High Noon in Hollywood
I recently attended a screening of “High
Noon” with Glen Frankel giving a short talk. I forgot how good this 1952 movie
is. In his book Glen Frankel tells the story of the making of this low-budget
black and white movie, his protagonist the screen writer Carl Foreman, the
producer Stanley Kramer, the star Gary Cooper, the composer Dimitri Tiomkin, and the very strong female roles of Grace
Kelly and Katy Jurado against the backdrop of the growing “red scare” in
Hollywood. Who knew Dmitri Tiomkin, a Ukrainian Jew, wrote the musical score for such westerns as “Red
River,” “Duel in the Sun,” “Giant,” “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and of course,
“High Noon.” Frankel notes that Tiomkin’s
biographer likened him to putting a musical score to the classic western
paintings of Frederic Remington and Charles Russell. He also discusses how the
movie’s theme song “Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darlin” became such a big hit.
But Frankel is not only interested in
the creation of this classic, he is also interested in the role of the Communist
Party in Hollywood and the blacklist that was to come in the late 1940s and
early 1950s. Screenwriter Carl Foreman was a communist for a while and then
abandoned the Party, but he along with the Hollywood 10 (screen writers who
refused to talk before the House Un-American Activities Committee and were
jailed) refused to name names and ended up in exile in England.
In Frankel’s view “High Noon” is an allegory
to Foreman standing up to the committee. Gary Cooper as Marshall Kane successfully
stands alone as the townspeople abandon him to face four returning outlaws
seeking revenge. The townspeople represent those in Hollywood who cringe in the
face of the committee, many of whom were like the liberals Dore Schary, Elia
Kazan and Ronald Reagan (a big liberal at the time). The story brings to mind Henrik Ibsen’s “An
Enemy of the People” where the bravest are the ones who stand most alone.
Frankel is clear-eyed when he discusses
the perfidy of the American Communist Party in the late 1930s and the early
1940s. But somehow he seems to me to be way to forgiving of the Hollywood
communists. He leaves out that Moscow targeted the New Deal, the C.I.O., the
defense industry and Hollywood as pathways for subversion. The Hollywood 10
writers were following orders from Moscow and were working towards bringing
Soviet Communism to America. They weren’t all that successful, but the intent
was clear. I wonder if instead of being communists they were Nazis would
Frankel have been so forgiving? Yes it was a bad time and yes civil liberties
were being trampled upon and yes the fears of the public were legitimate. Frankel
recognizes this when he cites the Venona transcripts which describe Moscow’s
control of American Communism.
Despite my disagreements, Frankel has
written an excellent book that tells us how a great movie was made and the
fears that bestrode liberal Hollywood in the 1950s.
