[ad_1]
In fact, Cooper wasn’t even in their top 10. “High Noon” producer Stanley Kramer was hoping for Marlon Brando, Kirk Douglas, a bigger, more fashionable name than Cooper to sell this urgent story, per Vanity Fair.
Kramer and writer Carl Foreman had come up together in Hollywood, capitalizing on the post-war hunger for movies dealing explicitly with the national mood. Kramer made multiple movies with this directive in mind, like 1949’s “Home of the Brave,” a saga of racism in the military. His profile in the industry grew because of his financially efficient producing sense and vision, buoyed by Foreman’s screenwriting. “High Noon” proved their talent.
For a producer-writer team familiar with the thorny contours of modern life, a Western could demonstrate its versatility. And it wouldn’t be escapist fare – it would be a movie that dealt obliquely with the McCarthyist anti-Communist witch hunts overrunning society (and Hollywood) in the late ’40s and early ’50s. Its target was the famous Hollywood blacklist that exiled artists with any history of Communist leanings from the industry.
One of the men who led the Hollywood blacklist was perhaps the most famous Western star of all time: Gary Cooper’s good friend John Wayne. He found “High Noon” deplorable. Years of serving as President of the Motion Picture Alliance had given him a keen eye for subversive Communist subtext in movies, and “High Noon” seemed to have more than a bit. As he told Playboy in 1974, the script was “the most un-American thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life.”
[ad_2]
Source link
Comments are closed.