Michael Perelman wrote:
NPR had an interesting feature last Sunday about the theme song for the film,
High
Noon.
The movie High Noon premiered in New York City on July 24, 1952, with an
innovation
-- a theme song, Do Not Forsake Me. It was a major a surprise hit, selling 2
million records.
Chronicle of Higher Education, September 13, 2002
FILM
Western Drama, Cold-War Allegory
By THOMAS DOHERTY
On first viewing, John Wayne hated High Noon (1952), the social-problem
film in Western garb produced by the orthodox liberal Stanley Kramer,
directed by the Vienna-born immigrant Fred Zinnemann, and written by the
blacklisted ex-Communist Carl Foreman. It wasn't just the people behind
the scenes, or the slanderous central conceit -- that the Old West was
packed with no-account yellow-bellies -- but the ending. "It's the most
un-American thing I've ever seen in my whole life," snarled Wayne after
he watched the embittered marshal, played by Gary Cooper, toss his tin
star into the dirt of a frontier town too dishonorable to deserve
protection.
As we mark the 50th anniversary of High Noon, the film may look a little
dry and dusty, but few would deny its quintessential American-ness. From
the opening strains of the Dimitri Tiomkin ballad crooned by the cowboy
star Tex Ritter ("Do not forsake me/Oh my darlin"') to the final ride
away from town, emphatically not into the sunset, the film seems as much
a frontier classic as a wanted poster of Cole Younger or a lecture by
Frederick Jackson Turner.
But High Noon's staying power derives not only from its compliance with
the codes of the Old West. It also results from its resistance to the
codes of the cold war. On September 17, PBS will be showing Darkness at
High Noon: The Carl Foreman Documents, already making the film-festival
circuit, which looks at Foreman's confrontation with the House
Un-American Activities Committee. Viewing the documentary against the
backstory of the original film highlights how much attitudes toward the
cold war have changed -- and how much the ideological combat of that war
still resonates in American culture.
At first blush, High Noon seems remarkable today neither for artistic
innovation nor political controversy. Paced with the precision of a
Greek drama, the plot is as sparse as a penny dreadful. At around 10:30
on a Sunday morning, while Marshal Will Kane (Coop) and his gorgeous
Quaker bride, Amy (Grace Kelly), are getting hitched, three mean hombres
ride into town to meet a paroled murderer, Frank Miller (Ian MacDonald),
scheduled to arrive on the noonday train. Miller has a score to settle
with the marshal. The trembling town fathers, worried about venture
capital, real-estate values, and their own hides, advise Kane to
vamoose. Possessing in spades what the menfolk lack, only the sultry
Mexican "businesswoman," Helen Ramirez (Katy Jurado), appreciates the
moral backbone of the marshal.
Kane knows what a man's gotta do. From saloon to church, he trudges
wearily about town looking to recruit deputies, but the able-bodied men
of Hadleyville skulk away like polecats. Coop's taut, tormented visage
(painful back problems helped him get into character) registers the
anguish of a man facing not just death but disillusionment.
In a genre that had for years luxuriated in the liberation of open space
and scenic vistas, High Noon was a trapped and claustrophobic film. The
camera hugged the ground for static shots of train tracks on the horizon
and still compositions of a community paralyzed with fear and
indecision; the bone-dry, black-and-white cinematography recalled a
social documentary from the 1930s rather than a mythic flashback to the
colorful Wild West (not surprising, since the cameraman, Floyd Crosby,
shot New Deal documentaries).
The restrained style and harsh outlook of High Noon were extreme at the
time, but not totally out of tune during the high renaissance of the
postwar Hollywood western. From Howard Hawks's rowdy Red River (1948) to
John Ford's elegiac The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), the new
westerns were world-weary, philosophical, and morally ambiguous,
reflecting the hard-won knowledge of a generation of adult males who had
learned firsthand that dexterity with a gun was not proof of manhood.
"The deeper seriousness of the good western films comes from the
introduction of a realism, both physical and psychological, that was
missing from Tom Mix and William S. Hart," observed the cultural critic
Robert Warshow in a 1954 essay. (Long out of print, Warshow's landmark
1962 collection of cold-war cultural criticism, The Immediate
Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre, & Other Aspects of Popular Culture,
was reissued last year by Harvard University Press.)
Another part of the reason for the postwar maturation of the genre was
that the familiar ground of the Old West offered a safe homestead for
provocative social and political critique. In a conservative era, themes
that might have been verboten in modern dress -- racial injustice, the
arrogance of authority, capitalist corruption -- seemed less alien and
subversive among six-guns and sagebrush.
In this spirit, High Noon set its sights on the political controversy
settling over the most famous Western town of all. "What High Noon was
about at the time," its screenwriter Foreman admitted years later, "was
Hollywood and no other place but Hollywood." Translation: the Miller
Gang were stand-ins for the gang from HUAC, the craven townspeople of
Hadleyville were the cooperative witnesses who cowered before the
committee, and the marshal followed the lone path of honor in a town
without pity. Not too far under the surface, readily detectable by any
viewer with the wits to spot a metaphor, High Noon acted out the high
drama of conscience against expediency, personal codes against community
values.
Here, too, High Noon was not just provocative but prescient in its
challenge to the consensus cold-war view of domestic tranquility. Today,
in academic scholarship and popular entertainment alike, the manicured
landscapes of Leave It to Beaver, The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet, and
Father Knows Best have been supplanted by the corrosive picture of 1950s
America in Gary Ross's Pleasantville (1998). A virtual sister city to
Hadleyville, Pleasantville contains a rotten core within its apple-pie
front: lockstep conformity, blinkered perspectives, and an outlook that
is truly black and white. Once heretical, the view of cold-war America
exposed to sunlight in High Noon is now cold-war consensus.
Little wonder, then, that Foreman's free-thinking defiance appears so
admirable in retrospect. In September 1951, HUAC descended on Hollywood
to investigate Communist infiltration of the motion-picture industry,
and the screenwriter faced a showdown of his own. Although far less
star-studded than the notorious Hollywood Ten hearings of 1947, held in
Washington, D.C., the 1951 hearings in Los Angeles were a virtual
replay, with cooperative witnesses reeling off dozens of names of
suspected Communists, uncooperative witnesses (dubbed "unfriendlies")
baiting the committee and pleading the Fifth Amendment, and an unruly
gallery applauding and hissing on cue.
At the time, Foreman was riding the rising arc of a meteoric career,
with versatile credits including Home of the Brave (1949), a widely
praised exposé of racism within the Army; Champion (1949), a
bare-knuckled look at the fight world that brought Kirk Douglas to
stardom; and The Men (1950), a moving depiction of the struggle of
paralyzed war veterans that introduced a young Method actor named Marlon
Brando. During his testimony, telecast live on local television, Foreman
tried to avoid appearing stridently unfriendly. "If I knew now or ever
had knowledge of anyone plotting grievous damage to my government and
the Constitution, I would report it," he declared. "I have always tried
to be a good American." Still, he firmly rebuffed the committee's
demands to inform on his former comrades in the Communist Party by
"naming names."
The next day, the producer Stanley Kramer, heretofore Foreman's
collaborator, business partner, and friend, declared: "There is total
disagreement between Carl Foreman and myself." He then jettisoned
Foreman from his production company, which was helping to bankroll High
Noon.
That outpouring of bad blood roils again in Darkness at High Noon. The
documentary was directed and written by Lionel Chetwynd, a prolific
filmmaker perhaps best known for The Hanoi Hilton (1987) and for being
one of the rare conservative Republicans in lefter-than-thou Hollywood.
It alleges that the good liberal Kramer, the producer of record for High
Noon, kicked the former Communist Foremen while he was down by kicking
his name off the screen and cheating him out of production credit.
Though Kramer himself died last year, his widow has accused Chetwynd of
"rewriting history." For anyone else, however, Darkness at High Noon
marshals more than enough evidence on Foreman's behalf to demonstrate
that he, not Kramer, corralled High Noon for market.
Nevertheless, despite his renunciation of Foreman, until the recent
dust-up Kramer's credentials as the very model of cold-war liberalism
were unassailable. For more than three decades as a producer and
director, Kramer thrived as the auteur of a distinctive series of
high-minded, dead-earnest, and smugly self-satisfied melodramas
exploring Serious Issues: interracial brotherhood (The Defiant Ones,
1958), moral responsibility (Judgment at Nuremberg, 1961), and
interracial marriage (Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, 1966). Ridiculed for
his middlebrow earnestness by elite critics, he was nevertheless often
rewarded by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science and by
moviegoers increasingly sympathetic to his liberal agenda.
To now cast Kramer as central villain of the blacklist era is both
mean-spirited and off target. Whatever his aesthetic sins, he was a
gutsy voice for traditional liberalism during the depths of the cold
war. At once anti-Communist and anti-McCarthyite, he played a notable
role in helping to crack the blacklist. In a famous gesture of
subversive defiance during the credit sequence of The Defiant Ones, the
name "Nathan E. Douglas" -- the pseudonym used by the blacklisted
screenwriter Nedrick Young -- flashes on screen over the face of none
other than Nedrick Young, who was making a cameo appearance as a truck
driver in the film he co-wrote.
Moreover, so long after the fact, it is difficult to disentangle how
much of Kramer's grasping of screen credit for High Noon was
blacklist-inspired opportunism and how much the usual credit-hogging in
an industry where the fight over name recognition has always been a
blood sport. Tellingly, the 1952 trailer to High Noon, viewable on the
DVD released in 2001, bills the film as "Stanley Kramer's masterpiece of
suspense" -- neglecting to mention not only the blacklisted screenwriter
Foreman but the un-blacklisted director Zinnemann.
Whatever the truth of the matter, Darkness at High Noon reflects just
how contentious and convoluted the politics of the blacklist era remain
after half a century. Where else could a conservative Republican
(Chetwynd) use an ex-Communist (Foreman) victimized by right-wing
politicians (HUAC) to discredit a liberal Democrat (Kramer)?
Sometimes lost against the blacklist backstory is the other time-bound
sensitivity exposed by High Noon. In what was then an audacious hook,
the film exploits the passage of "real time" to ratchet up the suspense:
Its 85-minute running time unspools approximately in sync with the
10:30-to-noon time frame of the narrative. Everywhere, pendulums swing
and clocks tick as the passage of time is highlighted in a prolonged
session of watch-the-clock.
A plague more terrible for Hollywood than even the blacklist was helping
prepare audiences for the timely innovation: television. As the media
historian Erik Barnouw noted in his 1975 compendium Tube of Plenty: The
Evolution of American Television, before television, spectators were
conversant in only one moving-image language, a dialect that found its
most eloquent expression in the "invisible style" of classical Hollywood
cinema, where a syntax of smooth dissolves and seamless editing worked
to suspend the passage of time. High Noon brought to the movies the
tension and pace of Studio One, The U.S. Steel Hour, Playhouse 90, and
other gems from the golden age of live television drama.
Punctually enough, the television-derived time codes and the blacklist
backstory of High Noon collided in a moment of high drama on the evening
of March 19, 1953. The occasion was the 25th Academy Awards ceremony,
for the first time telecast live. High Noon was favored to win the Best
Picture Oscar, but the more conservative choice by the most conservative
director took top prize: Cecil B. DeMille's circus extravaganza The
Greatest Show on Earth. In the end, High Noon won four Oscars -- Best
Song, Best Editing, Best Musical Score, and Best Actor for Coop.
But the category that the citizens of Hollywood had anticipated with a
fearful tension that the citizens of Hadleyville would have understood
was Best Screenplay. By then the blacklisted Foreman was in exile in
London, which meant that someone from the production team of High Noon
would have had to accept the award on his behalf had he won. Yet
Foreman's pariah status had rendered the usually coveted trophy
radioactive. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Kramer and his
associates drew straws to see who would accept the Oscar. When the MGM
executive Dore Schary read the name of the winner -- Charles Schnee for
The Bad and the Beautiful -- the only person happier than Charles Schnee
was High Noon's production designer Rudolph Sternad, who had drawn the
short straw.
Later that evening, when the ceremony-averse Coop won his Oscar, his
friend and fellow frontier icon John Wayne accepted for him. The actor
in Wayne winning out over the activist, he confessed that he would have
liked to have played the role of Marshal Kane. High Noon was already
beginning to seem timeless.
Thomas Doherty is an associate professor of film studies at Brandeis
University and the author of Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization
of American Movies in the 1950s (Temple University Press, 2002).
