TV Remake Can’t Harness Original ‘High Noon’ Suspense

Do not forsake me, oh my darlin’.

Easy to say in the Tex Ritter ballad woven through the original movie. By the end of Sunday’s TBS remake of the classic 1952 western “High Noon,” however, you definitely have that forsaken feeling.

Not that any film or story is off limits to fresh eyes. If Shakespeare can be redefined infinite ways, what’s so hoity-toity about “High Noon”? Yet when a clock in Hadleyville reads 11:45 a.m.--about 15 minutes from heroic Will Kane’s anticipated showdown with the returning badman he sent to prison--your lids shouldn’t be as weighty as horseshoes. It’s all in the execution.

The taut, suspenseful original “High Noon” benefited from Fred Zinnemann’s direction and long, lean Gary Cooper’s Oscar-winning work as Kane.

Oh so memorable is the face of Cooper’s stoic town marshal as he quietly resigns himself to doom on his wedding day when abandoned by the town he has rushed back to defend from vengeance-seeking Frank Miller and the gang members who await his return on the noon train.

For a morality tale predicated on dramatic tension, there isn’t much in this dull, meandering new version that has Tom Skerritt as a mellow, unhurried Will and Susanna Thompson as his feisty Quaker bride, Amy, who has made him promise to retire from law enforcement and try ranching. As the moments tick away, bringing Will closer to peril, instead of edginess from director Rod Hardy we get windy speeches from the marshal and others.

There is no sense of urgency here. Notably missing from this “High Noon” is Dimitri Tiomkin’s perfectly calibrated song (whose opening lyric by Ned Washington appears above), Academy Award-winning music so closely linked to Will’s date with Frank Miller that its absence creates an unfillable void.

Most of T.S. Cook’s teleplay tracks the original Carl Foreman script, including a pivotal scene inside a church where Kane’s desperate pleas for men to deputize are rejected.

One mistake Cook makes, though, is having Kane’s conflict with Miller (Michael Madsen) eclipsed by his differences with his young deputy, Harv (Reed Diamond), whose lover, Helen Ramirez (Maria Conchita Alonso), is the marshal’s ex-girlfriend. Nor is it easier to fathom here than in the original why, when the town washes its hands of him, Will doesn’t just beat it instead of hanging around for a gunfight he’s unlikely to survive.

Perhaps he knows what the rest of us don’t learn until the end of the movie: Despite their snarly, gun-wielding menace, Miller and his gang can’t hit the side of a barn with a buckboard.

* “High Noon” will be shown Sunday at 7 p.m. on TBS. The network has rated it TV-PG-V (may be unsuitable for young children with special advisories for violence). The original “High Noon” will be shown Sunday at 11 a.m. and Saturday at 7 p.m. on TCM.