Book review: “High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of An American Classic” by Glenn Frankel

I’m thinking I’m not a great fan of books that tell the story of a great movie. Not that I’ve read that many.

I found Philip Gefter’s Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage and the Making of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” more than a bit overwrought. And I liked even less The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood by Sam Wasson.

Part of this has to do with my preference for the work of art itself rather than the story behind it.

I have no interest in what was happening in Emily Dickinson’s life or what she might have written in her letters on the day that she finished “Because I could not stop for Death.” I don’t want to know what James Joyce was doing during the years he was writing Ulysses.

Both works speak for themselves. As do the movies Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Chinatown.

And High Noon.

 

Two stories at the same time

Having watched High Noon, I didn’t see the need for Glen Frankel’s High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of An American Classic.

It’s a pleasant enough three hundred pages or so, but it’s somewhat flat, probably because Frankel is attempting to tell two stories at the same time — about the Hollywood blacklist in the 1950s and about the making of the movie.

The story of the blacklist has been told, many times. In this retelling, Frankel is using High Noon and its creation as an illustration of the oppression that was caused in the anti-Communist fever.

Its screenwriter Carl Foreman was driven out of Hollywood because of his past membership in the Party and because of his refusal to name names. But, unlike the vast majority of other writers, actors and movie workers who were blacklisted, he left town with a rich severance package he negotiated from Stanley Kramer, the producer of High Noon.

 

A blacklist allegory?

Also, Frankel is arguing that High Noon itself is a commentary on the blacklist, and he shows that the blacklist was on Foreman’s mind when he polished up the script for the movie. It is a script in which the “good people” turn their heads and let an upright man face his fate alone.

But, despite the controversy around the film before and after its release regarding the involvement of former Communists in its creation, High Noon wasn’t seen when it was released as a commentary on the blacklist — as Frankel himself acknowledges.

Clearly High Noon is a Western, but is it also, as Carl Foreman insisted, a blacklist allegory? Almost no one thought so at the time, including [director] Fred Zinnemann.

When he first read Carl’s first draft, he said many years later, “I felt the situation as described by Kramer and Foreman very fascinating and I saw no parallel with any political upheavals. I don’t believe there are any. I think that this is a mystique that’s been created and there’s nothing to it.”

 

Will Kane as Joe McCarthy?

And Frankel goes on:

Still, seen on the screen at a distance of more than sixty years, High Noon’s politics are almost illegible.

Rather than appearing to be a brave opponent of the blacklist, some critics have suggested that Will Kane [Gary Cooper] could just as readily be seen as Senator Joe McCarthy bravely taking on the evil forces of Communism while exposing the cowardice and hypocrisy of the Washington establishment.

All of which seems to raise the question of why try to write about the blacklist through a film that, to many, doesn’t seem to be about the blacklist, despite what Foreman said.

 

Will Kane as Harry Callahan?

And one more odd thing: Frankel offers a long paragraph that seems to endorse what to me is a very strange idea:

But film historian David Thomson believes Will Kane’s most faithful cinematic heir is Harry Callahan, the modern-day San Francisco police lieutenant who goes one-on-one with murderous criminals in Dirty Harry (1971) and its various, more tawdry sequels, his righteous actions always portrayed in stark contrast to the cowardly equivocations of his morally corrupt superiors. At the end of Dirty Harry, after gunning down the villain, Eastwood flings his inspector’s badge into a pool of dirty water, echoing Cooper’s same action twenty years earlier at the conclusion of High Noon. But whereas Cooper’s gesture is one of sadness and resignation, Eastwood’s is one of contempt.

 

Bravery and brutality

This, to me, is an astonishing idea.

In High Noon, Will Kane is a decent man who feels forced by his code (and the need to protect himself) to confront the criminals, even if he gets no support from the townspeople.

In Dirty Harry, Harry Callahan is an amoral fascist, one-man judge and jury, who enjoys the killing he carries out.

High Noon is a movie about bravery. Dirty Harry is a movie about brutality.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

9.12.25