“HIGH NOON”: Saw this last week at the American City Diner. Good movie (and good music, which is still stuck in my head). Very strange to watch right now, since it plays like a pro-invading-Iraq tract. The situation actually seems much more analogous to US vs. Iraq than to the Cold War context in which the movie was originally made. You can find slams on the UN, the US Council of Catholic Bishops (or any other Christian group that can neither condemn the use of force nor muster courage), and people who argue that Dubya is heading to Baghdad to work out his personal issues with his father. Now, I still adhere to the tentatively anti-war-on-Iraq position I held before I saw the movie; I’m just noting that the pro-war message is unavoidable. I disliked Amy Kane; not sure if I was supposed to. Her relationship with hero-husband Will was not fleshed out well–at the beginning, it seemed like there was some pre-existing tension between them (witness his reluctance to embrace her in public), but that was never either explained or played out. The Mexican senora was a stereotype trying to be an archetype, but I took to her anyway. The minor characters aren’t as well-developed as in, say, “The Manchurian Candidate” (where even bit players get distinctive personalities), but almost–they’re unusually distinctive, which was great. And, obviously, the storyline is moving. Og like.

I thought the City Paper capsule review was odd, though, in that it slammed the movie for its “liberal” cliches. Now, I assume they mean “Cold War liberal,” of the Lionel and Diana Trilling stripe perhaps, but still, I didn’t see anything especially liberal about the flick. It seems like the position the movie stakes out could be proclaimed by almost anybody except a pacifist or (given its element of political allegory) a contemporary leftist of the Katha Pollitt stripe. (I can practically hear her condemning Kane for using “protecting the safety of women to walk down the street in daylight” as a transparent excuse for his own bloodlust.)