The blacklist period was like a continuous earthquake, in the sense that almost everybody involved that I can think of lost their footing in it in some way or other.
CARL FOREMAN
Gary Cooper was gone, but High Noon not only endured as an important film, it made an extraordinary leap from the movie house to popular culture, where it has remained entrenched for more than sixty years. It is celebrated around the world.
Most famously, in the run-up to Poland’s first free election in 1989 after four decades of one-party Communist rule, graphic designer Tomasz Sarnecki transformed a High Noon poster into a campaign poster for the Solidarity trade union movement. The image shows Marshal Will Kane with a folded ballot in his right hand and a Solidarity badge pinned to his vest. Below is the message: HIGH NOON: 4 JUNE 1989.
The poster was a huge hit, and it helped Solidarity win a landslide victory. “Cowboys in Western clothes had become a powerful symbol for Poles,” Solidarity leader Lech Wałesa later wrote. “Cowboys fight for justice, fight against evil, and fight for freedom, both physical and spiritual.” Fifteen years later, Wałesa said, people were still presenting copies of the poster to him for autographs.
In America High Noon has become part of the political-journalistic lexicon, a term that connotes a ritualistic confrontation between good and evil in a showdown in which good is often embodied by a solitary person. When President Obama announced he was planning executive action to tighten restrictions on gun sales in his last year in office, the Arizona Republic’s headline read OBAMA TO GO HIGH NOON ON NRA AND GUN LOBBY. “He may, like Cooper in the movie, wind up bloodied and disenchanted,” wrote E. J. Montini. “But at least when the credits roll on his presidency, Obama will be able to drop his marshal’s badge on the ground and limp off into the sunset with his head held high.”
Every editorial headline writer seems to rely on High Noon for a metaphor whenever a beleaguered public official takes on a mob of opponents. When the health minister of the Canadian province of Alberta sought to crack down on bonuses to public executives, a headline in the Edmonton Journal asked, HIGH NOON AT ALBERTA HEALTH SERVICES? When congressional Republicans threatened to refuse to pass a continuing budget resolution in the fall of 2013, the Daily Times of Salisbury, Maryland, warned of a HIGH NOON FOR POSSIBLE SHUTDOWN, while former secretary of labor Robert Reich decreed it was OBAMA’S HIGH NOON. When the United States and Iran were negotiating a suspension of Tehran’s nuclear weapons development, columnist Noga Tarnopolsky of Global Post, referring to the prime minister of Israel, said a deal would amount to NETANYAHU’S PERSONAL HIGH NOON. Even in southern Africa a headline writer for the Mail & Guardian detected a HIGH NOON FOR MUJURU, MNANGAGWA when the two Zimbabwean politicians squared off in a power struggle to become the heir apparent to elderly president Robert Mugabe. Meanwhile the Kansas City Star characterized Mayor James Sly as undergoing “something of a High Noon moment” when he led the city council in a seven to six vote to defy state law and ban drunken people from carrying firearms in public.
In fact, High Noon and firearms often go together in the American imagination. A Google search lists eight High Noon gun shops or firing ranges from Anchorage, Alaska, to Sarasota, Florida, plus a holster manufacturer in Tarpon Springs, Florida, and three saloons where, presumably, gunfire is discouraged.
American presidents have also been drawn to High Noon’s archetypal message and meaning. Dwight Eisenhower screened the film at least three times during his eight-year tenure. When Will Kane confronted Frank Miller and his three henchmen, Ike “bent forward in genuine anxiety,” reported a magazine writer who watched the film with the president. “Run!” shouted Ike, when Kane leaped on a horse to escape the burning barn.
According to White House projectionists’ logs, High Noon has been the film most requested by American presidents, led by Bill Clinton, who reportedly screened it some twenty times while in office. “High Noon has stayed with me over fifty years now and enriched my life,” Clinton once told an interviewer, “and reminded me that courage is not the absence of fear, it is perseverance in the face of fear.”
Clinton acknowledged that Will Kane’s solitary struggle, after he has been forsaken by the people he believed were his friends and supporters, has great appeal to presidents, who tend to see themselves as lonely figures who make their decisions based upon principle rather than the crass calculations of their political allies and enemies. “This weary loner’s brave posture of prescient and courageous certainty in the face of public cowardice is the American politician’s ego ideal,” writes film historian J. Hoberman. But it’s Kane’s vulnerability that has most stayed with Clinton. “The thing that makes it a great movie was that Cooper was like you and me and he rose above his fear,” says the former president. “He was terrified and he did the right thing anyway.”
Although Fred Zinnemann never rose to the auteurist heights of John Ford, Orson Welles, or Alfred Hitchcock, his place seems secure alongside such outstanding directors as William Wyler, George Stevens, Billy Wilder, and John Huston. His best films—among them High Noon, From Here to Eternity (1953), The Nun’s Story (1959), and A Man for All Seasons (1966)—are as artful, powerful, and distinctive as anything from that turbulent era of filmmaking.
High Noon, From Here to Eternity, and A Man for All Seasons won eighteen Oscars among them, including two for best picture and two more for best director. But the one project to which he was personally most devoted never got made. Fred set out to film Man’s Fate, André Malraux’s epic novel about a failed insurrection in Shanghai in the 1920s, and spent three years and $1.7 million of his own money in preparation. But the new president of MGM—James T. Aubrey Jr., an abrasive former TV network executive known as “the smiling cobra”—killed the project three days before shooting was to begin. Fred sued successfully to recover most of his own costs, but the sudden demise of the project was a bitter and heartbreaking blow.
Fred could be prickly and self-obsessed, and as the years went by he jealously guarded his film credits and royalties. He and Carl Foreman remained friends except for a brief but telling rupture in October 1965 when Carl published a piece about Western films in the Sunday Observer magazine that referred to “George Stevens’ Shane,” “John Ford’s Cheyenne Autumn,” “John Sturges’ Magnificent Seven”—and “Carl Foreman’s High Noon.” It was as if Carl had not only written the film but directed it as well. When Carl saw an advance copy of the magazine, he immediately wrote a letter of apology that was published in the Observer’s news pages on the same day the magazine article appeared. But Fred was not appeased. “Carl Foreman’s High Noon is in fact NOT Carl Foreman’s High Noon,” he wrote to the editor. “This film is the result of a collective effort, initiated by Stanley Kramer and including Floyd Crosby’s photography, Elmo Williams’ editing, and Dimitri Tiomkin’s music. It may be worth mentioning that I directed High Noon; every frame of it.”
It was, in its way, Fred’s summation of his view that High Noon had been a collaboration among several gifted people. The only major contributor he omits in this accounting is Gary Cooper, but elsewhere he unfailingly honors Cooper for his powerful yet understated performance. For himself, Fred insisted on due recognition, nothing more and nothing less, but he was willing to give the same to others as well.
After Fred died in London in March 1997 at the age of eighty-nine, his son Tim put together a reel of scenes from his father’s most noteworthy films interspersed with commentary from Fred. He sounds proudest of the moments when he defied the studio bosses to stay true to his vision—most especially in From Here to Eternity when he insisted on casting the brilliant but scrawny Montgomery Clift as the former boxer Robert E. Lee Prewitt, even though Clift bore no physical resemblance to a real pugilist; and cast the elegant and demure Deborah Kerr as Karen Holmes, the sex-obsessed wife of a corrupt and adulterous Army captain. Fred also stood firm in insisting that Paul Scofield play Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons, a role the actor had originated on the London stage. The film’s financial backers wanted a more recognizable movie star like Richard Burton or Laurence Olivier. But under Fred’s direction, Scofield won an Oscar for best actor.
Fred Zinnemann loved to make movies about outsiders who face a crisis of conscience. Like Prewitt, who refuses to box after beating a man nearly to death in the ring, even though his commanding officer constantly harasses him; or Sister Luke in The Nun’s Story, who quits the church after seventeen years of devoted service when she realizes she can no longer provide the unquestioning obedience it demands; or Thomas More, who for religious reasons refuses to bless King Henry VIII’s decision to divorce one wife and marry another even though it ultimately costs him his life. More, said Fred, “is a spiritual cousin of the marshal in High Noon as a man who is prepared to honor his commitment and to stay in his convictions even if in the end his head rolls.”
“There is a through line, a common theme, running through High Noon, From Here to Eternity, Nun’s Story, and A Man for All Seasons: the outsider sticking to his guns no matter what happens to him, no matter the obstacles—and that’s exactly how my father was,” says Tim Zinnemann. “He was what he chose to make movies about.”
Martin Berkeley’s career as a professional Red hunter ultimately proved no more enduring than his screenwriting career. He blamed his lack of work after he turned informer in 1951 on the Reds and their sympathizers who purportedly backlisted him in retaliation for his prodigious act of name naming. By 1954 he was reduced to doing public relations work for Crown Opticians, a business he had invested in. “The Reds and their pals have practically run me from the industry, Hedda, and I need all the help I can get,” he wrote to his old pal, Hedda Hopper. “My partner is a wonderful optician, our prices are right, and we’ll do business if we get our people behind us … Do come and do bring some friends. I’m counting on you.”
Berkeley still worked sporadically in television and movies, writing teleplays for TV Westerns and the screenplay for Red Sundown (1956), a B Western for Rory Calhoun at Universal International. “We have just finished the screenplay and are dickering for release and financing,” he told Hopper. “A plug from you may make all the difference in the world to us!”
There’s no record she gave him one.
Berkeley remained an FBI informant into the mid-1950s, reporting regularly to the bureau’s L.A. office on purported Communist activities and rivalries inside the Motion Picture Alliance. In an October 1955 meeting with FBI agents, Berkeley was particularly scathing about Roy Brewer, his former ally and benefactor. According to Berkeley, Brewer had made a power grab to establish himself as the ultimate arbiter of which former Communists deserved clearance. After performing this public service, Brewer had left his union post and went to work as an executive for Allied Artists, where he helped the studio obtain clearances for troublesome liberals like John Huston, Billy Wilder, and William Wyler. Brewer, said Berkeley, remained “consistently and sincerely anti-Communist,” but had “accumulated a great deal of self-esteem and importance.” It was typical of Berkeley: praising Brewer on the one hand, yet accusing him of egotism and corruption on the other.
Brewer’s power play had caused Ward Bond, George Sokolsky, and James O’Neil to quit the informal committee that vetted and cleared alleged leftists to work for the major studios. The result, claimed Berkeley, was that the process was now effectively left in the hands of the studios themselves, which had every incentive to “clear” the people they most wanted to hire.
The Hollywood blacklist died for many reasons. There was the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy, a classic demagogue who wrested control of the Red Scare headlines and emotions away from HUAC, personalized it, and turned it against the federal bureaucracy that itself had sought to control and regulate the purging of alleged Communists within its ranks. McCarthy finally went too far, aiming at fellow Republicans and at hallowed institutions like the Army, inevitably turning the political establishment against him. His spectacular decline and fall invariably damaged HUAC’s credibility as well.
The federal judiciary, awakening belatedly to the abuses of power inherent in HUAC’s inquisition, also intervened. The courts not only undermined the State Department’s power to curtail travel by those suspected of subversion, they also pared back HUAC’s authority to conduct its investigations without legislative purpose or intent. “There is no general authority to expose the private affairs of individuals without justification in terms of the functions of Congress,” the Supreme Court ruled in 1957, overturning the conviction for contempt of Congress of a labor union official who had refused to name names before the committee. “Nor is the Congress a law enforcement or trial agency. These are functions of the executive and judicial departments of government. No inquiry is an end in itself; it must be related to, and in furtherance of, a legitimate task of the Congress. Investigations conducted solely for the personal aggrandizement of the investigators or to ‘punish’ those investigated are indefensible.”
Eight years of the Eisenhower administration calmed some of the nation’s political anxieties, and the rise of John F. Kennedy and the New Frontier suggested that Americans were ready to turn the page on the Red Scare era. But optimism and anxiety still mixed uneasily. The beginnings of détente between the United States and the Soviet Union followed the near-miss of a nuclear exchange over Russian missiles in Cuba.
Stanley Kramer struck one of the blows that damaged the blacklist when he hired screenwriter Nedrick Young, working under the pseudonym “Nathan E. Douglas,” to co-write with Harold B. Smith the screenplay for The Defiant Ones (1958), a drama about two escaped prisoners in the Jim Crow South, one white and the other black. “Kramer did not insist on coffee shop exchange of rewrites, credit fictions, or fronts,” said Smith’s son Joshua. Indeed, in the title sequence at the beginning of the film Young and Smith appear as prison guards as the writing credit for “Douglas” and Smith is screened. The following year the screenplay was nominated for an Oscar, but by then the New York Times had revealed the true co-writer. The governors of the Motion Picture Academy, faced with the embarrassing prospect of having to withdraw the nomination, instead voted to repeal its exclusion rule as “unworkable and impractical.” When The Defiant Ones won, Nedrick Young joined his writing partner up on stage to receive the award, to an enthusiastic ovation.
Ward Bond, one of the founders of the Motion Picture Alliance, conceded defeat. “They’re all working now, all the Fifth Amendment Communists,” he told a radio interviewer. “There’s no point at issue. We’ve lost the fight, and it’s as simple as that.”
Still, American Legion national commander Martin B. McKneally declared a new “war of information” against “a renewed invasion of American filmdom by Soviet-indoctrinated artists,” and he singled out Stanley’s hiring of Ned Young to co-write the screenplay for his next picture, Inherit the Wind. Stanley was also attacked in columns by Ed Sullivan and Walter Winchell, and in an editorial in the Hearst-owned Los Angeles Examiner, which denounced “the danger and folly of employing enemies of our society in a particularly susceptible area—the transmission of ideas.” But he refused to back down. He denounced the campaign by the Legion and its supporters as “un-American and reprehensible.”
“Those who set up their own yardsticks may do so for themselves,” said Stanley. “But when they threaten economic retaliation on those who disagree with them, then they are as guilty of misconstruing democracy as were the people who blundered into the Communist Party in the thirties and forties.”
Having blasted the American Legion, Stanley went on to describe Hollywood’s major studios as the “most frightened and the most easily intimidated of any major industry in the United States.” Two days later he debated McKneally on national television, insisting that he had the right to hire whoever he pleased “according to the dictates of my conscience.”
Stanley was back in the role of rebel with a cause and enjoying it in his usual conflicted way. He was frequently lumped together in news media accounts with Otto Preminger, who announced in January 1960 that blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo had written the screenplay for his new movie, Exodus; and Kirk Douglas, whose company announced later in the year that Trumbo had written his new film, Spartacus.
“Martyrdom comes hard,” a somber and sardonic Stanley told the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers convention in May 1960. “What do I think will happen? Do I think the American Legion can hurt me or my picture? I think they can make life miserable.”
He added, “How much pressure will I withstand? Don’t ask me how I am involved in this, and don’t ask me what I think will happen.” It was classic Stanley Kramer—taking a principled position and acting more than a little annoyed at himself for doing so.
President Kennedy himself threw a small shovel of dirt on the blacklist soon after he took office in January 1961 when he slipped out of the White House on a Saturday evening to see Spartacus. His brother Robert, the new attorney general, had seen the movie the previous week and had recommended it. “It was fine,” Kennedy told reporters when he came out. No one asked him about Dalton Trumbo and the political significance of an American president endorsing a film written by a former member of the Hollywood Ten. For the blacklist it was defeat by omission.
Still, the blacklist took a long time to expire. Ring Lardner Jr., Trumbo’s good friend and another of the Hollywood Ten, reckons he went twelve years without being able to use his real name on screenplays. His wife, actress Frances Chaney, also couldn’t find work because she was married to him. She had, Lardner writes, acquired “unemployability by marriage.”
The intimacy of the damage was profound. Actress Lee Grant went a dozen years without work in Hollywood or on television. She eventually met with HUAC’s lawyers in a vain attempt to clear herself. When she finally got an acting job in the fall of 1964, she received a telegram from her ex-husband, backlisted screenwriter Arnold Manoff. I KNOW YOU NAMED ME, it read, THAT’S WHY YOU’RE WORKING. Lucille Ball, just emerging as the star of TV’s I Love Lucy, had to hold a humiliating press conference and swear that the only reason she had registered to vote as a Communist in 1936 was to assuage her senile grandfather.
Dore Schary lasted at MGM until 1956, when he was ousted as company president. Schary was supposed to have been the studio’s savior, and for a while MGM made steady profits under his reign. But the studio system was in a state of rapid deterioration and Schary’s commitment to the old order inevitably alienated the company’s ownership in New York. After his firing, he moved back to New York and wrote and produced Sunrise at Campobello, a Tony Award–winning play about Franklin D. Roosevelt’s triumph over polio. It was Schary’s vision of the making of enlightened, liberal leadership. His own liberalism, at once deeply committed to civil liberties yet staunchly anti-Communist, had failed to defeat the Red Scare hysteria. Liberals had been trapped in the middle between the Red-baiting autocrats of HUAC and the intrepid but secretive and dogmatic Communists. Yet in the end, lacking a firm agenda of their own, well-meaning liberals like Schary and Philip Dunne had ended up functioning as enablers of the blacklist. But a hearty few, like Stanley Kramer, Kirk Douglas, and Otto Preminger, played significant roles in helping destroy it.
HUAC’s power was fading, but its self-image as a warrior in the vanguard of the struggle against international Communism remained intact. Staff director Richard Arens left the committee under a cloud in 1960 after it was revealed he had been a paid consultant for a shadowy and racist pro-eugenics group known as the Pioneer Fund. But before he left HUAC, Arens gave an extraordinary address to the Pepperdine College Freedom Forum in California in which he warned that Communism was “moving relentlessly toward world domination.” He painted a dark portrait of the state of world freedom. “Of the eighty-six nations of the world, only one, the United States, stands as a formidable obstacle” to Communism. “It is a total war, a political war, an economic war, a psychological war, a diplomatic war, a global war,” he declared, “and it is a war which they and not us are winning internationally and domestically at an alarming rate.” When Arens died of a heart attack ten years later at age fifty-six, he undoubtedly still believed he had been a noble soldier in a losing cause.
In 1969, the House of Representatives changed HUAC’s name to the House Committee on Internal Security. Six years later the House abolished the committee altogether and transferred its functions to the House Judiciary Committee. The war against the shrunken American Communist Party—reduced to a mere five thousand members nationwide, one third of them estimated to be FBI informers—was officially over.
As for Martin Berkeley, he and his wife, Kate, eventually sold their suburban house and horses and moved to Marbella, Spain, near the Mediterranean coast, where their money went farther and Hollywood was a distant memory. Berkeley developed a heart condition and Parkinson’s disease. While many of his former comrades wrote memoirs or made frequent public appearances, he languished in silence and obscurity. When Victor Navasky wrote to him in 1976 requesting an interview for Navasky’s landmark study Naming Names, Berkeley regretfully said no, citing his failing health. “I know you will be disappointed to hear this, and I assure you that I am disappointed too,” he told Navasky. He moved to Florida in the late 1970s for medical reasons and died there in 1979.
On October 27, 1997, the fiftieth anniversary of the Hollywood Ten hearings, the four major entertainment guilds sponsored jointly “Hollywood Remembers the Blacklist,” a tribute to the Ten and the other blacklist victims, demonstrating the old dictum that when it comes to history, the writers always get the last word.
There were film clips, live commentary by some of those who had been blacklisted, and dramatizations of the HUAC hearings of 1947 and 1951. The actor Billy Crystal read from Larry Parks’s tragic testimony, including the line, “I am probably the most completely ruined man you’ve ever seen.” John Lithgow read a portion of Sterling Hayden’s testimony, Kevin Spacey portrayed blacklisted screenwriter Paul Jarrico, and actress Alfre Woodard read a scathing letter that blacklisted actress Anne Revere wrote in 1953 demanding in vain that her fellow Screen Actors Guild colleagues abolish the loyalty oath they had imposed on all members. It turned out that the oath had remained intact as a requirement until members of the Grateful Dead rock band refused to sign it in 1967. “We regret that when courage and conviction were needed to oppose the blacklist, the poison of fear paralyzed our organization,” declared Richard Masur, president of the Screen Actors Guild, whose former leader, Ronald Reagan, had been instrumental in enforcing the blacklist. Leaders of the Directors Guild, the Writers Guild of America, and the American Federation of Radio and Television Artists also expressed their regrets.
Over the years the Writers Guild has gone farther by restoring screen credits for blacklisted writers. As of the year 2000, the credits of eighty-two films had been corrected and more than one hundred others were under review.
Despite the recognition, many wounds had not healed. In March 1999 when eighty-nine-year-old Elia Kazan was given an honorary Oscar for his work as a director, some Motion Picture Academy members refused to stand and applaud as Kazan was embraced onstage by director Martin Scorsese and actor Robert De Niro. Outside, some 250 demonstrators protested the honor, including blacklisted screenwriters Bernard Gordon and Robert Lees, and a full-page ad in Daily Variety condemned Kazan for having testified against his former comrades forty-seven years earlier.
On November 30, 2012, sixty-five years after the 1947 HUAC hearings, the Hollywood Reporter published a detailed account of its own role in fomenting the Red Scare and blacklist. Included as a sidebar was an apology from W. R. Wilkerson III, Billy Wilkerson’s son, who said his father had been driven less by anti-Communist ideology than by a burning desire to retaliate against the studio heads who had shunned him when he had first arrived in town and had sabotaged his plans to establish his own film studio. “In his maniacal quest to annihilate the studio owners, he realized that the most effective retaliation was to destroy their talent,” W. R. Wilkerson III wrote. “The blacklist,” he continued, “silenced the careers of some of the studios’ greatest talent and ruined countless others merely standing on the sidelines.”
Billy Wilkerson had died in 1962 at age seventy-one. “It’s possible, had my father lived long enough, that he would have apologized for creating something that devastated so many careers,” his son wrote. Since Billy couldn’t do so himself, “on behalf of my family, and particularly my late father, I wish to convey my sincerest apologies and deepest regrets to those who were victimized by this unfortunate incident.”
The sins of mainstream journalists had been less consciously malicious but no less damaging—a willingness to print the phony or exaggerated allegations of public officials and “friendly” witnesses without holding them up to scrutiny or challenging their assumptions. Not until a generation later, after the mistaken official judgments and outright falsehoods of the Vietnam War and the crimes of Watergate, would reporters hold the government, including Congress, more frequently accountable for its secrets and lies.
Beyond the suffering of hundreds of individuals was the impact that the blacklist had on American cinema. Dorothy B. Jones’s study for the Fund for the Republic, published in 1956, concluded that the proportion of Hollywood films with social themes peaked at 21 percent in 1947, the year of the first HUAC public hearings, and then began a steep decline to 9 percent in 1950 and 1951, while the proportion of escapist entertainment rose accordingly. Some of the most successful movies of the 1950s critically and financially—including High Noon, From Here to Eternity, On the Waterfront, and Giant—had clear social content and meaning. Still, many of the great Hollywood filmmakers of the 1950s and early 1960s, including Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, John Ford, William Wyler, and Billy Wilder, steered clear of social issues and focused on cultural and psychological ones (Stanley Kramer being a notable exception). The return to productive film work in the 1960s of blacklisted writers and directors like Ring Lardner Jr., who won an Academy Award for his screenplay for MASH (1969), Waldo Salt, who won Oscars for Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Coming Home (1978), Abe Polonsky, Martin Ritt, Dalton Trumbo, and Walter Bernstein signaled a new era of social engagement in American cinema and paved the way for filmmakers like Warren Beatty, Hal Ashby, Norman Jewison, and Francis Ford Coppola to make movies with meaningful political messages.
The blacklistees had been sorely missed. “In Naming Names, I wrote about all the moral issues and constitutional violations of peoples’ rights,” says Victor Navasky. “What I did not write about was what we lost as a country and a culture by disqualifying people from participating in the national conversation for a decade or more.”
As time has passed, many of Gary Cooper’s films have faded from public view. Unlike John Wayne, who had the good fortune of working with legendary director John Ford for much of his career, Cooper had bounced from studio to studio, often playing them off against each other, and from director to director, never forging a long-time partnership with a great filmmaker.
But one film that endures is High Noon, a movie that has both sustained Cooper’s legend and benefited from it. If anything, the movie and the legend have been revitalized in recent decades as America’s place in the world has come under increasing scrutiny. As portrayed in High Noon, Cooper’s values—his decency, stoicism, and intuitive sense of right and wrong—have been recognized as sterling American characteristics worthy of celebration.
When three young Americans risked their lives to disarm a suspected jihadist about to launch a murderous rampage aboard an Amsterdam-to-Paris train in August 2015, a headline in the opinion section of the Wall Street Journal read: GARY COOPER IN EUROPE. The column praised the young men as representing “an admirable strain in American culture that doesn’t shrink from individual acts of heroism for the larger good … The heroes on the French train showed the world the kind of men that America is still made of.”
Even those who have never seen one of Cooper’s films or who know nothing about his life still recognize the legend he represents. Maria Cooper Janis, in an ode to her father written on the sixtieth anniversary of the release of High Noon, says his rugged moral courage is embodied by the anonymous hero of the Tiananmen Square massacre who stood in the path of Chinese tanks; by Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi, who spent more than fifteen years under house arrest for her political activism; by South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, who spent twenty-seven years in prison for his resistance to apartheid; and even by President George W. Bush when he appeared defiantly atop the rubble of the World Trade Center in New York after the September 11, 2001, attacks.
“It’s too much to say that all of these people were knowingly moved by the lessons of High Noon,” Janis writes. “But it’s not too much to say that Will Kane provided a template for principle and courage that has seeped deeply into the global consciousness over the decades.”
Maria helped arrange an extraordinary personal reconciliation between her mother and Patricia Neal, her father’s most serious mistress. It began when Maria wrote a sympathy note to Neal after she had a massive, near-fatal stroke in 1965. Neal wound up having tea with Maria and many years later lunch with her and her mother. Rocky and Maria encouraged Neal’s conversion to Catholicism and the writing of her exceptionally candid memoir. Neal’s husband, author Roald Dahl, had left her for another woman, giving her and Rocky something else in common, along with, of course, their mutual love for the same extraordinary man. “We had shared a purgatory,” Neal would write. “I felt that when she put her arms around me.”
When it came to High Noon, Stanley Kramer expressed several regrets. The first was financial: early on, he had decided to sell the rights to NTA Pictures, which later changed the name of its television and video distribution arm to Republic Pictures after buying the name and logo of the once-famous B-movie studio. High Noon was a huge success on television beginning in the late 1950s and later on videocassette and DVD, and it has been a steady earner for NTA and Republic. “At the time I sold my interest, it was impossible to imagine the magnitude of the profits I would have earned if I had kept it,” Stanley wrote ruefully. “Television was not yet, in those days, the money machine it has become. But though I receive nothing from the recurring reruns of High Noon, I can enjoy the even greater satisfaction that my name will forever be associated with that picture.”
Stanley’s deal with Harry Cohn and Columbia Pictures turned out to be a disaster for both sides. None of the first ten movies the Kramer Company made for Columbia was a financial success, and with each successive failure the relationship between Stanley and his annoying, uncouth, and autocratic overseer worsened. Only the eleventh and last picture, The Caine Mutiny (1954), directed by Hollywood Ten member-turned-informer Edward Dmytryk, was a hit. Its success was big enough to make up for the losses of its ten predecessors, but by then Stanley felt deeply relieved to walk away from what he called “the unhappiest period of my career.” Still, Stanley’s deal with Columbia was the forerunner of the New Hollywood that emerged from the ashes of the old studio system. Old companies like MGM, Warners, and Paramount survived in name, but they were no longer integrated entities that produced and distributed movies and owned their own theater chains. They were, instead, financing and distribution companies that serviced packaged deals put together by independent talent agents and producers like Stanley. The Jewish film moguls who had invented and ruled the old system for four decades had survived the dangers to their institutions posed by the blacklist by caving to the political demands of HUAC and its allies. But their acquiescence could not prevent the system’s economic demise. Many of the new rulers—the lawyers, agents, directors, financiers, and performers—were also Jews, but of a new generation that was more confident of its identity and far less fearful of anti-Semitism.
Stanley, who was desperate to direct as well as produce his own pictures, took full advantage of the new structure to create the next stage of his career. He went back to his independent status and proceeded to make the socially relevant dramas for which he became most famous: The Defiant Ones (1958), On the Beach (1959), Inherit the Wind (1960), Judgment at Nuremburg (1961), Ship of Fools (1965), and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967). Those six pictures established Stanley as the most consistently liberal filmmaker in Hollywood and garnered thirty-four Academy Award nominations and won six Oscars.
Once he returned to Hollywood, Carl Foreman occasionally ran into Stanley, but the two men never spoke. The first time occurred in an elevator at Columbia Pictures, Carl’s widow Eve recalls, but neither man looked at the other. Carl could forgive his enemies; he could not forgive his former friend, and his judgment of Stanley remained harsh throughout the rest of his life. While others hailed Stanley as a great fighter for liberal causes, Carl saw him as “the apostle of the safely controversial,” and a moral coward. “He had a chance then [in 1951] and he blew it,” said Carl.
Even after both men had died, the bad blood flowed anew in 2002 with the release of Darkness at High Noon: The Carl Foreman Documents, a two-hour documentary film written and directed by Lionel Chetwynd—Carl’s old friend from London days—and produced by him and Norman S. Powell for the Public Broadcasting Service. Relying heavily on Carl’s unpublished August 1952 letter to Bosley Crowther, the film accused Stanley and his business associates of having cheated Carl out of his associate producer’s credit for High Noon.
“It was taken from him, an act of apparent betrayal,” intones the narrator. “The blacklist worked for the same reason that Vichy France worked. It was all too often something that we happily did to one another.”
When she found out about the film, Karen, Stanley’s third wife and widow, launched a vigorous campaign to refute its accusations. She called the documentary “a deliberate hatchet job on Stanley’s character and reputation.” Karen contends it was actually Carl who betrayed Stanley. “Carl lied to him and said ‘I’ve never been a Communist,’” says Karen Kramer. “Stanley was very sad to lose Carl. But Carl lied.”
After Karen Kramer raised objections, PBS attached an introductory advisory that the film offered “one point of view in the making of High Noon.” The film was screened at the L.A. County Museum of Art in April 2002 and had one showing on PBS in September. It has had few public screenings since then.
The documentary makes no mention of Stanley’s claim that Carl had misled him. Nor does it note that Carl waived his associate producer’s credit as part of a written agreement in return for a sizable severance payment from the Kramer Company.
In the end what was most striking was the degree of bitterness and anger that had lingered for five decades and been passed on from the two principals to their families and friends. It underscored the sad truth that while the conflict between ideological enemies was intense, the blacklist era’s deeper hurt was between former friends and intimates. Carl ultimately could make peace with John Wayne and Hedda Hopper; he could never reconcile with Stanley Kramer.
The distinguished blacklist historian Larry Ceplair, who examined the case made by both sides, concluded that “Stanley Kramer may not have behaved with exemplary steadfastness in 1951, but he did not blacklist Foreman and nothing Kramer could have done would have saved Foreman from the blacklist.” In short, wrote Ceplair, “There were no heroes, no villains, simply two colleagues, decent men, confronted with indecent circumstances over which they had little control.”
Over the years, Stanley expressed regret over the way Carl had been hounded from Hollywood, and in most of his interviews he took pains not to openly criticize Carl nor engage in an argument over who had betrayed whom. Still, he continued to take credit for having saved High Noon with his editing.
But in an untranscribed and never-before-published 1973 interview with Michael A. Hoey, a British-born film editor and producer, Stanley discusses High Noon in an open, self-critical, stream-of-consciousness manner.
“Why is it that some films [are] beautifully tooled … [but] you put the whole thing together, you see it and you couldn’t care less?” he asks Hoey. “And then a film has a kind of driving spine to it all of a sudden that made everything fizz, wow. It terribly excites you. Now that kind of chemistry happened in High Noon.”
Stanley goes on to praise Fred Zinnemann, Carl Foreman, Dimitri Tiomkin, Elmo Williams—and himself. “I think all of these people are the people who made it possible. Now I don’t know whose chemistry made what fizz. I only know that we fooled around with it and that I fooled around with it forever and ever and a day.”
“It’s taken on an aura, and anybody who had to do with it who feels that aura probably should have his head examined because as soon as you feel the aura of what you’ve done yourself you’re in great trouble. I must say I feel no aura … It was a picture job and I see no reason why in my whole life The Defiant Ones or Judgment at Nuremburg or Inherit the Wind or any other picture … why they didn’t turn out that well.”
But, Stanley concedes, “They didn’t.”
“None of them occupy the position that High Noon does. I’m sorry, I guess in the final analysis they aren’t as good and they certainly didn’t have as much impact. But I can’t tell you why and that’s as honest as I can be … Its chemistry happened and we’re very happy it did.”
It was the closest Stanley Kramer ever came to admitting that he was baffled by High Noon’s success and chagrined that the little Western that he didn’t direct had exceeded all of his greatest pictures in terms of its stature and impact.
When Kevin Spacey won a Golden Globe in January 2015 for best actor in a television series for House of Cards, he recalled visiting Stanley at the Motion Picture and Television Home a few months before he died in February 2001 at age eighty-seven. Spacey said he took a moment to tell Stanley how much he admired his work: “The films you made, the subjects you tackled, the performances you got out of some of the greatest actors that have ever walked the face of the earth, the Oscars you won—your films will stand the test of time and will influence filmmakers for all time.” Spacey couldn’t tell if Stanley, who by then was suffering from Parkinson’s disease and other ailments, had heard and understood him. But as he got up to leave, Stanley grabbed his hand. “Thank you so much for saying that—that means so much to me,” he told Spacey.
Then he added a quintessentially self-critical Stanley Kramer observation: “I just wish my films had been better.”
Carl Foreman’s return to Hollywood in 1975 was bittersweet. “A part of him wanted to come home, it was a vindication,” his son Jonathan recalls. “But in my opinion it was a disaster. Unlike many Americans, he had never tried to become British. There was no pretension in him, but he’d actually grown to love the life in London.”
Several big movie projects didn’t get off the ground, including the filming of the life and martyrdom of Steve Biko, the black South Africa activist, for which Carl hoped to cast Sidney Poitier as Biko and Paul Newman and Jane Fonda as white journalist Donald Woods and his wife, Wendy.
After he moved back home, Carl made peace with several of his former antagonists, including John Wayne. He ran into Wayne at Dan Tana’s, the popular Los Angeles restaurant. After a wary greeting, the two men embraced as if they were old friends, and Carl introduced Wayne to Eve and their two children, Jonathan and Amanda, with a hearty, “Duke, I want you to meet my English son and my English daughter.” It went without saying that Wayne and his friends in the Motion Picture Alliance were the reason Carl had an English family in the first place. After they sat down again, Carl explained to Dan Tana why he had been so conciliatory with Wayne. “You know, he was a patriot. He didn’t do it to hurt me.”
Carl and Universal Pictures announced a deal for three feature films plus two major multi-hour television projects for CBS, but none of them ever got made. Less than a year later, he announced he was leaving Universal for a long-term, nonexclusive pact with Warner Bros. At the same time, he started recording his memories with his old friend John Weaver for an autobiography he contracted with Simon & Schuster to write. But Carl was too busy on film projects to ever devote enough time on the actual writing.
And then he got sick. He dropped his tennis racquet on the court one day, then couldn’t control his knife at dinner. In December 1983, he finally went to the doctor, got a CAT scan, and discovered he had a brain tumor. There were two operations, he got better for a spell, but then he began to decline rapidly.
Crushed by his old friend’s illness, Weaver asked Carl if there was anything he could do. Carl mentioned the Oscar that he and the late Michael Wilson had never received for The Bridge on the River Kwai. Everyone knew they had written it but how could they prove it? The original manuscript of the screenplay had supposedly disappeared, but Weaver found a copy in Wilson’s papers at UCLA. And there on the page was proof: three characters named Baker, Weaver, and Grogan, the same names of friends that Carl had used in every screenplay. The names were like a DNA marker. Weaver took the screenplay to Carl. “He was sitting in bed and he just put his arms around it, the tears came to his eyes,” Weaver recalled.
On June 25, 1984, the board of the Writers Guild of America—successor to the Screen Writers Guild—unanimously agreed that credit for Kwai belonged to Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson. Weaver took the news to Carl in his sickbed at home. The next morning he died.
Eve Foreman and Michael Wilson’s widow, Zelma, officially received the Oscars later that year. At the ceremony Zelma Wilson read from her late husband’s remarks when he had received the Writers Guild Laurel Award in 1976. “I trust that you younger men and women will shelter the mavericks and dissenters in your ranks and protect their right to work,” Wilson had pleaded. “The Guild will have need of rebels and heretics if it is to survive as a union of free writers. The nation will have need of them if it is to survive as an open society.”
In 1977, in an interview with Larry Ceplair, Carl had made a mental and moral tally of all that had happened to him because of the blacklist. The negative impact of that era still ate at him: the trauma of having been betrayed and excluded had cost him his self-esteem and many friendships and had made it hard for him to practice his craft for an extended period. “Every time I sat down at the typewriter, bitter and aggrieved feelings intruded and I wanted to write letters rather than the script,” he told Ceplair. The blacklist had cost him his passport, his freedom to travel, and, ultimately, his marriage to Estelle. And it had pressured him to play a role he hated: that of the political martyr, the bitter expatriate, the transplanted misfit abroad. Plus, he conceded, “it hurt like hell” that other men had been given credit for work he himself had done, especially on Kwai.
At the same time, Carl had faced the ordeal on his own terms—not as a saint, nor a hero, just as a flawed but decent human being. He had remarried and created a new family with Eve. He had done good work in the field that he loved. His pride and his honor had remained intact.
All four of the principal creators of High Noon—Fred Zinnemann, Stanley Kramer, Gary Cooper, and Carl Foreman—had had fabulously successful careers, and together they had made an enduring American classic. Yet all four felt a sense of frustration and regret over their own supposed failures and the shortcomings of others. Fred never quite achieved the critical recognition he deserved, and never got to make Man’s Fate, the film he hoped would be his ultimate statement about history and personal responsibility. Stanley was never satisfied with his own work, nor anyone else’s. Cooper felt defeated by the collapse of the studio system and his own self-perceived limitations as an actor. And Carl was haunted by his restlessness and his anger.
Still, he told Larry Ceplair, he had been faithful to his own code. Like Will Kane, the character he had created, “I discovered that I could be scared and still come through a situation. I actually was the kind of person I thought I was.” Carl Foreman had faced his personal High Noon, had confronted his enemies and his fears, and he had survived.