Watch this clip of John Wayne accepting Gary Cooper‘s Best Actor Oscar for High Noon at the March 1953 Oscar awards. Wayne delivers a comic riff about being angry that his people didn’t work harder at getting him the role of Marshall Will Kane. This is outrageous bullshit. High Noon was partly a metaphor for what screenwriter Carl Foreman had suffered (and was at the time still suffering) during Hollywood’s blacklisting of certain lefty screenwriters and how so many of his Hollywood “friends” had thrown up their hands or turned tail. Wayne was a staunch anti-Communist and more or less a supporter of the blacklist so the idea of him playing Kane is absurd. Not to mention the fact that he openly derided High Noon when it came out and later got together with Howard Hawks and made Rio Bravo as a retort to High Noon‘s dark view of human nature.
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