Reception
In 1952, Gary Cooper won a Golden Globe Award and his second Academy Award for his portrayal of Will Kane.
While The Washington Post refers to the character as "A Classic Role," Entertainment Weekly ranked the character fourteenth on its list of the top twenty "All-Time Coolest Heroes in Pop Culture" in April 2009. The magazine included him on its list because in "High Noon, Gary Cooper's retiring lawman faces down a killer and his goons despite being deserted by the rest of the town." Entertainment Weekly went on to cite his most heroic move as when "Kane's last ally gets cold feet, he tells him to go to his family, and then refuses the help of a teenager." Kane was also ranked by the American Film Institute as the fifth greatest movie hero of all time.
Nevertheless, although Cooper's performance has received considerable praise as indicated above, Majors and Skerritt's performances have not been so positively received. The New York Daily News referred to Lee Majors as "sadly miscast" as Kane in the sequel. Entertainment Weekly also contrasted Cooper with Skerritt to Skerritt's disadvantage. Reviewer Ken Tucker reminisces upon "the all-purpose image of Cooper that's taken hold in the popular imagination: the gaunt, chiseled stone face, a stoic deadpan that rendered Cooper the leading-man, romantic-actor equivalent of Buster Keaton....By contrast, Skerritt saunters through the new Noon as if he were still the easygoing, ironic lawman of Picket Fences."
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