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.
STANLEY KRAMER
The Men failed at the box office; despite an incandescent performance, Marlon Brando would have to wait a little longer to become a big-time movie star. But Carl Foreman received his second Oscar nomination for screenwriting. He lost again—this time to Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, and D. M. Marshman Jr. for Sunset Boulevard. Still, his string of personal successes led him to try to revive a project he’d first pushed two years earlier and still felt passionate about.
A United Nations representative had approached Screen Plays Inc. in 1948 seeking to interest Stanley and Carl in making a movie about the organization. Carl believed in the UN and wanted to help, but rather than turn out a propaganda film he started playing with the idea of setting it in the Old West in a town under threat from outside forces. At first he saw it as a hopeful parable about the new world order. But as the climate of fear began to take hold in Hollywood his vision began to darken. The HUAC hearings, the plight of the Hollywood Ten, the abject surrender by the big studios—all struck him as signs of moral and political collapse in a community he had once respected. “It was these events that made me think of a story about Hollywood under the political gun, as it were, and its reaction,” he recalled. “The certain lines of defense were shortening, and people were falling away and the authorities—our authorities, the studio heads and the Eric Johnstons, who had been so brave at the beginning—were all changing their tune and people were more and more scared all the time.”
At the same time, Carl had become intrigued with the concept of a story that would run in real time, like the recent Hitchcock thriller Rope—the clock ticking and the suspense building for ninety minutes as the plot unwound toward a final showdown between the lawman and the bad guys. He dashed off a short outline and called it High Noon, an appropriate title for a picture in which the clock would be a major factor.
To supplement his income, Carl occasionally did writing gigs for other production companies besides his own, and he was currently working on The Clay Pigeon (1949), a modest noir-style melodrama for RKO, which had recently been acquired by Howard Hughes. Richard Fleischer, Carl’s buddy and close neighbor, was directing—it was Fleischer who had directed So This Is New York, the Kramer company’s first picture—and they carpooled to the studio together every morning from their homes in the San Fernando Valley and back again in the evening. There was plenty of time to kill crossing the Hollywood Hills and the two men would discuss High Noon, working out some of the potential characters and plotlines. Fleischer liked the idea a lot and wanted to direct it but was too busy with other things.
Carl next discussed the idea with Stanley Kramer, who also expressed interest. But the two men got sidetracked on other films. They had finished Champion, their boxing movie starring Kirk Douglas, then launched immediately on the combat melodrama Home of the Brave. Stanley wanted to keep that movie’s racial story matter secret, so he used the High Noon title as a cover on the screenplay and press announcements to disguise what they were doing. Still, Carl kept working on the real High Noon on the side.
A draft treatment, dated January 11, 1950, and crafted by Carl with Dick Fleischer’s input, is entitled High Noon: An Original Story by Carl Foreman. It is set in the fictional frontier town of Hatfield. Marshal Will Tyler is turning in his badge two days after marrying his bride, Elizabeth, when the stationmaster arrives to inform him that Clyde Doyle, a convicted killer, has been released from prison and is arriving in an hour on the noon train. Doyle’s two brothers are waiting for him at the station. When he gets there, they plan to kill Tyler.
During the next hour, Tyler discovers he will have to face the Doyles alone. The judge who sentenced Doyle to prison abruptly leaves town, one of Tyler’s deputies resigns and the other is away on business, Elizabeth walks out on him after he refuses her plea to flee, and no one in the community answers his call for volunteers. As the minutes tick by, he makes out his will and sets off down a silent street to meet his fate—“the loneliest man in the world,” as the draft puts it. The silence is broken by gunshots. Ten minutes later, the three Doyles lie dead while a wounded Tyler drops his badge and holster in the dirt, embraces Elizabeth, and rides with her out of town.
The draft, which runs slightly more than three pages, is just a rudimentary sketch of what High Noon would become. Yet it contains many of the themes and concepts of the final film: the head bad guy arriving on the noon train to meet his gang, the conflict between the marshal and his new bride, the abandonment of the lawman by the people he had counted on for support, the lonely walk down an empty street to a showdown against overwhelming odds, the references to time passing quickly. “There are no dissolves, fades, or other time lapses,” Carl writes. “Everything that happens takes place as the actual minutes tick by.”
But when Carl showed the treatment to friends and colleagues around the company, he discovered to his surprise and embarrassment that his High Noon story was not original. Art director Rudolph Sternad recalled reading a short story with a similar plot in Collier’s or the Saturday Evening Post.
Indeed, “The Tin Star” by John W. Cunningham Jr. had run in Collier’s in December 1947. As the story opens, Sheriff Doane, an aging widower with painful arthritis, is preparing for a showdown with four gunmen who are coming to town to kill him. One of his deputies quits out of cowardice, while the other, named Toby, promises to stand by him but plans to quit afterward. The job of sheriff is just too tough and unappreciated. Doane agrees. “You risk your life catching somebody,” he says, “and the damned juries let them go so they can come back and shoot at you … It’s a job for a dog, son.”
Mayor Percy Mettrick shows up, seeking to pressure Doane into resigning rather than face the younger gunmen. “Who the hell do you think you are, Doane?” demands Mettrick, washing his hands of the matter. “… Whatever happens, don’t be blaming me.”
Doane rides off to the cemetery to pay his weekly visit to his wife’s gravesite. “No, Cissie, I could have gone,” he tells her. “But you know—it’s my town.”
Hearing shots, Doane races back to town to find one gunman dead and Toby wounded in the leg. Doane manages to shoot another gunman, but he can’t hold the pistol after squeezing the trigger because of the pain.
Jordan and Colby, the two remaining killers, grab Toby and use him as a human shield. Doane manages to kill Colby by switching his gun to his left hand but takes a bullet in the neck from Jordan. The two men exchange shots; Doane is hit in the stomach and the knee while Jordan is shot in the chest. As a dying Jordan lifts his gun to shoot Toby, Doane throws himself across Toby’s body and absorbs the final bullet.
As the story ends, Toby takes the dead sheriff’s gun and his tin star, “holding the two things tightly, one in each hand, like a child with a broken toy.”
“Get the doc,” he tells Mettrick. “I’ve got a busted leg. And I’ve got a lot to do.”
“The Tin Star” is a story about the demands of duty on men of honor, and about courage—when the moment of truth arrives, some men have it and some don’t. It’s also about the passing of the torch from one generation to the next. The plot details are a bit convoluted, but the characters are sharply drawn. And while many of the themes and plot details differ, its basic narrative thrust is uncomfortably similar to Carl’s concept for High Noon. The reference to the clock and the train, the cowardly actions of the mayor and one of the deputes, the mechanics of the final shootout—all have echoes in the story Carl was starting to create. But with one important difference: “The Tin Star” concludes with an affirmation of the values of society, whereas High Noon ends with a ringing rejection.
Carl was chagrined to discover the overlaps between his story and Cunningham’s. Perhaps he had read the story in 1947 and then forgotten all about it? He suggested to Stanley that they buy the film rights to the story just to be safe. But Stanley was immersed in planning for Cyrano de Bergerac and had lost interest in High Noon. Although Westerns usually did well at the box office, they were expensive to shoot and needed a big-time star, lots of action scenes, and Technicolor to guarantee success, all of which didn’t appeal to some of the more pragmatic moneymen who counted on Stanley and his team to work quickly and cheaply. But Carl was determined to go ahead; he paid Cunningham eight hundred dollars out of his own pocket for the rights. He harbored the hope that he might be allowed to produce and direct High Noon himself under the Kramer company trademark. It was, after all, his baby. After completing the screenplays for The Men and Cyrano, he started to work on it.
* * *
By the time Carl finished a more detailed, fifteen-page treatment in January 1951, circumstances had changed dramatically for him and the Kramer company. Stanley had formed his new enterprise and was about to sign the deal with Columbia Pictures. It would require the company to deliver six pictures per year over a five-year period—an enormous undertaking for a company that had only made five pictures in its four-year existence. Stanley, George Glass, and Sam Katz immediately turned their attention to acquiring properties, hiring talent, and hammering out a production schedule for the first year. Stanley told Carl he would have to forgo directing High Noon or any other picture for the foreseeable future. The company needed him working full-time cranking out scripts and helping produce the movies that resulted.
There was, however, one unfinished piece of business that Stanley needed Carl’s help with. The company owed United Artists one more film under its original distribution contract and High Noon was the obvious candidate. Carl could finish writing it and he could produce it as well. The film would be branded a Stanley Kramer production, but Carl would be credited as associate producer and he would have a larger role than in the past in overseeing the making of the movie.
At around the same time, Fred Zinnemann returned to Hollywood after filming Teresa, the story of an Italian war bride and her GI husband, in Italy and New York. He was thrilled when he read the detailed High Noon outline and listened to Carl talk about the project. “I thought it was nothing short of a masterpiece—brilliant, exciting, and novel in its approach,” Fred would recall. “I could hardly wait to come to grips with it.” Carl’s heart sank; he realized he would have to shelve his hope of directing the picture himself and turn it over to his more experienced colleague. Still, Carl liked and trusted Fred, had enjoyed their partnership on The Men, and was more than willing to collaborate with him again. High Noon moved forward.
Neither man seemed fazed by the fact that they had never made a Western before. “I had grown up with the Western,” Carl would recall. “It turned out there was very little research to be done.” He was wary of the obvious limitations and “encrusted clichés” of the Western, and he was not interested in cattle drives or stunning vistas or multiple gunfights. “I was simply tired of endless cattle stampedes and I wanted to present human rather than purely pictorial values,” Carl recalled.
Still, he had a genuine appreciation for the classic values of the old-fashioned Western, especially those of his silent-movie idol William S. Hart, whose Western characters always kept their word. It’s clear that Carl was thinking of Hart as he started to sketch out his own heroic lawman for High Noon. “His films were remarkably authentic, and psychologically accurate,” Carl later wrote. “More, in their lean simplicity, their unadorned concern with basic motives and passions, and their direct thrust to an inevitable conclusion, they bore a strong relationship to the Greek classics, and more often than not, like them they ended in tragedy.”
Both he and Fred also had huge respect for John Ford, the American cinema’s most honored director and a visual poet of the American West. Carl’s new script in many ways followed the path first blazed by Ford’s classic Western Stagecoach (1939). At its heart, Stagecoach was a social drama, almost a comedy of manners, about class, loyalty, community, and civilized values. Ford filled his stagecoach with a variety of outcasts, hypocrites, and thwarted idealists. The hero is an escaped convict seeking justice for the murder of his brother. His companions and soulmates are an alcoholic physician and a kindhearted prostitute. Each rises to various challenges with courage and grit. In the end, the hero triumphs over Apache raiders and goes on to confront his brother’s killers in a showdown that his lover begs him to avoid. He guns down the villains, then rides off with her to his ranch across the border, with the blessing of a sheriff who looks the other way as they escape. Decency triumphs. The film is Ford’s optimistic vision of the West as a place of new beginnings. High Noon borrowed many of the same themes; its hero triumphs through personal courage and gun violence. But its vision became something far darker.
Fred Zinnemann’s reputation was that of an art-house filmmaker who knew how to work with talented young actors but had never directed a hit movie. Some observers thought it was ludicrous to give him a Western, that most quintessential and lowbrow of American cinematic forms. But Fred had grown up in Vienna reading the novels and short stories of Karl May, Germany’s literary equivalent of Zane Grey. The Wild West of May’s melodramatic books bore little or no resemblance to the real one, but that didn’t matter; they were faithful to the mythic American West in his mind—and in the minds of tens of thousands of readers. One of the books Fred treasured from childhood and brought with him from Europe was the 1891 novel Der Schatz im Silbersee (The Treasure of the Silver Lake), in which two of May’s classic heroes, Apache chief Winnetou and mountain man Old Shatterhand, track down a gang of killers searching for the legendary treasure. “My father was into the West and that’s what got him wanting to come to America in the first place,” says Tim Zinnemann.
But Fred didn’t care primarily about the Western setting. What appealed to him most about making High Noon was the same thing he looked for in almost all his pictures: the struggle of a lone person confronting a terrible decision. High Noon would have intense scenes of people facing danger who were forced to reveal their true selves in front of the story’s hero. “It’s a picture of conscience as against compromise,” he said. “Just that, nothing else.”
High Noon was Carl’s eleventh screenplay in just over a decade and the writing went quickly. He would send pages to Stanley and Fred as he wrote, and they would meet periodically for discussions. Fred’s major contribution to the screenplay was to emphasize the railroad tracks at various moments in the story and have them disappear into the far horizon to underscore the isolation of the town and the looming threat. Fred even had Rudy Sternad do a sketch of the tracks to show the image he was looking for. Stanley suggested they hold the final shootout in a cemetery, but Carl rejected the idea. Otherwise things went smoothly, with Carl fleshing out scenes and dialogue.
The setting for his story is now called Hadleyville, a name that sounds a bit more like Hollywood and also echoes Mark Twain’s novella about a small town’s hypocrisy, The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg. Not so long ago, Carl writes, the town was at the mercy of local rancher Gil Jordan, a ruthless feudal baron, and his gang of thugs. But five years ago, Marshal Will Doane and a handful of hard-riding deputies had defeated the gang and arrested Jordan for murder. He was sentenced to hang, but influential friends in the territorial capital applied pressure to have the sentence commuted to life imprisonment. These days Doane only needs two deputies to help him enforce the law. But now word has come by telegram on a Sunday morning that Jordan has been pardoned and is on his way home on the noon train to join with the remnants of his gang and seek revenge on Doane.
Alongside the plot, the prime focus of Carl’s first draft was on character development. He had learned over the years that, as he put it, “if I understand my characters, it’s a much easier story to write. Time and again I fall into traps. I get terribly interested in the plot and get so involved in that I get too lazy to stop and say, ‘Wait a minute, really, who are these people? What do they want? What are they about?”’
The main character is Doane, a second-generation Westerner in his mid-thirties. Doane, who is not a native of the town, has an unromantic view of his job as marshal but “has enjoyed the prestige it has given him, and the knowledge that he is respected and liked by the townspeople.” Now he is getting married and is leaving his post with regret. He is doing so at the behest of his new bride, a young woman who has convinced him to move to another town and open a general store. “He is, certainly, not an average man,” writes Carl, “but a very human one.”
Amy Fowler, whom Doane has married this morning, became a Quaker after her father and brother were killed while taking part in a vigilante action. “Young, attractive, intelligent, strong-willed, Amy is determined not to be a sheltered toy-wife but a full partner in her marriage, and it is she who has planned their future,” Carl writes. “More, Amy’s Quaker heritage had given her strong intellectual and emotional convictions against any form of violence, and marriage to Doane would have been unthinkable had he remained a peace officer.”
Carl has also created another strong woman character, Helen Ramirez, a local businesswoman. She is half white and half Mexican and thus “a victim of the era and environment with rigid social standards.” She is “neither acceptable to the ‘pure’ American women of the region nor eligible for a ‘good’ marriage. Consequently, in addition to being intelligent, shrewd, and strong-willed, she is also hard and resentful. Physically she is handsome, full-breasted, passionate. More, she has style, personality.” The widow of a local saloon owner, Helen had become Gil Jordan’s mistress during his reign over the town. But after his arrest and imprisonment, she selected Doane as his successor, and she still cannot forgive Doane for ending their affair—“a privilege she reserves for herself.” Helen insists on controlling her own life, including her body.
What’s striking is that both these women characters are exceptionally modern, independent, and intelligent, not just for the 1880s time period the screenplay is set in but for 1951 when Carl created them. Not many women with their stature and autonomy appeared in Western novels or films. And both sprung directly from Carl’s own imagination. He had never before written female characters of such flair and strength; the women in Champion are largely cardboard cutouts, representing virtue, sin, and sensuality. Ellen, the lead character in The Men, is stronger and more complex, a mix of naïve idealism and fierce determination, but she is still incompletely drawn. Amy and Helen, by contrast, are something new, and their strength and the contrast between them are among the things that make High Noon exceptional. Carl’s widow, Eve Williams-Jones, says he based these characters in part on his own mother and grandmother, both of them strong, talented women. His mother could sew, make hats, and play the piano beautifully. His grandmother wrote poetry. Both were gifted storytellers.
“I was trying to write some women’s parts within the framework of a male story, and also within the framework of a male industry,” Carl would recall. He especially wanted Helen Ramirez to be a character of “stature, individuality, a person in her own right, a strong character.”
Carl has added one other main character to the mix. Harvey Pell is Doane’s friend and chief deputy and recently he has become Helen’s younger lover. Beneath his friendship with Doane lurks “a nagging sense of inferiority” and envy. Although Pell has taken Doane’s place in Helen’s bed, he feels he has not really replaced the older man in her heart. Pell is immature, ambitious, and anxious to prove his manhood and importance. He had hoped to be named Doane’s successor as marshal, and resents Doane for the fact it hasn’t happened. He comes to see the unfolding crisis as his opportunity to get what he wants.
As Carl worked on developing the main characters, Stanley launched the process of casting the picture. The big question was who should play the lead role. Stanley, Carl, and Fred discussed names such as Gregory Peck, Henry Fonda, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Marlon Brando, William Holden, and Charlton Heston, but each of them either was unavailable or unwilling to work for the kind of salary that the Kramer company was willing to pay—fifty thousand dollars or so. But to Stanley’s surprise, one big star was willing to negotiate. Gary Cooper, who was in the middle of the seven-year deal with Warner Bros. that at this stage guaranteed him $295,000 annually for one picture a year, was so hungry for a decent part that he was ready to take a major pay cut.
At first Stanley and Carl were reluctant to consider him: at age fifty he looked at least ten years too old to play the marshal. And Cooper was exactly the kind of big studio celebrity actor that both men tended to deprecate. “The name of Gary Cooper was already, at that time … a fun name for Hollywood: yep and so forth and so on,” Carl would recall. “He was a kind of relic; old, old times.” Stanley was equally wary. “[Cooper] wasn’t at the peak of his career either,” he recalled. “Everybody felt he was old and tired.”
But Bruce Church, the Salinas lettuce grower who had helped finance The Men and Cyrano and who was willing to invest two hundred thousand dollars in this new picture, was a big Cooper fan. He urged Stanley and Carl to make a pitch to Cooper’s lawyer, I. H. Prinzmetal. Tired of the second-rate screenplays he was getting from Warners, Cooper said he loved Carl’s story and was genuinely excited by the chance to play the marshal. He claimed the role reminded him of the Montana lawmen his father used to tell him about. “My concept of a sheriff was that of a man who represented the people,” said Cooper. “Alone he could never do his job—he had to have help.” To everyone’s surprise, Cooper was prepared to accept one hundred thousand dollars—less than half his usual salary—plus a percentage of the profits. Stanley, for one, assumed there would be none. It was a great deal for the Kramer company.
Carl recalled that Cooper came onboard before he had finished the screenplay. The contrasts between them surely made for an interesting first encounter. Cooper was pure Hollywood aristocracy, lavishly paid and well connected. He’d been a major star for two decades, and even though the luminosity of his stardom was fading, he was still at the heart of the filmmaking establishment. There’s a photo from a New Year’s Eve party at Romanoff’s in the 1950s of Cooper in evening wear with a long-stemmed glass of champagne in his hand, looking relaxed and well groomed, standing and joking with Clark Gable, Van Heflin, and James Stewart, his good friends and noble peers. Or Cooper at the Parthenon with Rocky and Maria, or Cooper strolling along the Seine or meeting Pope Pius XII at the Vatican, or bowing to Queen Elizabeth in London, or sitting at a table with the dashing young John F. Kennedy in a naval officer’s uniform. Cooper was always well dressed and handsome and comfortable with royalty of all kinds, a man so elegant that a men’s magazine had gone to his house to photograph his clothes closet.
Like Cooper, Carl Foreman now lived in Brentwood, an haut-bourgeois neighborhood just west of Beverly Hills. But Carl’s idea of social life was poker night with John Weaver, Herb Baker, and Dick Fleischer, or a barbecue at Stanley Kramer’s little beach cabana, or bowling at La Cienega Lanes on Saturday night followed by coffee at Dominick’s. But what Cooper and Carl had in common was respect for the work and an abiding hunger to succeed. Cooper needed a good screenplay and Carl knew that High Noon was the best one he’d ever written. On this they totally agreed.
Even though Cooper was a relative bargain, his hundred-thousand-dollar fee blew a huge hole in Stanley’s budget and left a mere $35,000 for the rest of the cast. He and Carl had to work carefully and skillfully to put together a talented set of supporting actors.
They hired the Academy Award–winning character actor Thomas J. Mitchell for the part of Jonas Henderson, the jocular but hypocritical town selectman who claims to be the marshal’s best friend but publicly disowns him at the crucial moment when Doane pleads for the community’s support. Mitchell had won an Oscar for best supporting actor for Stagecoach in 1940, and had performed brilliantly in classics like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It’s a Wonderful Life. Stanley signed him for $6,000 for one week’s work. Kramer struck similar time-sensitive deals, although for far less money, with Lon Chaney Jr. ($1,750), Otto Kruger ($1,500), and Henry Morgan ($1,000), all of them veteran character actors. Each signed on for just one week’s work, which meant Carl and Fred had to design a shooting schedule to use all of them during the first week of filming. Stanley got Lloyd Bridges, a potential future star, for five weeks at $800 per week.
Bridges was a handsome, blond-haired Northern California boy who had worked in the theater in New York in the early thirties before returning home in 1936 to get into the movies. He was briefly under contract at Columbia, but got stuck with bit parts and no real training or career development. Seeking to improve, he joined the Actors’ Laboratory, where he was exposed to acting techniques and radical politics in equal measure and became a devoted student of fellow actor Roman Bohnen, chairman of the Actors’ Lab executive board. Like his good friend Larry Parks, Bridges became a member of the board, and then around 1943 Bohnen asked him if he’d ever given any thought to joining the Communist Party. There was, as Bridges later recalled, “no law against it and they were fighting the Nazis and the Fascists.” So he joined up. He remained in the party for a year or more, then drifted away. But he remained on the board of the Actors’ Lab and involved in radical causes, including the campaign to abolish HUAC.
Bridges had been best man at Parks’s wedding to Betty Garrett in 1944, and he watched with horror the public humiliation heaped upon his friend by HUAC. A few weeks after Parks’s disastrous appearance before the committee, Bridges paid a visit to the FBI with his new lawyer, Martin Gang, to tell everything he knew about the party, including the names of Bohnen (who had died in 1949) and other former comrades. All of which he kept secret from his fellow High Noon cast members, including the fact that he was due in October to give testimony in executive session to Bill Wheeler at HUAC.
Stanley and Carl next contracted for the three “gunnies”—the members of Gil Jordan’s gang, including his younger brother, Milt, who spend most of the movie drinking, smoking, and bickering while waiting for their boss’s train to arrive. Stanley signed Sheb Wooley, Robert Wilke, and, in his first movie role, Lee Van Cleef, who was a client of Earl Kramer, Stanley’s talent-agent uncle. All three went on to become superbly familiar faces in a decade or more of Westerns, and Van Cleef became an iconic Western star (although in High Noon he didn’t have a single line of dialogue; his hawklike face said it all). Jack Elam, another fixture in Westerns, had a bit part as the town drunk. Earl Kramer also brought in a client named Katy Jurado, a dark and sultry Latina actress who was a proven star in Mexico, where she had made seventeen films in Spanish, but had only appeared in one previous American movie.
As in The Men, Carl was closely involved in many of these decisions and Fred had veto power. But Stanley alone got the credit for the most intriguing yet problematic casting choice.
Grace Kelly was a twenty-two-year-old fledging actress with a couple of Broadway performances, television shows, modeling gigs, commercials, and one small movie role on her résumé when her agent, Jay Kanter of MCA, suggested her for the part of Amy Fowler, the marshal’s virginal but strong-minded new bride. Kanter was the same agent who had worked with Stanley to line up Marlon Brando for The Men. Kelly was strikingly beautiful—a natural blonde with perfect skin, piercing blue eyes, and a beguiling smile—and incredibly unsure of herself. But perhaps her most noteworthy trait, in Stanley’s eyes, was her willingness to work for $750 a week.
Grace had the plummy accent and icy demeanor of a native-born aristocrat from Philadelphia’s affluent Main Line. But she wasn’t exactly what she seemed. Her parents were Irish Catholics and she was raised in East Falls, an affluent Philly neighborhood but nowhere near the Main Line. Her father, Jack, whom she adored, was a gold-medal Olympic oarsman, owner of a bricklaying business, charismatic but failed mayoral candidate, and world-class philanderer. Her mother was a beauty queen and model who taught physical education at the University of Pennsylvania. Her older sister, Peggy, was Jack Kelly’s favorite, while Grace was a flat-chested, chubby, and myopic teenager, subject to bouts of extreme melancholia. “The idea of my life as a fairy tale is itself a fairy tale,” she told Donald Spoto, one of her biographers.
Jack’s brother, George, was an actor and a playwright, and he saw something promising in his shy, frustrated young niece and helped steer her toward the stage. At age seventeen, she moved to the Barbizon Hotel for Women at Lexington Avenue and East Sixty-Third Street in Manhattan, where Jacqueline and Lee Bouvier, Sylvia Plath, Lauren Bacall, Gene Tierney, and Liza Minnelli all lived at one time or another, and she studied acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, whose alumni included Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Edward G. Robinson, Rosalind Russell, and Kirk Douglas. Her first serious boyfriend was one of her teachers, a divorced actor and a Jew. After graduating she did lots of small-town theater work and TV commercials, then won a supporting role in a Broadway revival of August Strindberg’s The Father, starring Raymond Massey, in 1949, four days after her twentieth birthday. She was doing summer stock in Denver when she got the part in High Noon.
When they met to discuss the role, Fred Zinnemann found her “beautiful in a prim sort of way,” but tense and awkward. She wore white gloves to the meeting—“a thing unheard in our low-class surroundings,” Fred recalled—and neither of them could manage any small talk. Their conversation was awkwardly brief and Fred was relieved to dispatch her down the hall to meet with Carl Foreman.
All of them were uncertain about her. She seemed young, stiff, and uncertain. Stanley, who had hired her before Cooper came aboard, became even more worried once he did. Grace was twenty-eight years younger than Cooper; would they really fit as husband and wife? “She was too young, too inexperienced, too nervous,” Stanley would recall. Still, she was in.
Next came the search for locations for the film shoot, which Stanley oversaw with Fred’s and Carl’s input. The interiors would largely be shot in the low-rent Motion Picture Center Studios at 846 Cahuenga Boulevard, where Carl kept his main office even after most of the Kramer Company moved several blocks north to the more lavish confines of Columbia’s studios at 1438 North Gower. As for the exteriors, Fred wanted to find a small Western town in the middle of nowhere, “with miles of empty space at the end of each street and a railroad track pointing straight into infinity.” He and the film’s art director, Ben Hayne, scoured New Mexico and Arizona looking for someplace with an evocative, old-fashioned main street and railway station. They found an authentic setting outside Gallup, but Stanley vetoed it because of the expense of hauling the cast and crew so far from home. Instead, he found something closer around the colorful town of Sonora in Tuolumne County, the old gold-rush territory in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains some 330 miles northeast of Los Angeles. There was a main street in the nearby town of Columbia that included a firehouse, livery stable, and old church that seemed to perfectly suit their needs. And the town of Warnerville had a railroad station, water tower, and old narrow-gauge train tracks.
With most of the casting and locations accomplished, Stanley backed away, devoting his time and energy to dealing with the massive commitment he had made to Columbia Pictures. He began feverishly buying the rights to stories and rounding up more directors and writers. Following the examples of Home of the Brave and Cyrano de Bergerac, he bought the rights to several plays, including The Member of the Wedding, Death of a Salesman, and The Four Poster, which he figured he could turn quickly into screenplays. He gave Carl a $790,000 budget cap for High Noon and left him and Fred to flesh out the cast and crew.
Both men understood that with such a limited budget, they would have to take a rigorously disciplined approach to making the film. The shooting schedule, for example, had to be brisk—Carl budgeted for thirty-two days, including Sundays off—and it had to be organized around the fact that some of the key supporting players were only signed for a week or two yet had to film their scenes together. Fred knew he needed a director of photography who could do set-ups and lighting quickly and efficiently and shoot scenes correctly the first time. He turned to an old friend and colleague.
Floyd Crosby was a rail-thin veteran cameraman whose early professional experience, like Fred’s, was in documentary filmmaking. Born in New York City in 1899, Crosby studied at the New York Institute of Photography, then became an apprentice photographer on an ethnographic expedition to Haiti. Like Fred Zinnemann, he crossed paths early in his career with documentary film legend Robert Flaherty, working for Flaherty and famed German filmmaker F. W. Murnau on Tabu (1931), which is still considered one of the most beautiful outdoor pictures ever made (it won an Academy Award for cinematography). Over the next two decades Crosby specialized in documentaries in exotic locales like Tahiti, Honduras, Brazil, and India. He also made short documentaries for the Air Force during World War Two, rising to the rank of major. Crosby, whose son David later became a founding member of two groundbreaking rock bands, the Byrds and Crosby, Stills, and Nash, was known for his uncompromising standards, like his mentor Flaherty, and he did very little shooting for mainstream Hollywood features until 1950 when he worked on Robert Rossen’s The Brave Bulls. Fred was confident that Crosby could help him create the stark, documentary-style visual effect he was looking for.
Carl was also looking for an ally he could trust, and he turned to Elmo Williams, who was developing a reputation as one of Hollywood’s finest film editors. Williams was a good-looking Oklahoma farm boy who came to Hollywood in the early 1930s to escape the Dust Bowl. While working as a carhop at the Hi-Ho Drive-In at the corner of Westwood and Wilshire Boulevards, he met an up-and-coming film editor named Merrill White, who hired him as an assistant and taught him the craft of film cutting. Williams worked for several studios, then enlisted in the Army during the war and joined the Capra film unit alongside Carl and other budding young writers and filmmakers. After the war he worked for RKO and met up with Dick Fleischer, who told him about the fun he had had working with Stanley and Carl and discussed the High Noon project. After Williams expressed interest, he got a call from Carl, who regularly played volleyball with him and called him by the nickname Mole.
“Mole, I need you over here,” Carl told him. “… I need somebody that’s on my side.” Williams added, “Apparently he was already having some difficulties with the Kramer Company.”
And so gradually, over the course of a few weeks, Stanley, Carl, and Fred signed up a small but very talented band of professionals—from the famous star to the able supporting cast to the master craftsmen and technicians behind the camera. Backing them up, at least in theory, were some gifted artists and craftsmen in the Kramer Company, including composer Dimitri Tiomkin and art designer Rudolph Sternad. They were up against a miserly budget and a tight shooting schedule. And they faced the sense that, rightly or wrongly, High Noon was not a priority for the new company and its hyperactive but distracted leader. “Almost from the start, it was apparent that High Noon was going to be an orphan, a ransom paid to UA [United Artists], completely overshadowed by the really important Columbia product—in short, a B picture on the overall slate,” Carl would recall.
Stanley Kramer would later dispute Carl’s claim and insist that he personally had overseen the making of High Noon and had never short-changed the production. It’s the first of several conflicts and contradictory accounts that have raged ever since the movie first appeared. But for Carl, as he worked on the first full draft of the screenplay, these issues would turn out to be the least of his problems. The House Un-American Activities Committee was planning a return visit to Hollywood in September, and Carl’s name was on its list.