"High Noon," with its iconic story of one man's courage in the face of death, has long been a favorite movie of many viewers. Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, despite their different political perspectives, each cited the 1952 Western in which Gary Cooper stars as a marshal who stands up alone against a gang of murderers as one of their best-loved movies.

But "High Noon," recently out on DVD in a two-disc Ultimate Collector's Edition (Lionsgate, not rated), has also stirred passions to a greater degree than almost any other Western.

Its left-wing screenwriter, Carl Foreman, said he wrote "High Noon" as "a parable about Hollywood and McCarthyism."

For that and other reasons, John Wayne, a staunch Hollywood conservative, called "High Noon" "the most un-American thing I've ever seen in my whole life."

At its core, "High Noon" is about marshal Will Kane (Cooper), who on the day of both his wedding to his young Quaker bride, Amy Fowler (Grace Kelly, in her first major film role), and his retirement as a lawman, learns that a killer he had put behind bars has been pardoned and is seeking revenge against him.

"High Noon" was made by the independent production team of producer Stanley Kramer, well-known for his liberal views, and associate producer-writer Foreman, a leftist who had been a member of the Communist Party but resigned in 1942. It was directed by another liberal, Austrian immigrant Fred Zinnemann.

From Foreman's perspective, Kane was standing in for himself and other blacklisted screenwriters, actors and directors who felt abandoned by their colleagues and their movie studios when the forces of the House Un-American Activities Committee and its right-wing allies in Hollywood tried to purge Hollywood of leftists.

Ironically, Cooper, who won an Oscar for his performance as Will Kane, was a conservative, yet he stood by Foreman when John Wayne and others were calling for his blacklisting.