Carl Foreman

Frankel recounts how the Western classic High Noon, starring Gary Cooper as a small-town sheriff up against the clock, some bad guys, and his own conscience, was released during the blacklist.

It was penned by Carl Foreman, a former communist who had to testify before HUAC as filming took place.

I spoke with Frankel about this lesser-known aspect of the film when he visited Houston in 2017.

Maybe some of you already know it, but if you don't, it looks like Frank Miller's coming back on the noon train.

I need all the special deputies I can get.

When and how did Carl Foreman get involved with the Communist Party?

He came out to Hollywood in 1938 with his new bride, Estelle, from Chicago.

He came from a very left-wing, you know, Jewish immigrant background that was particularly leftist.

when he was younger and it just affected him as like a cool Western.

But then when he was working on the movie Trumbo and playing the blacklisted screenwriter, Dalton Trumbo, and of course, Carl Foreman, who wrote High Noon was another blacklisted screenwriter.

He was doing all of this research on the blacklisted writers.

And because of that, he was paying more attention differently to High Noon and its politics.

Yeah.

Anyway, the actual screenwriters, Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson, were blacklisted and therefore denied screen credit.

So the screenplay Oscar originally went to the novelist, Mr. Pierre Boule, who did not speak English.

The Academy [laughs] eventually corrected its records and awarded Foreman and Wilson for their Oscars posthumously in 1984.

Whoops.

So they're light dramas, which Sarah covered.

One of the three screenwriters were honored, and that was the novel writer with Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson.

They were blacklisted.

His name escapes me at this moment.

But Carl Foreman, he got blacklisted by Hollywood under McCarthyism.

So there was definitely some of that.

around some people that worked on the film, and I think that likely leached into it not winning Best Picture.

This is from 1949.

So from producer Stanley Kramer, The Defiant Ones, and director Mark Hobson, Valley of the Dolls, comes one of Hollywood's first films to confront racism head-on, adapted by legendary screenwriter Carl Foreman, High Noon.

From a play by Arthur Lawrence, West Side Story, Private Peter Moss returns from a dangerous reconciliance mission on a Japanese-held island paralyzed, yet doctors find nothing physically wrong with him.

As an army psychiatrist probes him, his memories of jungle terror, lost friends, and a lifetime of prejudice, one question remains, can Moss confront the true source of his paralysis and walk again? Starring James Edwards, The Steel Helmet, in a landmark leading performance alongside Lloyd Bridges from High Noon, Frank Lovejoy in A Lonely Place, and Jeff Corey, True Grit.

Yeah.

and john would you want to discuss the final title in this bundle from the august from the august bundle

definitely so the last one uh from here is the men this is imprint number 656 and this is a 1950 film marlon brando makes his stellar screen debut in this powerful drama from academy award winner frank zinneman high noon written by carl foreman the guns of navarro and produced by stanley kramer on the beach Ken Willishek, a young infantry lieutenant, is left paralyzed from the waist down from a sniper's bullet in the final days of World War II.

Embittered and withdrawn from paraplegic ward of Veterans Hospital, Ken refuses to see his devote fiance, Ellen, until a straight-talking doctor and his fellow patients begin the long, painful walk together.