Sorry, folks. It dawned on this blogger — after the halfway point in this essay — that there is a difference between a long-form essay and a looooooooong-form essay. Today's post falls into the latter category. However, this blogger was entranced by the narrative that mentioned films, performers, and events from this blogger's early life. If this is a (fair & balanced) warning that the Red Scare of the 1950s could be repeated in the days to come, so be it.
[x VF]
"High Noon’s" Secret Backstory
By Glenn Frankel
TagCrowd cloud of the following piece of writing
It is one of Hollywood’s most iconic images: a lawman walking down a deserted Western street toward a showdown with four armed killers. For more than 60 years, High Noon, starring Gary Cooper, has embedded itself in our culture and our national memory. Its title itself has become legendary, connoting a moment of truth when a good man must confront evil.
Shot in 32 days on a shoestring—with its famous star working for a fraction of his normal wage—High Noon was an afterthought for those who made it, a rush job to fulfill the tail end of an old contract. Yet it vaulted almost immediately to critical acclaim and box-office success. Its taut narrative, powerful performances, evocative theme song, and climactic shootout made it an instant classic. It won four Academy Awards, including best actor for Cooper. Even today it is considered one of the most enduring films of Hollywood’s golden age.
Each generation has imposed its own politics and values onto High Noon. Yet what has largely been forgotten is that the man who had written the script had set out with a very specific goal: to make an allegory about the Hollywood blacklist, the men who sought to enforce it, and the cowardly community that stood by silently and allowed it to happen.
By 1951, Carl Foreman was one of the town’s hottest screenwriters, working for one of the industry’s most admired independent production houses. The Stanley Kramer Company had a short but impressive track record of low-budget box-office and critical hits. It was, in our modern vernacular, a nimble start-up that was making socially relevant movies better, faster, and cheaper than the more bloated studios with their glitzy, predictable fare. It attracted talented collaborators like director Fred Zinnemann (later known for pictures such as "From Here to Eternity" and "A Man for All Seasons"); composer Dimitri Tiomkin ("It’s A Wonderful Life" and "Giant"); and some of Hollywood’s most gifted actors, who took pay cuts to work with the company—including Cooper, Kirk Douglas, Marlon Brando, Jose Ferrer, Teresa Wright, and an as-yet unknown actress named Grace Kelly.
Carl Foreman had twice been nominated for best screenplay for Champion and The Men and would soon get a third Oscar nod for "High Noon." Foreman, his wife, Estelle, and their four-year-old daughter, Kate, had recently moved to fashionable Brentwood, occupying a large cottage once owned by Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth. Along with his higher profile, Foreman was also drawing the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). An ex-member of the American Communist Party, Foreman, while finishing the "High Noon" screenplay, was subpoenaed in June 1951 by HUAC and told he would take the stand three months later—during the middle of the film shoot.
Foreman knew what to expect. Cooperative witnesses were required to confess to and renounce their membership in the party—and praise the committee’s patriotic diligence. But they had to go one step further: to prove their sincerity, they were expected to name the names of other participants in the alleged Red plot to destroy America.
The alternative was to invoke the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination, a choice that ensured you would lose your high-paying job and social status because the major Hollywood studios had all adopted a policy of blacklisting anyone who refused to cooperate. For Foreman, it came down to a Solomonic choice: betray his friends or lose the career he’d worked so hard to achieve. As he pondered what to do, he began to rethink his script. High Noon’s protagonist—marshal Will Kane—was now Foreman himself. The gunmen coming to kill him were the members of H.U.A.C., and the hypocritical townspeople of fictional Hadleyville were the denizens of Hollywood who stood by passively as the forces of repression bore down.
“As I was writing the screenplay, it became insane, because life was mirroring art and art was mirroring life,” he would recall. “It was all happening at the same time. I became that guy. I became the Gary Cooper character.”
But it wasn’t Foreman alone who faced a crisis of conscience. The film’s producer Stanley Kramer also had to decide whether to cut loose his creative collaborator, good friend, and business partner, or face his own expulsion from the movies. His decision would help alter the course of Hollywood filmmaking for years to come.
They were two ambitious, fast-talking Jewish intellectuals from the Depression-ridden ghettos of New York and Chicago, the sons or grandsons of immigrants from Eastern Europe. Born in Hell’s Kitchen on Manhattan’s West Side, Stanley Kramer, raised by a single mother, never really knew the father who walked out on his family. At age 19, he became one of the youngest graduates of NYU; in 1936, a screenwriting fellowship brought him to work at Twentieth Century Fox and, later, Republic, United Artists, and MGM, where the soft-spoken young man gained a reputation for his ingrained disdain for authority.
Carl Foreman, whose Russian-born parents owned a millinery shop off Chicago’s Division Street, was an aspiring writer who spent a misbegotten year in Hollywood searching for a break that never came, sleeping on the rooftops of apartment buildings and eating peanuts three times a day to keep his stomach full. He went back to Chicago a failure, worked as a carnival barker, then returned to LA in 1938 aboard a circus train that reeked of elephant shit. This time he hung on, eventually landing a job as an MGM script doctor.
He and Kramer met during World War II, where each was serving on US Army film units, making documentaries and shorts out of the Astoria studio in Queens. The thirtysomething movie buffs found they had much in common: a deep hunger to succeed, a social conscience, and a withering contempt for the smug, sclerotic studio system.
After the war, Foreman went back to screenwriting gigs. The entrepreneurial Kramer, meanwhile, scraped together the money to buy the film rights to "This Side of Innocence," a popular Taylor Caldwell novel. He got squeezed out of that deal—a lesson in the true value of a Hollywood commitment—but made enough off the transaction to launch his own small company, Screen Plays Incorporated. He boasted that its business model was based not on stars, which he couldn’t afford anyway, but on stories. Naturally, he turned to his buddy Carl Foreman to help get started. He also gave a share to a Hollywood law firm and to George Glass, the firm’s charismatic publicist.
They leased offices in a cavernous warehouse on North Cahuenga Boulevard called the Motion Picture Center Studio, home to a loose band of indie filmmakers who shared little except a lack of liquidity. (It’s still there, now called RED Studios Hollywood.)
Using funds Kramer coaxed out of a wealthy young friend, they bought the rights to a Ring Lardner novel called The Big Town, which, in 1948, they turned into a comedy: So "This Is New York." It turned out to be an utter disaster.
Hollywood was in big trouble. People were moving to the suburbs, where movie palaces had yet to penetrate. The Supreme Court was about to require the studios to divest of their lucrative theater-chain monopolies. And TV was poised for a boom. “Hollywood,” one anonymous producer told Fortune magazine, “is an island of depression in a sea of prosperity.”
The problems were more than just financial. Darryl F. Zanuck, head of production at Fox, came back from his Army service to warn that the war was changing American attitudes and perceptions. “When the boys come home from the battlefields overseas,” he told Fox’s senior producers and directors on his first day back, “you’ll find . . . they have learned things in Europe and the Far East. . . . They’re coming back with new thoughts, new ideas, new hungers. . . . We’ve got to start making movies that entertain but at the same time match the new climate of the times.”
Soon came a wave of thought-provoking, socially nuanced films that sought to engage audiences as well as entertain them. Anti-Semitism was explored in Zanuck and Elia Kazan’s "Gentleman’s Agreement" and in Dore Schary’s noir-ish "Crossfire." In "The Best Years of Our Lives," director William Wyler addressed the complex issues that faced returning GIs. "All the King’s Men," the adaptation of Robert Penn Warren’s novel, focused on a corrupt Southern populist. Some films were created by dedicated liberals, others by current or former Communist Party members. All of them stood out amid Hollywood’s usual fluff.
Kramer and Foreman quickly joined in. After their first flop, they turned to their other Lardner property, a short story called "Champion," about a ruthless and avaricious working-class boxer named Midge Kelly, pounding his way to the top and stepping on his friends and family along the way. This time, Foreman’s writing was tough and remorseless. Kelly’s only goal is success. Mobsters, parasites, crooked business managers, and pretty women all want a piece of his soul—only Midge doesn’t have one. Embedded in the script is Foreman’s critique of the brutality of capitalism. “It’s like any other business,” Midge says of the fight racket, “only here the blood shows.”
Kirk Douglas, a film colony novice, read the screenplay and was mesmerized. His talent agency had gotten him the third lead, behind Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner, in a stiff, big-budget MGM production called "The Great Sinner." Douglas, still looking trim and charismatic, at 98, when I meet with him at his Beverly Hills home in April 2015, recalled how he longed to play Midge, the anti-hero, instead. “My agency was against it,” he said. “They were telling me ‘Kirk, who is Stanley Kramer? This is a little picture.’ But I thought Carl Foreman was a great storyteller and I thought it was time for me to play something different.” When Douglas got to Kramer’s office, he pulled off his shirt and flexed his muscles to show him he had what it took to play the part.
"Champion" was a smash. It cost $550,000 to make yet it grossed nearly $18 million and was nominated for six Academy Awards, including best actor for Douglas and best adapted screenplay for Foreman. Its success brought Kramer offers from Fox, Paramount, and MGM for multi-picture production deals—including a bizarre post-midnight rendezvous with Howard Hughes, who had just purchased RKO. But Kramer jealously guarded the autonomy and freedom of his new start-up.
He and Foreman went on to make a searing racial drama, "Home of the Brave; The Men," Brando’s cinematic debut, in which he plays a paraplegic war veteran; and an adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac, which would win Jose Ferrer best-actor honors. It wasn’t just the hard-hitting performances and contemporary subject matter ("Cyrano" being an exception) that made Kramer’s films successful. It was also the way they were made: low budget, black and white, scores by Dimitri Tiomkin, inspired film editing by Harry Gerstad, unfussy art direction by Rudolph Sternad, along with Foreman’s characters and dialogue, which grew sharper and more compelling with each film.
As a producer, Kramer was a withering perfectionist. But he encouraged collaboration among his gifted cohorts as well as a sense of ownership, a welcome attribute in a dictatorial profession. What’s more, each picture, at Kramer’s insistence, included a pre-shoot rehearsal. This allowed the director, actors, and crew to get comfortable with one another before a single reel was shot. The practice, combined with cut-rate cast and production methods, meant Kramer could bring in a film at roughly half the cost of a major-studio movie. Kramer was also a keen judge of talent, giving a three-picture deal to director Fred Zinnemann, a cultured Viennese Jew known for his meticulous craftsmanship and documentary-film style.
Soon, however, the temptation to cash in on the company’s newfound fame and success proved too great. By 1951, Kramer signed a five-year, 30-picture deal with Columbia and its famously autocratic and uncouth studio head, Harry Cohn, who announced the new pact as “the most important deal we’ve ever made.” Kramer and his team—renamed the Stanley Kramer Company—were suddenly under the gun to come up with new projects to feed the Columbia beast. But under an old distribution contract, Kramer also owed United Artists one remaining film. Kramer, his PR chief George Glass, and most of their team headed off to smart new offices at Columbia. Foreman and Zinnemann stayed behind to make "High Noon."
"High Noon" had a lot going against it. Foreman had never written a Western. Zinnemann had never directed one. Foreman’s screenplay, inspired by a short story in Collier’s magazine called “The Tin Star,” by John W. Cunningham, had no beautiful vistas, no Indian raids, no cattle stampedes. What it did have were beautifully drawn characters who defied the cowboy stereotypes; realistic dialogue without a wasted word; and a suspenseful story that unwound in real time. Roughly 80 minutes elapse between the moment the retired marshal learns that his nemesis is coming back to town (to kill him) and the arrival of the noon train. The script abounded with shots of ticking clocks.
The skintight, $790,000 budget that Foreman and Zinnemann were given in 1951 meant they couldn’t afford to film in color or hire one of the hot young stars they preferred for the lawman, such as Brando, Douglas, William Holden, or Gregory Peck. With Kramer’s help, however, they found their way around many obstacles. First, Kramer signed a talented new actress to play the marshal’s bride. Grace Kelly was just 21 but already an experienced stage performer, and she had had only one small part in a movie. Still, the producer liked her virginal looks—and the fact she was willing to work for $750 a week.
Next, came his biggest coup. At age 50, one of Hollywood’s brightest stars, Gary Cooper, saw his career beginning to fade. He was in the middle of a lucrative deal with Warner Bros. that paid him $275,000 for a picture a year. But after a great run in the early 1940s ("Meet John Doe," "Sergeant York," "The Pride of the Yankees," "For Whom the Bell Tolls"), he was being offered increasingly mediocre roles. “He was furious [and] frustrated,” his daughter Maria Cooper Janis says today. “They would send him these crappy scripts and at some point you have to do one of them.” In addition, his marriage was unraveling: he had separated from Veronica, his wife of 17 years (and Maria’s mother), and was coping with the emotional demands of his breathtaking but tempestuous young mistress, 25-year-old Patricia Neal.
Cooper knew a good part when he saw one, and he loved the "High Noon" script. His lawyer let Kramer know he’d be willing to play the role—for $100,000. Both Kramer and Foreman saw Cooper as a product of the old-time studio system they disdained. “He was a kind of relic,” Foreman would recall. Plus, Cooper was 29 years older than Kelly, who would play his wife. Nonetheless, he brought authenticity and a box-office name. The deal was done.
Foreman had the job of putting together the rest of the cast for a total of $30,000. He hired famed character actor Thomas J. Mitchell for one week. He corralled Lloyd Bridges, Harry Morgan, Lon Chaney Jr., and a young Mexican actress named Katy Jurado. He found three relative newcomers to play the bad guys who wait with their boss for the noon train to arrive: Robert Wilke, Sheb Wooley, and Lee Van Cleef, who would all become regular faces in 50s and 60s Westerns.
It was like constructing a human jigsaw puzzle. Capitalizing on Mitchell’s six days of camera time, most of the other actors had to show up during the first week while he shot his scenes. Everything needed to synch up perfectly. Zinnemann hired his old friend Floyd Crosby as director of photography, because he knew Crosby could help achieve the washed-out, sweat-stained, pseudo-documentary look he wanted. (Crosby’s son David became a leader of the Byrds and Crosby, Stills & Nash). Foreman hired one of Hollywood’s best young film editors, Elmo Williams, to cut the picture.
"High Noon," despite all the odds, seemed to be shaping up into something special. But there was one obstacle even they couldn’t circumvent.
Four years earlier, the House Committee on Un-American Activities had held its first public hearings on alleged Communist infiltration of the film industry. The result: contempt of Congress citations for 10 screenwriters, directors, and producers, known as the Hollywood Ten, who had refused to respond directly to the committee’s questions. Most had been members of the American Communist Party in the 1930s and early 1940s. Many still were, but they weren’t about to admit it or cooperate. Early on, they had had a lot of support from the film community—Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Danny Kaye, and a planeload of liberal-leaning movie stars flew from Hollywood to Washington to protest outside the committee room. Even Ronald Reagan, then head of the Screen Actors Guild, questioned the committee’s bully-boy methods.
By 1951 the atmosphere was very different. The Ten had each been sentenced to up to a year in prison, and their convictions were upheld by the Supreme Court. While they were winding up their terms in prison, the committee decided it was time for a sequel.
Fear of Communism was rampant. The Soviet Union had developed an atomic bomb. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and their alleged co-conspirators had been arrested for espionage. Alger Hiss was in prison for allegedly being a Soviet agent. American troops were fighting Communist forces in North Korea. Hollywood’s conservative studio heads, fearful of boycotts and lost business, were determined to fire any past or present member, or sympathizer, who refused to cooperate with the committee. Suddenly the most harmless of subjects were under political scrutiny. Monogram Studios shelved a film project on the life of Hiawatha, The New York Times reported, because the Onandaga chief’s efforts as a peacemaker among warring tribes “might cause the picture to be regarded as a message for peace and therefore helpful to present Communist designs.”
By 1951 the atmosphere was very different. The Ten had each been sentenced to up to a year in prison, and their convictions were upheld by the Supreme Court. While they were winding up their terms in prison, the committee decided it was time for a sequel.
Fear of Communism was rampant. The Soviet Union had developed an atomic bomb. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and their alleged co-conspirators had been arrested for espionage. Alger Hiss was in prison for allegedly being a Soviet agent. American troops were fighting Communist forces in North Korea. Hollywood’s conservative studio heads, fearful of boycotts and lost business, were determined to fire any past or present member, or sympathizer, who refused to cooperate with the committee. Suddenly the most harmless of subjects were under political scrutiny. Monogram Studios shelved a film project on the life of Hiawatha, The New York Times reported, because the Onandaga chief’s efforts as a peacemaker among warring tribes “might cause the picture to be regarded as a message for peace and therefore helpful to present Communist designs.”
Carl Foreman and his wife, Estelle, had joined the Communist Party in 1938, quit in 1943 when he entered the Army, and rejoined for a year or so after the war. He later said he found out that the party was under the thumb of Moscow and operated undemocratically. Though his political instincts had remained decidedly left wing, he was far too busy writing screenplays to engage in political activism. Even so, he watched with growing dismay as former party members like Larry Parks (the Oscar-nominated star of "The Jolson Story") and Sterling Hayden (a former Marine just getting his start in pictures) were grilled or groveled on the stand and were compelled to name names. “Carl always said he was horrified by what happened to Parks,” says Eve Williams-Jones, Foreman’s second wife and widow.
Once Foreman got his subpoena, he knew he had to tell his "High Noon" collaborators. Zinnemann, a liberal who detested the blacklist, told Foreman he could count on him to be in his corner. So, surprisingly, did Gary Cooper, who was a conservative Republican and a charter member of the right-wing Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Cooper had grown fond of Foreman, admired his skills as a screenwriter and producer, and believed him when he said he was no longer a party member. Cooper even volunteered to go before the committee and vouch for Foreman’s “Americanism,” but his lawyer quickly vetoed the idea.
At first, Stanley Kramer also gave Foreman his full support. But as the summer wore on, Kramer began to back off. His new business partner, Sam Katz, a hardheaded former production executive at MGM, warned that Foreman’s refusal to come clean with the committee could kill the larger deal with Columbia. George Glass, the company’s marketing wizard, also received a subpoena. At first, Glass said he planned to defy the committee. But within days he changed his mind, citing his loyalty to the company and a belatedly found hatred for Communism. Soon after, Glass named names in an executive session. Others attached to "High Noon" were also under the HUAC spotlight, including supporting actor Lloyd Bridges.
Kramer himself was a staunch liberal Democrat. But as far as H.U.A.C. and the F.B.I. were concerned, liberals were almost as bad as Communists. In June 1951 a supposedly reliable informant told FBI agents that Kramer “had the reputation of being sympathetic to Communism.” Screenwriter Martin Berkeley, a former Communist who named more than 150 people in spectacular public testimony, told the FBI’s LA office that while he knew nothing derogatory about Kramer personally, “the Kramer outfit is Red from the top to the bottom.”
Foreman argued in meetings with Kramer that the company could withstand HUAC’s political pressure so long as everyone stuck together. But Kramer grew wary. For one thing, he felt Foreman wasn’t being completely honest about his former party membership. And he didn’t like the idea that Foreman was planning to invoke the Fifth and refuse to answer the committee’s questions. In Kramer’s view, it would look like Foreman had something to hide, and the shadow of suspicion would inevitably fall on his colleagues. Kramer, Katz, and Glass were demanding to know where Foreman’s true allegiance lay.
Kramer and Foreman were also at odds over "High Noon." Kramer didn’t like what he was seeing in the dailies. Floyd Crosby’s gritty style looked too dark. Kramer also didn’t care for Cooper’s laconic, minimalist performance. “He seemed not to be acting but simply being himself,” Kramer would recall in his memoirs. “The character Cooper played was meant to be a simple man, not a superhero, strong but not unafraid, a human being. I think Cooper could have played him in his sleep—there were times I thought that was just what he was doing.” Kramer was equally critical of Grace Kelly, remarking, “She was just too young for Cooper.”
Foreman, for his part, was fed up with Kramer. He believed the picture was being shortchanged because Kramer and the production department were too busy trying to meet the new demands of churning out six pictures a year for Columbia. As the date of Foreman’s HUAC appearance grew near, things deteriorated. “We seemed to buck each other on practically everything,” he would recall. “I was in no mood to compromise anymore, and I fought for everything I thought necessary all the way.”
Foreman refrained from telling his colleagues that "High Noon" was a blacklist parable. He thought Zinnemann had enough on his mind already, and he feared Kramer and the other partners might panic and pull the plug if they recognized what he was doing.
Still, as Foreman put the finishing touches on the screenplay, he found himself inserting words he was fielding from his so-called friends, including Kramer and Glass. “A lot of the dialogue was almost the dialogue that I was hearing from people and even in the company,” he would later note. “You could walk down the street and see friends of yours recognize you, turn, and walk the other way.”
The conflict finally came to a head during the second week of shooting. Foreman was summoned to a meeting at Columbia with Kramer and the others—Katz, Glass, and lawyer Sam Zagon. Kramer announced their verdict: Foreman was to stop working on "High Noon," hand in his resignation, and turn over his stock holdings in the firm. All of this was designed to insulate the Stanley Kramer Company before Foreman testified. At a later date, he was told, they would reach an appropriate cash settlement with him.
Foreman resisted. He said he didn’t want to appear before the committee as a man who had already been tried and convicted by his own partners. Nor did he want to abandon the picture at such a crucial juncture. Kramer bridled and said he would take over the picture himself. Foreman objected, pointing out that Kramer, his hands already full with the Columbia deal, had had little direct involvement up to that point.
Two days later, Glass came by the Burbank set with an envelope containing two letters signed by Kramer suspending Foreman from the company and from any role on "High Noon." “You are hereby further instructed and directed not to come upon the premises . . . nor upon any location where said motion picture is being produced.”
Soon after, Kramer went to Zinnemann and Cooper and to Bruce Church, a Salinas agribusiness magnate who had helped finance the film, to tell them he was taking over from Foreman. To his great surprise, all three objected. To add to Kramer’s problems, his lawyers quickly discovered that Foreman had never signed a standard agreement deferring part of his salary during production. Without the deferral, Bank of America could refuse to issue the loan the company needed to complete the picture.
Kramer and the other partners were stuck. The following day Foreman received a new letter restoring his role as writer and associate producer of "High Noon" until the film was completed. Neither side would comment about Foreman’s status at the company without the other’s consent. At Kramer’s request, he and Foreman met again the next day.
According to Foreman’s account, Kramer sounded bitter and resentful. “Well, you’ve won,” he told Foreman. Not really, Foreman replied. He had never wanted to hurt Kramer, and even now, Foreman explained, he hated to see Kramer humiliated or feel defeated. Foreman said he didn’t want to leave the company, but if Kramer insisted, he would. Just give me a decent settlement, Foreman told him.
Then, Foreman said, Kramer started talking about Foreman’s plan to invoke the Fifth Amendment on the witness stand. The minute you do that, Kramer told him, they’ll think you’re a Communist and they’ll suspect me as well. Foreman replied: if they ask me about you, I’ll say you’re a fervent anti-Communist, and I won’t do anything to hurt you or the company. As Foreman saw it, everyone else had caved too quickly to HUAC’s pressure. If he and Kramer held firm, they could beat this. The two men agreed to wait 60 days and see what happened, without taking action or commenting publicly. “Let’s fight as long as we can,” Foreman pleaded. Kramer, in Foreman’s recollection, agreed.
Over the years, Stanley Kramer would seldom discuss his breakup with Foreman or criticize his former friend and business partner. There was one notable exception: an interview Kramer gave in the 1970s to author and editor Victor Navasky for Naming Names, Navasky’s seminal book on the blacklist, in which Kramer contends Foreman was not honest with him about his past Communist connections and what he planned to say on the witness stand.
“In my negotiations with Foreman there was this veil of unspoken ideas about how my past connections could militate against me,” Kramer contended. “If he had leveled with me, if I had known all the facts, that would have been one thing. But he really didn’t. . . . We had a couple of meetings in which I locked the door and looked him right in the eye, and I just felt he didn’t look me back in the right way, and we parted. That’s it.”
Their final meeting lasted more than two hours. The two friends would never speak to each other again.
Dressed in a dark-blue suit and what he called “a very sincere tie,” Carl Foreman took the witness stand on Monday morning, September 24, 1951, in the small, claustrophobic Room 518 of the Federal Building in Los Angeles. His testimony took less than an hour. Asked if he was a Communist, Foreman gave a convoluted reply: a year earlier, he said, he had signed a loyalty oath as a member of the board of the Screen Writers Guild pledging he was not a member of the party. “That statement was true at the time, sir, and is true today,” he added.
But when asked if he had been a Communist before 1950, Foreman invoked the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination and continued to do so throughout the hearing. He also pointedly refused the invitation of several questioners to denounce the party or comment further about its activities except to say that if he had come across anyone with treasonous intentions against the United States, he would have turned them in.
Committee members denounced his refusal to cooperate. He didn’t budge. He went home exhausted and drained, but took the night train to Sonora County where the 'High Noon' cast and crew were spending a week on location. The next day, he received word that Columbia had issued a statement under Kramer’s name citing “a total disagreement between Carl Foreman and myself.” The stockholders and company directors followed suit, effectively removing him from the premises and the picture. “They didn’t wait the 60 days,” Foreman would later recall. “They . . . threw me to the wolves.”
Foreman’s lawyer eventually negotiated a settlement with the company for an undisclosed amount to Foreman as severance pay, compensation for his shares, and his agreement to surrender his associate producer’s credit on "High Noon." Foreman would later put the total payment at around $150,000.
Next, he announced he was starting his own independent production company. Gary Cooper agreed to invest and the two men spoke about the actor starring in one of Foreman’s first productions. The agreement lasted exactly eight days. Cooper came under extraordinary public pressure—from right-wing gossip columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, who publicly questioned what this icon of American values was doing going into business with a former Red; from studio executives at Warner’s, who threatened to invoke the standard morals clause in Cooper’s contract to shut him down permanently; and from Cooper’s pals in the Motion Picture Alliance, including John Wayne. Cooper took off for Sun Valley, Idaho, where he embarked on a hunting and fishing expedition with his good pal Ernest Hemingway. A few days later he phoned Hopper to tell her that while he was still convinced of Foreman’s “loyalty, Americanism, and ability as a picture maker,” he had received “notice of considerable reaction and thinks it better for all concerned that he does not purchase any stock.” Hopper’s story ran on the front page of the next day’s Los Angeles Times.
Foreman never complained about Cooper’s retreat—“He was the only big one who tried,” Foreman later said—but his hopes of continuing to work in Hollywood were now shattered. Several months later, he moved to London, where he would live for the next 25 years, working on a slate of films, most notably co-writing the Oscar-winning screenplay for "The Bridge on the River Kwai" with blacklisted colleague Michael Wilson. (The movie took home six Academy Awards, including best picture and best screenplay.) The official screen credit would go to Pierre Boule, the French author of the novel upon which the 1957 movie was based. This injustice wasn’t rectified until 1984, when the Motion Picture Academy recognized Foreman and Wilson as the actual writers.
By then, both men were dead. At a somber ceremony, Zelma Wilson and Eve Foreman, their respective widows, picked up their prizes.
Controversy over "High Noon" didn’t end with Carl Foreman’s departure. After the filming, Kramer had it edited and re-edited to tighten the suspense. To almost everyone’s surprise at the Kramer Company, the little Western was an immediate hit upon its release in July 1952. President Eisenhower loved it, and 40 years later, so did Bill Clinton, who reportedly screened it some 20 times while in the White House. Over the years Kramer, film editor Elmo Williams, Zinnemann, and Foreman would debate endlessly just who was responsible for its abiding quality. “Of course the whole story behind the filming of "High Noon" is a comedy of errors and omissions—and a frantic scamper for credit by everyone since the film achieved some success,” Kramer would tell film historian Rudy Behlmer.
In the end, Carl Foreman’s career wasn’t the only victim of the blacklist. At least 500 people found themselves cast out of work, often for a decade or more. There were several suicides. There were premature deaths. Canada Lee, the African-American actor from "Body and Soul," died at age 45; two weeks later, heart failure claimed his 39-year-old co-star, John Garfield. Hollywood carried on, of course. But the studios, more or less, stopped making socially conscious movies for fear of facing another congressional reign of terror.
One of the notable exceptions was Stanley Kramer. After his partnership with Columbia dissolved in a sea of red ink and acrimony, he became an independent producer and director. Among his first hits was "The Defiant Ones" with Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis playing escaped prisoners in the Jim Crow South who are chained together and must learn to cooperate to have any chance at freedom. The script was co-written by Nedrick Young, a blacklisted screenwriter.
When the screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award, no one attempted to hide Young’s identity. And when it won, Young and co-writer Harold B. Smith went up together to collect their Oscars. Kramer hired the two men again to write "Inherit the Wind," and when the American Legion objected, he debated Martin B. McKneally, the organization’s commander, on national television. He branded the legion’s Red Scare crusade “un-American and reprehensible.”
Kramer went on to make a series of meaningful “message” pictures, including "On the Beach," "Judgment at Nuremburg," "Ship of Fools," and "Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner." Some were hits and some were clunkers, and Kramer took a lot of flak from critics like Pauline Kael, who called his films “irritatingly self-righteous” and “feeble intellectually.” Nonetheless, they paved the way for the political films of the late 1960s and 1970s, including "MASH," written by Hollywood Ten member Ring Lardner Jr., and Dalton Trumbo’s "Johnny Got His Gun"—along with "Midnight Cowboy," "Serpico," and "Coming Home," all written by blacklisted screenwriter Waldo Salt; Martin Ritt and Walter Bernstein’s "The Front" (which featured several blacklisted actors); as well as Hal Ashby’s "Bound for Glory," Francis Ford Coppola’s "Apocalypse Now," and Warren Beatty’s "Reds."
Viewed today, it’s hard to see "High Noon" as an anti-blacklist allegory. Gary Cooper’s Will Kane could just as easily be construed as Senator Joe McCarthy, standing bravely alone against an outlaw gang of Commies. But the arch conservative John Wayne smelled out the subversive politics lurking in the picture’s soul. He once called "High Noon" “the most un-American thing I’ve seen in my whole life.” Some distinguished critics have said it isn’t a Western at all but a modern social drama artificially grated onto an Old West setting.
Even so, despite its troubled and turbulent provenance, "High Noon" has succeeded in becoming, in the words of film critic and historian Leonard Maltin, “a morality play that just happens to be universal.” ###
[Glenn Frankel is an author, academic, and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. He is the author of four books, the latest of which is High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Legend (2017) and this essay was adapted from that book. Between 2010-2014, Frankel was the director of the School of Journalism and the G.B. Dealey Regents Professor in Journalism at The University of Texas at Austin. He received a BA (history) from Columbia University.]
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