Story behind ‘High Noon’ as gripping as the film itself
“H igh Noon” both defines and defies its genre. Its basic plot — taciturn lawman must confront the ruthless killer he sent to prison years ago — is about as Western as it gets.
However, because the community the marshal thought he could rely on suddenly turns its back on him, other observers through the years have called the film more of a social drama in cowboy clothes.
In reality, “High Noon,” originally released in 1952, works on both levels. The acting, direction, script, visuals and music are all topnotch. Telling the story in real time — a clock appears in nearly every scene — creates off-the-charts tension. But Glenn Frankel’s 2017 book, “High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic,” examining the film and its era and now out in paperback, reveals yet another level on which “High Noon” succeeds: as an allegory for the plight of Hollywood’s creative class during the years after World War II, when the nation’s chorus of anti-communist voices reached a fever pitch.
Communist paranoia and accusatory treachery ran amok throughout the United States, perhaps in Hollywood most of all. The blacklist, as it was known, tainted truckloads of careers and left a repressive aftertaste in the film industry for decades. As the Cold War took hold, many actors, directors and screenwriters desperately tried to retain their integrity (and, short of that, employability).
None of the men and women behind “High Noon” were untouched by this climate, and few of them came out of the experience totally unscathed.
For a time after the Great Depression, Frankel notes, movie theaters outnumbered banks. “High Noon” came along when television had already begun challenging Hollywood for America’s attention spans and entertainment dollars. But the bigstudio bosses still controlled an industry that was enormously lucrative and profoundly influential — and as vulnerable to corruption, espionage and outright backstabbing as any other.
Soon enough, a clutch of both federal and state lawmakers seized on Hollywood, allegedly rife with Reds, as the perfect means to further their own less-than-altruistic agendas. Though he wasn’t among the ringleaders, one such congressman was future Vice President and President Richard M. Nixon.
Frankel, who won a Pulitzer Prize at the Washington Post and went on to teach journalism at Stanford University and the University of Texas at Austin, draws on a plethora of sources to craft a tale that, as a thriller, rivals “High Noon” itself. Though none of the principals involved in the film were ever front-rank, card-carrying Communists (certainly by the time “High Noon” was made), most of their backgrounds were leftist enough to create an inevitable cloud of suspicion. The threat of subpeona loomed constantly.
Besides, the men on these committees and subcommittees, most notoriously the House Un-American Activities Committee, seldom requested any proof of Communist credentials, past or present. Prominent Hollywood conservatives including John Wayne, Ronald Reagan and gossip columnist Hedda Hopper constantly beat the anti-Communist drum, and guilt by insinuation was more than enough. All the committees, which held their most famous hearings in 1947 and 1951, really wanted was for their targets to publicly renounce any connection to the party — and, just as important, to name names of their so-called coconspirators.
And if they didn’t, they were in big trouble.
If Frankel’s book has a leading role, it’s probably Carl Foreman. Son of Chicago Jewish merchants and a onetime carnival barker, he slowly worked his way up the screenwriting ladder until his friend Stanley Kramer, the scrappy “boy wonder” producer, brought him on board his fledgling company. Foreman wrote the Oscar-nominated scripts for the Kirk Douglas boxing drama “Champion” and Marlon Brando’s debut picture, “The Men.”
“High Noon” was his baby, an idea he nurtured, developed and guarded for years. Still, Frankel’s book presents Foreman as merely the first among equals in the team of talented collaborators it took to bring the film to the screen.
Kramer played a crucial role, not least in casting an unknown young actress from the Philadelphia area named Grace Kelly. So did Fred Zinneman, a Viennese native who was more accustomed to directing art-house dramas such as “The Men” than Westerns. Ukranian-born Dimitri Tiomkin, house composer at Kramer’s company, tweaked an old folk melody into the movie’s theme song (commonly known as
“Do Not Forsake Me, O My Darlin’ ”), which punctuates the film at key moments and became an unlikely hit single.
Gary Cooper, the picture’s actual star, emerges as a key supporting player in the book. The aging, ailing star — curiously, also one of Hollywood’s leading conservatives — had recently slid off the A list. But his performance, a deft delineation of the differences between fear and cowardice, won his second best-actor Oscar. Besides Kelly, Mexican actress Katy Jurado gives the film two strong female characters, another anomaly for a 1950s Western. Along with John Ford’s “The Searchers” (subject of Frankel’s 2013 book), “High Noon” helped establish a line of more realistic, mature Westerns continued in Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Clint Eastwood’s “High Plains Drifter” and last year’s “Hostiles.” Even at the height of the blacklist, “High Noon” was one of the top box-office hits of 1952, and its themes of courage (or cowardice) under fire continue to resonate. During his White House tenure, President Bill Clinton screened the film more than 20 times. But its legacy is bittersweet. Several people involved with the picture claimed to be primarily responsible for its success. Even before its release, Foreman and Kramer fell out and never reconciled. Foreman testified before HUAC in September 1951 and refused to name names. He spent several tough years in London before landing a chance to write director David Lean’s World War II drama “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” Foreman’s screenplay for that film won an Oscar, but his name was nowhere near the screen. His official credit wasn’t restored until June 1984 — the day before he died.
‘High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic’ By Glenn Frankel Bloomsbury, 379 pp. (paperback), $18