'High Noon': The Rewrite

On September 17, PBS aired Darkness at High Noon: The Carl Foreman Documents. On the surface, this documentary is a posthumous homage to a worthy blacklisted screenwriter. Presumably for this reason, the Writers Guild of America screened the documentary last spring in Los Angeles.

However, underneath the surface, Darkness is a thinly veiled attack on Foreman's longtime producer, the late Stanley Kramer, previously regarded as Hollywood's archetypal liberal. The two met in the Army and after World War II set up an independent movie company, creating some of the era's landmark films, often featuring controversial subject matter: In their Champion (1949), Kirk Douglas was Oscar-nominated for portraying a greedy boxer, while Home of the Brave tackled racism in the military; The Men (1950) debuted Marlon Brando as a paraplegic war veteran; Jose Ferrer won the Oscar for their Cyrano De Bergerac. High Noon (1952) was the partners' most acclaimed movie--winning four Academy Awards, including Gary Cooper's for Best Actor--and their final collaboration.

According to Darkness, Foreman came to Hollywood shortly before WWII, wrote Bowery Boys comedies and joined the Communist Party (Victor Navasky's authoritative 1980 book, Naming Names, says he quit in 1942, although he briefly rejoined). During the war, Foreman served in Frank Capra's film unit and went on to receive multiple postwar Best Screenplay Oscar nominations. Congressional witch-hunters subpoenaed Foreman to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and when he invoked the "diminished fifth" (he denied present party membership but refused to name names from the past), the unfriendly witness was blacklisted. Unable to work in Hollywood, Foreman went to England and wrote, produced and/or directed movies such as 1961's The Guns of Navarone and 1966's Born Free. By late in the decade, Foreman was running Columbia Pictures' London studio.

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