Another sign of the politicization of all aspects of our culture is the latest Criterion Channel tagline for the 1951 film High Noon: “One of the most politically resonant of all Hollywood westerns.” Really? They’re referencing, of course, the screenwriter Carl Foreman’s brief membership in the Communist Party, which eventually landed him on the industry’s blacklist. Fans of the film need not worry, however: This doesn’t mean playing Tex Ritter’s rendition of the film’s theme song “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh, My Darling” backwards yields “The Internationale” communist anthem.
The Gary Cooper oater has received a political makeover by Glenn Frankel in a book that once again covers the story of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) investigations into Tinsel Town communism in the late 1940s and early 1950s. No matter whether readers believe that HUAC and the Hollywood studio blacklists it prompted abrogated constitutionally protected free speech and free association (true – to an extent) or agree that subversive activities were commonplace within the movie industry (also true – to an extent), this book (High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic, Bloomsbury USA) does little to sway opinions either way.
Frankel falls squarely in the first camp, finding fault with HUAC members, studio heads eager to clean the commies out of Hollywood’s closets and anti-communist celebrities such as John Wayne and Ronald Reagan. At the same time he blames the blacklist era for the early demise of actor John Garfield, director Robert Rossen and several others. This is correlation rather than causation and therefore impossible to verify. If so, it wouldn’t be difficult to attribute the early deaths of 1950s matinee idols James Dean and Montgomery Clift to the blacklists had either actor ever been summoned by HUAC or belonged to the Communist Party (they didn’t, but both men indeed died young). No, instead, Dean was a reckless driver and Clift a chronic abuser of alcohol and other drugs. Likewise, Garfield suffered from a chronic heart condition that may or may not have been aggravated by the blacklists and Rossen conducted an extremely dissolute lifestyle that may or may not have been exacerbated by winding up on the blacklist. There’s simply no way to tell for sure.
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