This article was originally written for the Star of the Month programming in the TCM Now Playing newsletter in June 2025.
Do not forsake TCM in June, when Gary Cooper is the Star of the Month. Cooper holds a special place in the pantheon of screen icons. He was all over the American Film Institute’s 1998 series of tributes to a century of American film. Will Kane, perhaps Cooper’s signature role from Fred Zinneman’s High Noon (1952) was named the fifth most memorable screen hero. On the AFI list of the 50 greatest male stars of the 20th century, Cooper placed 11th, between Charlie Chaplin and Gregory Peck. Most telling is that on the AFI list of 100 Cheers: America’s Most Inspiring Movies, he starred in five: High Noon, Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe (1941) and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Sam Wood’s The Pride of the Yankees (1942) and Howard Hawks’ Sergeant York (1941). (All are included in TCM’s month-long tribute).
Seven of Cooper’s films have been inducted into the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry as “historically, culturally or aesthetically significant”: Hawks’ Ball of Fire (1941), High Noon, Clarence G. Badger’s It (1927), Joseph von Sternberg’s Morocco (1930), The Pride of the Yankees, Sergeant York and William Wellman’s Wings (1927), the first Best Picture winner at the inaugural Academy Awards ceremony.
Cooper earned two Academy Awards for Best Actor for High Noon and Sergeant York. He was also nominated for Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, The Pride of the Yankees and Sam Woods’ For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943). He was the recipient of an honorary Oscar in 1961. William Wyler, who directed Cooper in The Westerner (1940) and Friendly Persuasion (1956), presented the statuette to the absent Cooper’s stand-in, an emotional James Stewart.
“For a man who has never had much to say,” Wyler praised, “no one has ever said more to the credit of our industry and more than that to our country because Gary Cooper represents the type of American who is loved in the four corners of the Earth.” The type that Cooper most indelibly exemplified was the common man, the modest and unassuming hero, a man of action, but few words, or in Cooper’s caricatured case, one word: “Yup,” as in this playful clip from It’s a Great Feeling (1949) in which Cooper spoofs his screen image.
Even Bugs Bunny got into the act in “Bugs Bunny Rides Again” when he breaks the fourth wall during a showdown with Yosemite Sam: “Just like Gary Cooper, huh?”
Evening one of TCM’s month-long Cooper-palooza features three of his essential performances (four, if you count King Vidor’s The Fountainhead, 1949, which we do, though the uncompromising individualistic architect Howard Roark is a dramatic departure from the quintessential altruistic Cooper hero).
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town is Cooper at his Everyman best, a “pixilated” small-town man up against big city lawyers who want to separate him from the $20 million he has just inherited. Deeds is a prince of a man, a rube who runs excitedly to the window at the sound of passing fire engines, but whose unshakable integrity and ideals anticipate two key late-career characters: Sheriff Will Kane in High Noon and Roark in The Fountainhead.
The evening also includes Cooper as two real-life heroes, New York Yankees first baseman Lou Gehrig in The Pride of the Yankees and hellraiser-turned-faith-driven-pacifist-turned-WWI hero Sergeant York. Both men were unassuming in their private lives, but their exceptional exploits on the ballfield and battlefield, respectively, inspired the nation. Cooper’s heroes may not say much, but when they do through powerful speeches, they make those words count, as when he proves himself the sanest man in the courtroom at the conclusion of Deeds. And if you can make it through Gehrig’s “luckiest man on the face of the Earth” speech in Yankees, you are made of sterner stuff than me.
In the five films TCM presents on June 11, Cooper divides his time between man of action and romantic leading man. He stars in two adaptations of books by Ernest Hemingway: For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms (1932). The actor and the author were great friends. "Cooper is a fine man," Hemingway once wrote, "as honest and straight and friendly and unspoiled as he looks.”
Despite it being a massive box-office hit, Hemingway was not a fan of A Farewell to Arms for the liberties it took with his harder-edged book about an American ambulance driver during World War I who falls in love with a nurse (Helen Hayes), who is carrying his child out of wedlock (pre-Code, baby!). But Hemingway still lobbied hard for Cooper to portray anti-fascist volunteer Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls.
In these films, and in two other gems being broadcast on this night, Morocco and Frank Borzage’s Desire (1936), costarring Marlene Dietrich, Cooper made quite the impression on his leading ladies. Hayes wrote in her memoir, “Like half the women in the world, I was, in the words of the Noël Coward song, ‘Mad about the boy.’” In a 1971 CBC interview, Ingrid Bergman, Cooper’s For Whom the Bell Tolls costar, called him “the most natural actor I’ve ever worked with.” And Dietrich? Their affair enraged Cooper’s other lover, the actress Lupe Velez.
Audrey Hepburn was not among Cooper’s off-screen conquests. His costar in Billy Wilder’s Love in the Afternoon (1957), Hepburn was 27 at the time; Cooper was 55. Their onscreen romance may be problematic for some now, but it remains entertaining thanks to Wilder and I.A.L Diamond’s sparkling script, the charming Maurice Chevalier and Cooper, and the vivacious Hepburn.
There were no such May-December concerns in 1952 when the then 51-year-old Cooper was cast opposite 22-year-old Grace Kelly in High Noon, which is the film we most talk about when discussing Gary Cooper. After years of sagging box office returns, High Noon restored Cooper’s stature and earned him his second Academy Award. The story of a sheriff who, on his wedding day, refuses to run when Frank Miller (Ian MacDonald), freshly sprung from prison, returns to town to make good on his threat to kill him (“You'll never hang me. I'll come back! I'll kill you, Will Kane! I swear it”). Kane’s increasingly desperate pleas for deputies are rebuffed, forcing him to face Miller and his gang alone.
High Noon, with its Oscar-winning theme song, “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling,” still resonates with its themes of individual courage and unshakeable principles. The screenwriter, Carl Foreman, intended the film as an allegory for the Hollywood blacklist, which claimed the careers of film artists who refused to buckle under the House Un-American Activities Committee and confess not only their own suspected Communist ties but name others they suspected of being communists.
Fun fact: Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton were reportedly among High Noon’s biggest fans. Reagan called it his favorite film, and Clinton screened it at the White House 17 times. Not a fan was director Howard Hawks, who didn’t cotton to the notion that a sheriff would beg for help. High Noon, he claimed, was a violation of the traditional Western tropes of loyalty and camaraderie, and as a response, he directed Rio Bravo (1959), in which John Wayne’s John T. Chance refuses offers of help in his stand against land baron Nathan Burdette, whose brother Chance is holding for murder.
Come for High Noon, which kicks off the third night in TCM’s Cooper celebration but stay for some underseen treasures in the Cooper canon, including Friendly Persuasion, a late-career triumph for Cooper as the head of a Quaker family whose pacifist views are put to the test when the Civil War hits too close to home. Michael Curtiz’s period epic Bright Leaf (1950) was a box-office hit, but for many years languished in obscurity until Ross McElwee featured it prominently in his 2003 documentary, Bright Leaves, in which he investigates whether the story of rival tobacco entrepreneurs was based on his family’s history. In it, McElwee interviews costar Patricia Neal, who made two films with Cooper. She doesn’t add much to confirming the film’s origins, but she calls Cooper “the love of my life.” (They had a long-term affair).
TCM saves some of Cooper’s best for the last night of its retrospective. Howard Hawks’ Ball of Fire is a screwball Manhattan fairy tale co-written by Billy Wilder that tips its hat to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Cooper shines as a shy and socially awkward grammarian who has been cloistered with his staid colleagues in a ramshackle mansion trying to complete an encyclopedia. Their lives are upended by the arrival of Sugarpuss O’Shea (Barbara Stanwyck), a showgirl on the lam, who teaches Cooper all about modern slang and “yum-yum.”
Cooper and Stanwyck were paired again in Meet John Doe, a considerably darker tale in which Cooper’s “John Doe” is unwittingly used as a pawn by newspaper columnist Stanwyck and her editor (James Gleason) to exploit their own political beliefs. As with Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Meet John Doe puts viewers through the wringer before fellowship triumphs over fascism: “There you are, Norton! The people! Try and lick that!”
On a 1959 episode of What’s My Line?, panelists guessed mystery guest Cooper’s identity after Bennett Cerf asked, “Do you kick pebbles a lot and say ‘Yup’?” This Star of the Month celebration will be a revelation to anyone who type-casts Cooper in this limited way. In Westerns, action films, dramas and comedy, Cooper displayed many shadings of the masculine ideal and the personification of the American hero.
