out. The problem I have always had with it is the setting. It's a classic example of what happens in dictatorships: storytellers who want to dramatize what's happening in the present time set their stories in a past time in hopes that the censors wouldn't realize what the movie was really about. In this case, the story was set in a time where it would not have happened. Anyone who lived on the frontier learned quickly how to band together to survive crises. In the film it's noted that the townspeople had supported Will Kane when this same gang invaded the town some years before. It's also said he had several deputies back then. Where would they have come from? The townspeople, of course. All the various reasons they have for not coming now don't hold up to logic: "the people upstate will think we are uncivilized if there is a fight here". What nonsense.

The same story makes much more sense in "On the Waterfront", (which was made by people who were "friendly" witnesses before HUAC), where it works because longshoremen, as tough as they are, are used to having their lives dominated by employers and unions. It makes no sense in the Old West.

The film that covers this moral territory the best and does it out west is "The Ox Bow Incident". Here the citizens are the "gang", just as they so often were. Committees of vigliance frequently took the law into their own hands and hung the first strangers they came upon in the name of "justice". They are a much more likely western scenario than the one in "High Noon".