You Must Remember This: Why We Return to ‘Casablanca’ and ‘High Noon’

(NYTimes) ... “Casablanca” arrived just short of a year after the United States declared war on Germany. In it, Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine, whose mantra is “I stick my neck out for nobody,” famously does just that, shrugging off the neutrality that had been American policy until Pearl Harbor, and helping his former flame Ingrid Bergman and the Czech resistance hero Paul Henreid escape the Nazis.
... “High Noon,” on the other hand, is a profile in collective cowardice. The United States was in the grip of the Red Scare, and the marshal, Will Kane (Gary Cooper), can’t find a single good man in the dusty Western town of Hadleyville to help him confront the Miller brothers and their gang, who have sworn to kill him. Coop prevails, naturally, but his triumph fails to dispel the toxic fog of betrayal and disillusion that shrouds the story. Continued