Videoage International October 2017

12 Book Review October 2017 V I D E O A G E A merica was experiencing a period of post-war prosperity at the time that Hollywood’s celebrated screenwriter Carl Foreman began writing the 1952 Western classic High Noon , a story of a criminal’s vengeance thwarted by law and order. AnagedGaryCooperplaysthefilm’sprotagonist, Will Kane, Hadleyville’s former sheriff, who is pitted against the returning antihero, Frank Miller, and his gang of lawbreakers. In the film, Kane requests help from the townspeople, yet he is left without support and made to face the gunmen alone. That author Glenn Frankel selects High Noon as an entryway to exploring that U.S. era’s virulent anti-Communism is apt, as Foreman was similarly scapegoated and abandoned by his colleagues during a time of rampant blacklisting in the American film industry. In High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic (Bloomsbury USA, 2017, 400 pgs, U.S.$28.00), Frankel chronicles, in granular detail, the development of one Western film as a means to illustrate the dominant social and political forces at play in mid-20th century America. It is not an easy task to delve into the complex drama, both off-screen and on, but Frankel captures the film’s intricacy and its political undertone without losing the reader in exhaustive details. As a genre of American film, the Western has provided a vision of the nation’s character, one that is said to maintain the values of rugged individualism and lionhearted volunteerism at its core. Produced during America’s hunt for communists, High Noon would necessarily take on aspects of the period’s reactionary political climate. The idea and story behind High Noon belongs to screenwriter Carl Foreman, who was accused of being associated with the Communist party halfway through shooting the film. As Frankel illustrates, Foreman transformed events from his own life into an exemplary case of the anxiety, gossip, and betrayal — and the consequent blacklisting within the Hollywood studios — that resulted from the wide-ranging inquiry conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). While being investigated by the HUAC, Foreman came to feel very similarly to his protagonist: “As I was writing the screenplay, it became insane, because life was mirroring art and art was mirroring life.” Frankel writes that Foreman “began to rethink his screenplay for High Noon and turn it into an allegory about the Red Scare and the blacklist. The marshal was now Carl himself, the gunmen coming to kill him were the members of HUAC, and the hypocritical and cowardly citizens of Hadleyville were the denizens of Hollywood who stood by passively or betrayed him as the forces of repression bore down.” In the film, Kane is begged by his wife: “Don’t try to be a hero!” Just as Kane stood his ground, Foreman dug in his heels in the name of free speech, and Frankel seizes on this parallel in recounting the impact of a political witch-hunt on the makers of the film. Frankel’s gifts as a nuanced storyteller and historian allow him to aptly describe the complexity of making the film and its later success. Utilizing all the available literature on the blacklist era, Frankel offers a comprehensive account, which is supported by investigative documents and transcripts released by the National Archives and Records Administration concerning the HUAC sessions, as well as previously unreleased interviews with Carl Foreman and other key individuals involved in the making of High Noon . Although there are innumerable unraveling threads, Frankel does not flatten the narrative. At the center of Frankel’s investigation stand four figures: Foreman, Cooper, producer Stanley Kramer, anddirector FredZinnemann. As Frankel details, High Noon achieved success despite the antagonism fueled by the team’s divergent political beliefs and creative disagreements. Tensions were high not only amongst those being investigatedby the FBI andHUAC, but alsoamongst the principal figures in the making of High Noon . Throughout the process, there were squabbles about credits — Foreman’s associate producer credit was dropped during his HUAC trial because he was seen as a liability for the studio. High Noon was released in 1952, but Frankel begins five years earlier, with the first HUAC sessions in 1947. While contextualizing their lives within the larger historical moment, Frankel interweaves the biographies of all the principal figures of the film. Frankel not only attends to the events that led each of them to High Noon , but also to the ongoing political circumstances in which the film was made. This is one of Frankel’s strengths: to represent the big picture as it is formed of everyday events for individuals entrenched in the Hollywood film industry. Zeroing in on the impacts of global political tension as it affected the individuals of Hollywood, Frankel writes, “In Hollywood the struggle played out in far more intimate terms. People lost their jobs, business partnerships unraveled, friendships were destroyed, and families turned against each other.” The long-running personal and professional friendship between Stanley Kramer and Foreman grew bitter. The two met after Foreman served in the military and moved to New York City, where he met Kramer who was then a young film editor. Foreman’s sense of betrayal seems to come from Kramer’s lack of action in defending Foreman during his HUAC trial, as Frankel writes, “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 a majority of the book is centered on Foreman, Frankel offers an objective, even sympathetic, approach to more minor figures like Kramer or Zinnemann. By most accounts of the story, it would be easy to vilify Kramer, yet Frankel manages to humanize all the persons involved. “Whatever their initial intentions, there was no way Stanley Kramer or Gary Cooper or anyone else could or would stand up against the repression,” he writes. Early on in his book, Frankel declares that one of the aims of his book is to depict these conflicted individuals in the crisis of difficult decisions: “If we were confronted with the same terrible choice that these people faced — in this case, between betraying our principles or losing our livelihoods — what would we do?” High noon, as a phrase, indicates the specific time of day, but has come to mean “a ritualistic confrontation between good and evil in a showdown in which good is often embodied by a solitary person,” writes Frankel. This lone defender is embodied in Gary Cooper’s character, who, as Frankel points out, remains “one of Hollywood’s most iconic images.” Frankel concludes, “Carl Foreman had faced his personal High Noon, had confronted his enemies and his fears, and he had survived.” As Frankel writes, the lessons from High Noon — issues regarding public witch-hunts, censorship, and Hollywood’s tense relationship to conservative governments — continue to feel relevant to politics in America today, where many of the concerns have since amplified. Frankel is able to relate the dangers and risks of the time, and make them retain their resonances. “No one was put up against a wall and shot during the blacklist,” he reminds. “Yet it was a time of paranoia and persecution, and there are many echoes of its public anxieties, ritual humiliations, and moral corruption in our own troubled era.” In the end, Frankel writes a compelling case for High Noon as “one of the greatest American movies” for its implicit critique of U.S. politics at the time and for its riveting backstory. LP Art Mirrored Life, And Vice Versa, For Blacklist-Era Film High Noon