Fred Zinnemann's views on "High Noon"

Fred Zinneman's High Noon (1952) was one of Hollywood's first psychological westerns, focusing on character rather than action. The story involves a town marshal (played by Gary Cooper) who faces a gang of notorious gunmen alone, after the townspeople refused to help him. High Noon is often seen as an allegory on the Hollywood blacklist. During production of the film, Carl Foreman —the film's screenwriter who was once a member of the Communist Party— was summoned before the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), the committee that was investigating communism in the USA in the early 1950s. Foreman refused to name names of his former Party members and was consequently labelled an "unfriendly witness" by HUAC and later blacklisted by the Hollywood studios. Foreman eventually wrote the script of High Noon as a metaphor for his own HUAC experience. Like the film's marshal who ends up standing alone, the screenwriter had found himself shunned by his friends and people in the industry with no one having the courage to back him. Knowing he would no longer be able to work in the USA, Foreman sold his partnership share to production partner Stanley Kramer, moved to England and would not return to the States until 1975. 

In his 1991 autobiography A Life in the Movies, director Fred Zinnemann gave his own point of view on High Noon, feeling Foreman's point of view was "narrow". Zinnemann had not intended his film to be a metaphor for McCarthyism and the Hollywood blacklist. Instead he thought:

There was something timely -and timeless- about it, something that had a direct bearing on life today. To me it was the story of a man who must make a decision according to his conscience. His town -symbol of a democracy gone soft- faces a horrendous threat to its people's way of life. Determined to resist, and in deep trouble, he moves all over the place looking for support but finding that there is nobody who will help him; each has a reason of his own for not getting involved. In the end he must meet his chosen fate all by himself, his town's doors and windows firmly locked against him. It is a story that still happens everywhere, every day.

Above: Gary Cooper as Marshal Will Kane walking down the streets of his town while looking for volunteers to help him fight the bad guys. Below: High Noon's director Fred Zinnemann (left) and screenwriter Carl Foreman. 

Three years prior to the publication of his autobiography, Fred Zinnemann had presented his views on High Noon in the following letter to Mr Caparros-Lera, a Spanish professor who worked at the University of Barcelona, Spain. The professor wanted to know what Zinnemann's intention was behind his film. Apart from the blacklist angle, some people believed High Noon was an allegory on the Korean War, a theory Zinnemann also refuted.

Source:  publicacions.ub.es

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Director Howard Hawks made his western Rio Bravo (1959) in response to High Noon, hating the way High Noon depicted its main character: "I didn't think a good sheriff was going to go running around town like a chicken with his head cut off asking for help, and finally his Quaker wife had to save him." Rio Bravo's leading man John Wayne agreed with Hawks and also hated High Noon, saying that "real cowboys didn't have mental problems, and didn't have time for this couch-work.” A staunch anti-communist and fervent supporter of HUAC, Wayne even found the film "the most un-American thing" and in an interview said he would "never regret having helped run Foreman out of the country". Quite ironically, when Gary Cooper won the Best Actor Oscar for High Noon but was unable to attend the awards ceremony, it was Wayne (a longtime friend of Cooper's) who accepted the Oscar on Cooper's behalf. (Incidentally, Cooper himself had been a "friendly witness" before HUAC but later became an ardent opponent of blacklisting.)

 

On the set of High Noon with Gary Cooper, Fred Zinnemann and Grace Kelly, the latter having her first major role as Cooper's young Quaker bride.