Foreman on the set of High Noon.
Documentary settles a Hollywood score from blacklist years
Originally published in Current, June 3, 2002
By Karen EverhartIt's been 50 years since the release of High Noon, a film that became an American classic not only for stylistic innovations, but as an allegory about the McCarthy era.
A documentary scheduled by PBS for September looks at the Hollywood figures behind High Noon and draws explicit parallels between the movie's sheriff who stands alone against the forces of evil and the screenwriter, the late Carl Foreman. During production of the western, Foreman was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee and subsequently blacklisted.
"Darkness at High Noon: The Carl Foreman Documents," written and directed by Lionel Chetwynd, settles an old score between Foreman and his former business partner, Stanley Kramer.
Chetwynd asserts in the two-hour program that Kramer betrayed Foreman by severing their business ties and removing his credit as producer of High Noon, instead of fighting Hollywood's blacklist.
The primary source document is Foreman's letter to a New York Times film critic that details his creative role in High Noon.
"One of the main reasons the blacklist worked so well was not only because of the evils of studio chiefs and politicians," said Chetwynd, who produced the documentary in homage to his friend and mentor, Foreman. Though Chetwynd is known as an outspoken conservative in Hollywood and has produced right-wing issue programs for PBS, he focuses on the tragic consequences of McCarthyism. The blacklist "created a class of unprotected citizens," he says, and was enforced by those who still retained society's protection. "This was something we did to ourselves."
"Darkness at High Noon" has already drawn a vigorous rebuttal from Karen Kramer, who defends her late husband's creative claim to the film and his efforts to redress the injustices of the blacklist. Stanley Kramer, who died last year, used films to address social issues, and hired blacklisted writers and actors, said Kramer. "They're trying to rewrite history and I'm going to stand up and say, 'This is not true.'"
She has assembled evidence to refute the documentary and mounted a publicity campaign that generated stories in the Hollywood trades, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Kramer also appealed unsuccessfully to PBS and CPB to address inaccuracies in the film or consider the legal ramifications. She contends that "Darkness at High Noon" unfairly paints her husband as a villain and gives Foreman undue credit for High Noon.
By presenting the film, PBS is neglecting its mission to present work that "provides multiple points of view" and treats "complex social issues completely," she said. "Darkness at High Noon" is a "real one-sided hatchet-job and even PBS knows on proof that it is not correct," she said. "They are still cavalierly going to run it anyway."
Kramer asserts that Chetwynd is pursuing a political agenda with "Darkness at High Noon." "All of the Republicans in the film come off extremely well, but the leading liberal in our industry then was Stanley, and he takes the fall for everything that went wrong for Carl Foreman," she said.
"This movie defends an ex-commie who beats up on HUAC, and you know what? I'm taking a lot of heat from the hard right for it," said Chetwynd, whose last PBS series National Desk was attacked by a coalition of liberals as right-wing agitprop disguised as public affairs reporting.
The politics of the blacklist are more complex than today's conservative-liberal spectrum. "Hollywood still regards the blacklist as a sexy issue, and it helps determine your political orientation," said Tony Kahn, the pubradio newsman who produced a public radio series on the blacklisting of his father, screenwriter Gordon Kahn. Hollywood players "like to think of themselves as liberals, but most of this happened because liberal people got so scared that they caved in."
"The truth is there is no one around who really remembers and can speak to it first-hand," acknowledged Jacoba Atlas, PBS's co-chief programmer on the West Coast. The blacklist era has "too many gray areas" for people to be able to plant their feet and say definitively, "this is the truth and this is not."
Left-wing journalist Victor Navasky, publisher of the Nation and author of Naming Names, a 1980 book on the blacklist, interviewed both men about how and why they split after Foreman was subpoenaed. He told the New York Times that "Darkness at High Noon" seemed "one-sided" because it "makes a villain out of Stanley Kramer, when it was more complicated than that."
"The real moral of this episode," Navasky said, "is the way in which the Hollywood blacklist and McCarthyism caused people of goodwill like Foreman and Kramer--both of whom made great movies and had decent politics--to do things they would rather not have done."
PBS reexamined the documentary this spring and required Chetwynd to substantiate every statement.
"Lionel feels very strongly--and he's the filmmaker here--that Kramer made a huge ethical misjudgment with what he did with High Noon," Atlas said. "He feels he has backed up every single statement that needs to be made, and that he doesn't need to do two sides of the story."
Chetwynd said he is pleased that, after rigorous inspection, "PBS is supporting this version completely and will air it as delivered." CPB "has been fantastic and incredibly supportive," he said. The corporation matched PBS's $487,000 grant for the documentary, according to CPB.
"We have never, never, never accumulated as much material as we have on this," said Chetwynd, who executive produced the documentary with Norman Powell. "We knew within the community it would be carefully scrutinized . . . . We're proud to say it has been well-received within the Hollywood community." The film was enthusiastically received during an April screening at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Producers used sources with direct first-person knowledge of the events in question, a criterion that disqualifies Karen Kramer as an interview subject because she married Stanley Kramer a decade later. Other than one anecdote in which Kramer and Foreman encounter each other years later and don't speak, Chetwynd said, "no one is allowed to speak about anything other than what they observed first hand."
PBS doesn't plan extensive promotion for "Darkness at High Noon," Atlas said, but the film will generate publicity on its own. "It will be a very controversial film. I think you'll hear about it from both sides." She hopes that Karen Kramer will appear on Charlie Rose or Now with Bill Moyers to refute how her husband is portrayed.
"If I were doing a news program, I'd book her and Lionel," said Atlas, a former CNN producer. "I think it would make for an interesting discussion."
Chetwynd
Karen Kramer is defending the liberal reputation of her late husband, right.
Web page posted June 5, 2002
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