Director Fred Zinnemann's film High Noon was made during the McCarthy era. Consequently, it has been invested with political significance way beyond the striking simplicity of its plot. The allegorical claims that are made for it originated with its screenwriter Carl Foreman, a victim of the McCarthy witchhunt in Hollywood, who professed to see his script as an allegory of his own situation. Fred Zinnemann denied this interpretation, considering it the story of a man driven to act in accordance with his own conscience, while conceding that the town in which the action takes place is "a symbol of democracy gone soft." The nature of the film's message continues to challenge the film scholars, historians and critics who examine and analyze it, but in the annals of popular culture it remains a classic Western, one of the best of all time. To legions of ordinary movie-goers...