HIGH NOON: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an
American Classic
GLENN FRANKEL
Bloomsbury, 2017, 377 pages
The Hollywood western, High Noon, starring Gary Cooper, was the
frontrunner for the Oscars in 1953. It
picked up four awards, including Best Actor for Cooper, but there was no
statuette for the screenwriter, Carl Foreman, and none of the winners’ acceptance
speeches even mentioned his name. As
Foreman’s son later said, ‘it was like this weird Stalinism – Foreman didn’t
exist, there wasn’t a writer!’.
Foreman had become an
Un-Person because he had not sufficiently repented of the political sin of his past
membership of the US communist party in his recent hearing before the anti-Communist
witch-hunters of the federal government’s House Un-American Activities
Committee (HUAC).
Journalist, Glenn Frankel’s,
book revisits the political atmosphere of the time through High Noon in which the sheriff of Hadleyville (Marshal Will Kane,
played by Cooper), deserted by that town’s cowardly citizens and spineless
authorities, faces down a murderous rancher and his three gun-slingers in a
shoot-out in the main street as the designated hour, twelve noon, approaches.
Repurposed from its origins as
a parable about the newly-established United Nations Organisation’s aim of
preventing aggression, Foreman saw the possibility of a different allegory in High Noon, with HUAC’s victims
represented in the figure of the vulnerable sheriff, HUAC’s political thugs
symbolised by the rancher’s criminal gang, and Hadleyville standing in for a
craven Hollywood.
Foreman had joined the Communist
Party in the 1930s, because it was, as he told his HUAC inquisitors, ‘the
organisation most dedicated to fighting poverty and racism at home and Fascism
abroad’ but he had drifted away from the party because of Stalin. HUAC, however, was gunning for Hollywood
Reds, and (much like Stalin), it wanted total political degradation of the accused
in an elaborate Show Trial. HUAC needed
to choreograph spectacular political theatrics to reveal a giant “Red Plot to
destroy America” by parading a stream of self-flagellating communist penitents
denouncing their political faith, dumping on the party and ratting on their
comrades by naming names (even though HUAC already had all the names courtesy
of FBI spying).
Snitching on their comrades (at
the cost of total loss of all self-respect) was the only way to avoid jail for
contempt of Congress or staying off the career-ending Hollywood blacklist. The blacklist had been adopted by the movie
studios, and their Wall Street financiers, to avoid the economic loss that
would result from conservative boycotts and pickets of films which employed
HUAC targets. The blacklist (for those
with communist affiliations) and its equally damaging partner, the ‘graylist’
(which lassoed non-communists deemed politically risky because of their support
for progressive causes), drove some five hundred Hollywooders out of work.
By contrast, ‘friendly’
witnesses (including Cooper) were warmly welcomed by HUAC. Cooper, a Montana Republican, had had a stint
in a paramilitary polo club which trained to bust up ‘subversive’ gatherings
but the Paramount studio persuaded their star to leave the vigilante outfit
because such bare-knuckled politics would damage his brand value. The FBI, which helpfully ran political screen
tests for the ‘friendlies’, was subsequently pleased to report to HUAC that the
newly-respectable conservative star had passed his audition – he ‘presents an
excellent appearance and will testify in a smooth, even, soft-spoken,
unexcitable manner’, like his on-screen persona. Cooper leant celebrity endorsement to HUAC.
In High Noon, some viewers spotted the screenwriter’s deliberate
allusions to HUAC. John Wayne did - Hollywood’s
chief anti-communist bully, who said he never regretted ‘having helped run
Foreman out of the country’ to exile in England, hated High Noon, regarding it as ‘the most un-American thing I’ve ever
seen’. The film did, after all,
implicitly criticise the moral abdication of religion, commerce, the judiciary
and liberals. They were all brave from a
distance but melted away when their anti-blacklist principles saw HUAC’s
spotlight swing towards them.
One elite group of people have
always missed the political point of the film.
High Noon has been “the film most requested by
American presidents” (Bill Clinton tops the list with twenty private screenings)
because the POTUSes see in Marshal Kane’s courageous stand a reflection of themselves
as standard-bearers, often in opposition to their electorate, of moral
integrity in the cause of right versus wrong.
These fantasy heroes, however, are imposters, poseurs dishonouring a
film which was the antithesis of their practice of governing, with violence and
legal persecution, on behalf of the greedy, ruthless, criminal enterprise of
American capitalism.
The real heroes are to be
found in Frankel’s excellent book. Every
defendant who appeared before HUAC faced their own individual high noon, vulnerable
and scared, but they rose above their fear and, though wounded like the sheriff
in the shoot-out, they survived and the political value of liberty triumphed,
whilst it was the persecuting villains of HUAC who, in the end, bit the dust.
