This year marks the 70th anniversary of High Noon. To celebrate that auspicious occasion, we’ve invited award-winning author, professor and cultural historian Austin Fisher on the show to talk about the film’s reputation as the quintessential Cold War-era Western. Is High Noon really an allegory for the Hollywood blacklist and the anti-communist investigations of the 1940s and ‘50s? Or has that popular reading been overstated to a large degree? We discuss that topic, and much more, on this provocative new episode.

Also, stay tuned until the very end of the show for a lively chat with the founders of Outlaw Soap, who’ve sponsored our High Noon episode.

Austin Fisher’s essay Revisiting the Blacklist Western: A Reception Study of High Noon is published by the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies.

And very special thanks to songstress Sarah Vista for allowing us to use her brilliant cover version of the theme to High Noon on the podcast.