High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist & The Making Of An American Classic

Glenn Frankel “High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and The Making Of An American Classic,”  Bloomsbury, 2017, 311 pp.

Picture this: It’s 1880 or thereabouts, you’re the Sheriff in a small non-descript Western town.  Earlier, three known bandits rode through town and are encamped at the rail station awaiting their just-paroled boss, Frank Miller.  Miller had sworn he would kill you when he got out.  At noon you hear the train whistle and you are all alone on the empty street, even the wife you married this morning has deserted you, no-one in town will assist you, in fact, all have asked you to leave town—Gary Cooper plays your part.

Now, picture this: It’s 1953 and you’re a screenwriter/movie producer and you’re called to testify before The House Un-American Committee (HUAC) on whether you are or have ever been a Communist and, most objectionable, to name others who may have belonged to the Party or Communist fronts.  Gary Cooper is your friend but cannot help you but he is one of the few who doesn’t disown you and agrees to remain in the “High Noon” movie you have written and are producing.  This upcoming hearing is affecting the dialogue and scenes of this movie.  It is becoming an allegory for the times.  Other threats are occurring: China has become Communist, Russia has the atomic bomb thanks to the Rosenberg traitors (arrested in 1950), Alger Hiss 1950 conviction, Eastern Europe has mostly fallen to the Communists, Joseph McCarthy’s list of 205 purported Communists in the State Department…etc.

This book is a tapestry of the movie’s creation and the impact the HUAC investigation had on it and the country, particularly emphasizing the impact on Carl Foreman, screenwriter and producer.  To understand this book and its metaphors you have to be acquainted with the 1952 movie High Noon.  I saw this movie when I was ten years old and just thought of it as an ordinary Western; little did I know that it had developed into an allegory displaying courage needed to stand up to the government HUAC investigators trying to enhance their political credentials at the expense of liberals who had joined the Communist party or Communist Fronts during the depression, even if they had since withdrawn, especially after the 1939 Hitler/Stalin non-aggression pact and the subsequent division of Poland.  Before High Noon was complete Carl Foreman's name was given to HUAC as a member of the Communist Party. Carl had been a member, drawn to its Anti-Fascism and promotion of the rights of minorities, Jews, immigrants, and unions.  Years after it was all over, Carl looked back on his life and stated, “I discovered that I could be scared and still come through a situation.  I actually was the kind of person I thought I was.”  Actually, you cannot ask much more out of life.

Addenda:

One especially noteworthy witness for the committee was Milton Berkeley who gave the Committee 150 names.  Yet, when his son graduated from Yale he was denied acceptance into the Navy's Officer Training Program, blacklisted because his father had once been a Communist! (this anecdote belongs in the dictionary Karma entry).

Even Cooper couldn't defeat the HUAC and stand up to the threat of blacklisting. Foreman went to England and went on to write The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Guns of Navarone, The Mouse that Roared, Born Free, and Young Winston.

Carl Foreman, screenwriter and film producer, had lost his job; his name was expunged in the credits of High Noon and The Bridge on the River Kwai; his passport had been revoked, and his marriage damaged.

Pg. 264:  The Great Smog of December 1952 in London was caused by a thick layer of the soot from coal-fired furnaces and stoves that always blanketed the city during winter combined with a windless cold front that locked down the black cloud like an impenetrable drone.  For five days, people could barely see out their windows.  The 1952 London smog killed at least four thousand people and sickened one hundred thousand more.

My Notes:

Pg. xi:  The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) first held public hearings into alleged Communist infiltration of the motion picture industry in 1947.  The sessions had ended in stalemate: eleven current or former Communist Party members had been called to the stand, ten of whom cited the First Amendment in refusing to answer questions about their political affiliations and were charged with contempt of Congress.  These ten were subsequently purged from the motion picture industry.  Four years later the committee returned for a second set of hearings, one of those  called to testify was Carl Foreman.

Pg. xiii:  For Carl testifying in front of the committee it all came down to this: either sell out his friends and name names or lose the job and the career he had worked so hard to achieve.  He was then working on the screenplay for High Noon and it turned into an allegory about the Red Scare and the blacklist.  The marshal was now Carl himself.

Pg. xv:  Ultimately this book is about a small group of highly talented people who came together to achieve compelling creative work and what happened when they came up against the machinery of political repression.  It asks the question that history demands of each of us: if we were confronted with the same terrible choice that these people faced—in this case, between betraying our principles and losing our livelihoods—what would we do?

Pg. 25:  Communist organizers came to Hollywood for the same reason that their enemies in the House Un-American Activities Committee ventured there later—for the prestige and the publicity, and to make their mark on an industry that had become the effective overseer of American popular culture. However, even at its zenith there were probably no more than 350 active party members in Hollywood in an industry that employed nearly thirty thousand. 

Pg. 30:  The August 24, 1939, Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact between Russia and Germany decimated the American Communist membership. Overnight, the party’s position on war and peace swiveled 180 degrees from relentlessly promoting the fight against Fascism to denouncing the corporate warmongers who were purportedly pushing the US into another world war.

Pg. 51:  Hoover had the FBI stage at least eight illegal break-ins of the Los Angeles branch of the Communist Party to photograph membership records and wiretap alleged members of the L.A. branch.  The bureau found no evidence of espionage or conspiracy to overthrow the government, but the materials it gathered would later come in handy when congressional investigators—who, unlike the FBI, didn’t need evidence that would stand up in court before making allegations. The hearings would now be much more effective as TVs became widespread—in 1946 there were only 44,000 television sets, by 1952, the number had skyrocketed to 24.3 million sets, 53 percent of households.

Pg. 73:  Surging after fourteen years of electoral setbacks, the Republicans won control of both houses of Congress for the first time since the Hoover administration.  Truman issued executive order No. 9835 requiring that all federal employees be screened for loyalty. 

Pg. 111:  Heda Hopper was a willing soldier for HUAC during the Red Baiting of the era.  Her hit list of films she considered subversive included Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and Meet John Doe, both directed by Frank Capra, The Farmer’s Daughter, and The Best Years of Our Lives. She stated that “emphasizing the negative qualities in our way of life under its present system, and neglecting the good can be just as effective as waving the Red flag—even more so because its message is hidden.” (On reflection, there is truth to this.  However, society would still have slavery, Jim Crow, HUAC investigations, etc., if negative presentations are not allowed).

Pg. 134:  The HUAC hearings blatantly violated the Constitution’s separation of powers.  Congress is supposed to make laws, not judge the innocence or guilt of those accused of violating them.  Which is why President Truman, despite his administration’s own round of Red-hunting, declared that ‘the committee is more un-American than the activities it is investigating.’

Pg. 250:  Sheriff Will Kane has lived by certain bedrock assumptions: that good men will stand together and confront evil when it arises, that wives and friends will provide moral support, and that the pillars of civil society—church and state, and the ministers, judges, and elected officials who represent these institutions—will rally to support law and order and human decency.  All of those assumptions are challenged and upended as High Noon unfolds.

Pg. 298:  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.  McCarthy finally went too far, aiming at fellow Republicans and at hallowed institutions like the Army.  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 paring back HUAC’s authority to conduct its investigations without legislative purpose or intent 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*.  

*Watkins v. United States, 354 U.S. 178 (1957), is a decision of the Supreme Court of the United States that held that the power of the United States Congress is not unlimited in conducting investigations and that nothing in the US Constitution gives it the authority to expose individuals' private affairs.