Inside "High Noon" Revisited (Transmultimedia Entertainment, American Public Television, 2002, revised 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, October 29) I watched a couple of really interesting shows on KPBS, including a 2022 documentary called Inside “High Noon” Revisited (a rehash of a similar documentary, Inside “High Noon,” released in 2002) and a Frontline episode called “American Voices 2024.” Inside “High Noon” Revisited was a fascinating program on the making of the classic 1952 Hollywood Western High Noon, and since by the time the film was made almost all the principals directly involved in it were dead, director John Mulholland interviewed their children: Gary Cooper’s daughter Maria Cooper Janis (she got the “Janis” from marrying a man I’ve heard of in a rather different context: Byron Janis, classical pianist until arthritis in his hands made it almost impossible for him to play); director Fred Zinnemann’s son Tim; screenwriter Carl Foreman’s son Jonathan (who spoke with a British accent, reflecting the fact that Foreman was caught up in the Hollywood blacklist and had to move to Britain to continue his career in films; he and fellow blacklistee Michael Wilson co-wrote the 1957 hit film and Academy Award winner The Bridge on the River Kwai, though because of the blacklist they couldn’t be credited and instead the writing credit went to Pierre Boulle, author of the source novel, who because he didn’t speak English couldn’t have written, unaided, the script for an English-language movie); and Grace Kelly’s son Prince Albert of Monaco. The film also featured interviews with former President Bill Clinton, one of several U.S. Presidents (along with Dwight Eisenhower) who’ve named this as their all-time favorite film.

The way Mulholland’s narration, delivered by actor Matthew Rhys, describes it, High Noon was always one step ahead of the blacklist: the original director, Joseph Losey, had to give up the project when he was named as a Communist in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) and, like Foreman, had to flee to Britain to continue his career. The subsequent director, Fred Zinnemann, had been a rising star in the German film industry in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s until he – like so many other great German filmmakers, including Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder and Robert Siodmak – was forced into exile when the Nazis took power in 1933. Zinnemann got his start as a shorts director at MGM after having apprenticed with the great documentarian Robert Flaherty, and to my knowledge he remains the only director who’s won Academy Awards for both shorts (That Mothers Might Live, a vest-pocket documentary from 1938 described on imdb.com as “[t]he story of Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, a pioneer in medical hygiene who paid the price from colleagues who refused to believe him”; and Benjy, 1952) and features (From Here to Eternity, 1953; A Man for All Seasons, 1966). He directed the film debuts of Montgomery Clift (The Search, 1948 – though Clift had already filmed Red River for director Howard Hawks in 1946 but its release had been delayed for two years), Marlon Brando (The Men, 1950, like High Noon a Stanley Kramer production), and Meryl Streep (Julia, 1977). Producer Stanley Kramer was already known for “problem” films that took on social issues, albeit from a moderately liberal rather than a truly radical perspective; he’d released Home of the Brave (1949), written by Foreman and directed by Mark Robson, about an African-American servicemember dealing with racism. Kramer, Zinnemann and Foreman had considerable difficulty casting the lead male role, Marshal Will Kane, who tries desperately to raise a posse among the townspeople to stop outlaw Frank Miller (Ian McDonald) from coming back to the small town of Hadleyville from which Kane and a similar posse successfully drove him five years earlier.

Contrary to a popular legend, the role was not offered to John Wayne (who as president of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals was a strong supporter of the blacklist and, according to some accounts, had an up-or-down veto power over whether people got blacklisted or not), but it was offered to Henry Fonda, Charlton Heston, and Gregory Peck (who turned it down because he thought it was too similar to a part he’d played in The Gunfighter in 1950; he later called that the biggest career mistake he’d ever made). High Noon had a budget of just $750,000, and on the eve of shooting they were still $250,000 short – until a California rancher offered to put up the rest of the money, but only if they got Gary Cooper for the lead. Cooper would go on to deliver an iconic performance and win his second Academy Award for the part – and, ironically, his first Academy Award, for Sergeant York (1941), was also for a role in which an outsider forced him on the producers. In that case, the outsider was Sergeant Alvin C. York himself, whose contract with Warner Bros. for the film rights to his life story gave him approval of the actor who would play him – and he made it clear to the studio that Gary Cooper was the only actor he would approve. Kramer and Zinnemann were a bit anxious about having to approach Cooper because he, too, had been a supporter of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, but he liked the script and got along with Foreman so well that the two started a production company to make more films together – only the blacklist intervened once again and Cooper was told that, despite his lifelong Republican Party credentials, he’d be blacklisted himself if he stayed in business with Foreman. Foreman was subpoenaed by HUAC during the third week of the four-week shoot, and he decided neither to take the Fifth Amendment nor to feed the blacklist any more names of suspected Communists. He knew full well that would be the end of his career in Hollywood, and Kramer was pressured to take Foreman’s name off the credits – which, to his credit, he refused to do.

Inside High Noon Revisited also endorsed a revisionist view of the movie, presented by Don Graham in an article called The Women of High Noon, which argues that the two central female characters, Kane’s new wife Amy Fowler (Grace Kelly in her first major role) and saloon owner Helen Ramírez (Katy Jurado in her first starring role in English), both have far more “agency” (to use the modern term) than most women in Westerns. The film cites the 1939 Destry Rides Again as an example of how morally “loose” women were usually used in Westerns – Marlene Dietrich’s saloon singer sacrifices her life to save Tom Destry (James Stewart) so he can stay with his nice Anglo wife (Irene Hervey). I haven’t seen High Noon since 2005, and though I liked the film I found faults with it, including Kelly’s icy performance (her only truly great movies were her three for Alfred Hitchcock – Dial “M” for Murder, Rear Window and To Catch a Thief) and the whole preposterous ending in which Will Kane successfully kills Frank Miller and his two henchmen with help only from Amy, who despite her Quaker beliefs realizes she has to shoot one of the bad guys in the back to save her husband’s life. (Cooper had already made a similar character transformation in Sergeant York and would do so again in Friendly Persuasion.) One thing I’d forgotten about High Noon is it was shot without the dramatic red-filter effects that were almost de rigueur for major-studio black-and-white Westerns of the time. Instead Zinnemann and cinematographer Floyd Crosby, like Zinnemann a former associate of Robert Flaherty and father of rock musician David Crosby, shot it to look like the Civil War-era photos of Matthew Brady and Alexander Gardner, aided by the haze that enveloped all their outdoor locations from the as-yet uncontrolled California smog.

The film also mentions that John Wayne and director Howard Hawks intended Rio Bravo (1959) as an “answer” movie to High Noon; aside from objecting to its veiled but unmistakable anti-blacklisting politics (Carl Foreman responded to his own HUAC subpoena by “tweaking” the script to reinforce its anti-blacklisting message), Hawks made the rational objection that the Hadleyville townspeople would only have got in the way of Will Kane as he fought off the baddies and he needed professional gunmen for his posse. High Noon and this documentary about it are both unexpectedly politically relevant now on the eve of the 2024 Presidential election that may well return Donald Trump to the White House. Trump has not only called for a return to the political climate of fear and terror that gripped Hollywood – including threatening the licenses of ABC, CBS and at least part of NBC and leading the billionaire publishers of the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times to pull their papers’ editorial staff’s planned endorsements of Kamala Harris for President in what Yale professor Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, calls “anticipatory obedience” – he has a personal one-degree-of-separation connection to it. His favorite attorney, the late Roy Cohn, had previously been chief of staff to Senator Joe McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) in the early 1950’s, and though Cohn was disbarred in 1986 and died of complications from AIDS a year later (Cohn was both a fierce opponent of the Queer community and a closeted Gay man, which led Gay playwright Tony Kushner to make him the principal villain of his play Angels in America). Trump has repeatedly asked his aides during his various legal troubles, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”