The 1952 classic High Noon has been released on home video so many times in so many formats that it’s astonishing that it has taken this long to be upgraded to 4K UHD but that has finally happened thanks to Kino Lorer’s release of the film now owned by Paramount.

The Stanley Kramer production was originally a United Artists release. It was Kramer’s seventh and final film as an independent producer whose films were released by United Artists before he became a salaried producer at Columbia after which he turned to directing his films for release once again by United Artists. It followed Champion, Home of the Brave, The Men, Cyrano de Bergerac, Death of a Salesman, and The Sniper in Kramer’s canon and preceded The Member of the Wedding, The Juggler, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, The Wild One, and The Caine Mutiny in Kramer’s pre-directorial career.

Of all those early films, with the possible exception of 1954’s The Caine Mutiny, which was directed by Edward Dmytryk, High Noon is the only one that is still held in high regard by both critics and the public.

An atypical western, High Noon was initially compared to John Ford’s 1946 film My Darling Clementine in which the sheriff, Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp, gets help in ridding the town of the bad guys. In High Noon, sheriff Gary Cooper gets no help except in the end from his Quaker wife played by a still relatively unknown Grace Kelly.

Kelly has received equal billing to Cooper on all the home video releases of High Noon over the last forty-plus years, but only Cooper received over-the-title billing in the film’s initial release. Kelly was fifth billed after Cooper, Thomas Mitchell as the town’s mayor, Lloyd Bridges as Cooper’s last deputy, and Katy Jurado as the tavern owner and Cooper’s former mistress.

The film was directed by Fred Zinnemann who had won an Oscar for Best Short Subject for 1951’s Benjy. A previous nominee for directing 1948’s The Search, he would be nominated again for High Noon, win for From Here to Eternity, be nominated again for The Nun’s Story and The Sundowners, and win again for A Man for All Seasons for which he also took home the Oscar for Best Picture of 1966.

What drew everyone’s attention to the film in the first place was its seamless editing that makes it appear to have been filmed in real time due the constant reference to clocks that slowly advance the time to high noon while Tex Ritter’s sings “High Noon (Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin’)” repeatedly over the soundtrack.

The screenplay by Carl Foreman was written as a rebuke of the writer’s so-called Hollywood friends who abandoned him as he was brought before the HUAC (The House Un-American Activities Committee) followed by his eventual blacklisting. Officially an adaption of a similarly themed magazine story entitled The Tin Star (unrelated to the 1957 film of that name), Kramer bought the story after he received Foreman’s screenplay to avoid charges of plagiarism.

Nominated for seven Oscars and winner of four including Best Actor, Editing, Score, and Song, it lost Best Picture to Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth and Best Director to John Ford for The Quiet Man.

John Wayne, who denounced the film as anti-American because of Cooper’s throwing away his badge at the end, nevertheless gracefully accepted the Oscar for Cooper who was filming Vera Cruz opposite Burt Lancaster in Mexico at the time.

Although Foreman’s backstory has overwhelmed the film’s history at times, it’s the film’s one man against the world story, its unique editing, and the performances of Cooper and Jurado, more than Kelly, that have drawn audiences back to it over and over again.

Kramer had already established his niche as a man with a message with the anti-racist Home of the Brave and the harrowing paraplegic drama The Men. He would go on to even more explicit messaging with The Defiant Ones, On the Beach, Inherit the Wind, Judgment at Nuremberg, Ship of Fools, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.

Newly released on Blu-ray by Warner Archive is the controversial 1932 horror film The Mask of Fu Manchu

After the 1931 successes of Universal’s Dracula and Frankenstein, MGM tried to emulate that studio’s success with two 1932 horror films, Tod Browning’s Freaks and this film, originally assigned to Hungarian emigree Charles Vidor but taken over after a few days of shooting by silent film veteran Charles Brabin.

Boris Karloff, on loan from Universal, starred as the “yellow peril,” a lisping thinly disguised homosexual madman whose costume consisted of a Chinese woman’s wedding dress and platform heels, lusting after hunky Charles Starrett in an abbreviated loincloth in the same manner as his nymphomaniac daughter played by Myrna Loy in the last of her slinky Oriental femme fatale roles.

Karen Morley played the daughter of an Englishman captured, tortured, and killed by Karloff’s character before she, Starrett as her fiancé, Lewis Stone, and Jean Hersholt were also captured and tortured. Morley would marry fired director Vidor by the end of the year, Stone would go on to screen immortality as Judge Hardy, Hersholt would go on to have an honorary Oscar named after him, Starrett would go on to star in 135 westerns, Karloff would go on starring in horror films for the remainder of his lengthy career, and Loy would completely change her image to that of the perfect wife in The Thin Man and other films.

This is the first fully restored release of the film in over ninety years. The excellent newly recorded commentary by film historian Greg Mark points out the various cuts made in the film by different states and countries over the years, all of which seem silly by the standards of the last fifty plus years. You will find elements of the film’s most controversial scenes in numerous films from The Rocky Horror Picture Show to Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Happy viewing.