Column Chronicles: Famous movie's failed sequel revealed

Famous movie's failed sequel revealed

Frank Cotolo
November 24, 2016

Movie buffs are going to love this particular entry because I have information that has never appeared on any blog, even blogs that present true stories.

What many people don't know is that classic movies have had failed attempts to spawn sequels. Some of this was due to the powerful content of the original and some of it was due to the fact that the proposed sequels were such crappy ideas that they were never completed. Let me reveal one of these failures for the first time.

HIGH NOON - The 1952 western that won four Oscars ends when Gary Cooper's character, Wil Kane, quits being the Marshall of a town that refuses to help him face a vengeful enemy that he must defeat on his own, with a strange twist involving Kane's new wife, played by Grace Kelly.

In the proposed sequel, the Marshall's marriage begins to fall apart when his wife takes to the bottle to drown the guilt that comes from how she helped her husband against the vengeful enemy. Because she feels that she put her husband before her god, she purposely begins to destroy the marriage by inviting men wanted by the law to have illicit sex with her and her husband, even though the husband refuses. When the ex-Marshall has had enough of his wife's self-destructive behavior, he leaves her and takes a job as a Marshall at another town where he begins to take out his guilt for leaving his wife through cruelty to the town's people, including handing the death penalty to anyone caught urinating in a spittoon.

The proposed titles for the sequel were:

THE SAD DAYS TO FOLLOW HIGH NOON

HIGH AFTERNOON

HIGH NOON LOW SUNSET

SHADOWS OF HIGH NOON

HOW HIGH THE NOON?

Gary Cooper passed on the script and physically assaulted the screenwriter (who went by the pseudonym Clyde Hyde), during a lunch meeting at Musso and Frank's Restaurant.

Grace Kelly wanted to be in it but only if she received top billing and a new Rolls Royce each year for the next decade.

Producer Stanley Kramer and his unaccredited partner Carl Foreman, disagreed on the premise Hyde presented after Foreman signed actor Hans Conreid to replace Cooper as Kane.

Foreman tried to get the movie off the ground without Cooper or Kelly but when United Artists refused to distribute the movie if it did not include a creature from outer space somewhere in the story Foreman abandoned the project.

Frank Cotolo can be found hosting the talk and interview programme Cotolo Chronicles. You can send him an e-mail at this address: frank@148.ca.