GLENN FRANKEL was a longtime reporter, editor and foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, where he won a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. He taught journalism at Stanford University and the University of Texas at Austin, where he also served as director of the School of Journalism. He's the author of four books, including The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend, which was a New York Times and Los Angeles Times bestseller. His new book, HIGH NOON: THE HOLLYWOOD BLACKLIST AND THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN CLASSIC, is brand new from Bloomsbury Publishing. We spoke recently about the strong silent type of characters, how the politics of that era relate to today, and the government's touch-and-go relationship with Hollywood.
Glenn's new book on the making of the classic film MIDNIGHT COWBOY is due out March 16 and can be pre-ordered on all the usual online book sites. It is already gathering rave reviews on Kirkus and Booklist.
Dave Watson: First, congratulations on the book. How did you choose this film and the preceding decades leading up to it?
Glenn Frankel: I’d just published my first movie-oriented book, The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend, in 2013 when some colleagues and I staged a small film series on Westerns at the University of Texas at Austin. Film scholar Charles Ramirez Berg led the session on High Noon and focused not only on the tangled politics of the blacklist era but on the artistry of the film---the great performances, direction, screenwriting and editing---and he tied together those two disparate elements---the political context and the cinematic artistry---into one coherent and compelling package. By the time he was finished I knew I had my next book project.
DW: You cover the social and political movements leading up to the HUAC (House of UnAmerican Activities Committee) and communism in the 1950s, yet this is clearly a personal film, really starting with the writer, Carl Foreman. Did anyone see the film as intensely personal?
GF: Some anti-Communist critics like John Wayne and gossip columnist Hedda Hopper saw a simplistic connection between Carl’s personal politics and the movie, i.e. Carl Foreman is an ex-Commie; he refused to cooperate with HUAC; he wrote High Noon, therefore High Noon must be a Commie movie. But very few people understood that Carl had written a blacklist parable about his own political and personal plight. He told no one at the time of the film shoot because it would have killed the project. But afterward he wrote a confidential letter to Bosley Crowther, the influential film critic of the New York Times. After the film’s release, Crowther wrote a column strongly praising the movie for its depiction of courage in the face of evil, and said that many folks in Hollywood could learn a lesson from watching it. It was the closest anyone came to linking it to Carl’s own story.
DW: You seamlessly blend politics with art, including what political party controlled what sections of government throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Are federal politics that intertwined with what films are made?
GF: Generally I would say no. But it’s certainly true that movies reflect the spirit and sensibility of their eras, and politics are part of that mix. During the New Deal era, movies like The Grapes of Wrath, Meet John Doe and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
reflected the liberal views of the Roosevelt administration. So did pro-Soviet films during World War Two like Mission to Moscow and Song of Russia, which were designed to encourage popular support for our military alliance with Moscow against fascism. And during the blacklist era, films like I Was a Communist for the FBI, Big Jim McLain and My Son John reflected the anti-Communist hysteria fanned and fed by politicians in Washington.
DW: HUAC appeared to have a touch and go relationship with Hollywood. Would you agree? Why was this the case?
GF: I do agree. The politicians in HUAC were always looking for juicy targets, and Hollywood, with its well-known celebrities and high public profile, was perhaps the juiciest. At first the major studios and many celebrities resisted---they didn’t want a group of politicians dictating whom they could hire or fire and what kind of movies they could make. But by 1951, public anxieties over the Cold War and fear of Communism had risen to such heights that the studios sought to ally themselves with the committee. They blacklisted and fired anyone who failed to cooperate with the committee’s investigation and set up an elaborate mechanism to vet actors and crew members to make sure that only those cleared of any possible radicalism or left-wing sympathies were allowed to work.
DW: Gary Cooper as the strong, silent type doesn’t appear to be on the screen much in film these days, though it shows up in foreign films. Why is this?
GF: Not sure I agree. I think we still find the strong, silent type as hero of many contemporary films. Matt Damon as Jason Bourne, Liam Neeson in the Taken series, Denzel Washington, Kevin Costner, Clint Eastwood and Harrison Ford---these are often stoical, inarticulate men of action and few words. Of course, our concepts of masculinity and relations between men and women are constantly changing, as has what we value and expect of men. But Cooper as iconic cinematic folk hero and protector of the weak and defenseless has lessons to teach every generation.
DW: High Noon somehow falls into the category of westerns that transcend the genre. Why do you think that is?
GF: I believe the movie has endured for sixty-five years in part because of its cinematic qualities: the great performances, direction, editing, theme song, etc. But the larger reason is because it depicts great moral courage in the face of overwhelming odds. Will Kane has no desire to be martyr---he’d much prefer to ride away and begin a new life with his beautiful new bride. But he can’t. At the end of the day, even though all of his friends and the upright citizens of Hadleyville forsake him, he still has to stand up against evil, even though he has to stand alone. As Americans we identify with and celebrate this kind of reluctant but unbreakable courage. And it transcends simple categories of genre and media to become an enduring theme.
DW: Do the themes and storyline apply to America today? How?
GF: They do indeed. The failure of democracy and breakdown of values in the small town of Hadleyville as depicted in High Noon mirrored the failure of our democratic institutions to protect and defend civil liberties and the rule of law during the blacklist era. The three branches of government, the political parties and the press all failed us during a time of high anxiety, toxic political rhetoric and public inquisition. And we face another crisis today under leadership that has no respect for democratic values or the meaning of truth. There are many lessons from the blacklist that apply to our own perilous political era---let’s hope we learn and apply them.
DW: What’s next for you?
GF: I’ve launched on another Hollywood cowboy film, but one quite different from The Searchers and High Noon: the making of Midnight Cowboy, one of the greatest films of the brief New Hollywood moment when directors like Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Mike Nichols, Arthur Penn, Robert Altman and Woody Allen were at the height of their creative powers. John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy was in many ways the bleakest, most powerful and most unconventional of all those films, with many great themes to explore.
DW: What is your favorite cinematic moment? One that inspires you to this day?
GF: Good question! I love the ranch house scene in The Searchers after the posse arrives the morning after Ethan Edwards comes home (it’s maybe ten minutes into the film). It starts with a raucous, beautifully choreographed exchange of pleasantries between the family and posse members, segues into a barbed dialogue-interrogation between Ethan Edwards and his old comrade-in-arms, Sam Clayton, who is both a reverend and a Texas Rangers captain; and ends with the most tender moment in American cinema, when Martha Edwards silently hands her overcoat to Ethan, her beloved brother-in-law. Those last seventy or so seconds includes a chaste kiss on the forehead and a brief look of longing between two people who are deeply in love yet can never act on that love, and the wise, discreet passivity of Clayton, who knows what is taking place just behind him yet makes no attempt to intervene or comment. It tells you everything about these three people, their moral code and the world they live in without a word being spoken. Sublime artistry from the master of cinematic emotion, John Ford.
Clip: The Searchers
Founder and editor of Movies Matter, Dave Watson is a writer and educator in Madison, WI.
Glenn's new book on the making of the classic film MIDNIGHT COWBOY is due out March 16 and can be pre-ordered on all the usual online book sites. It is already gathering rave reviews on Kirkus and Booklist.
Dave Watson: First, congratulations on the book. How did you choose this film and the preceding decades leading up to it?
Glenn Frankel: I’d just published my first movie-oriented book, The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend, in 2013 when some colleagues and I staged a small film series on Westerns at the University of Texas at Austin. Film scholar Charles Ramirez Berg led the session on High Noon and focused not only on the tangled politics of the blacklist era but on the artistry of the film---the great performances, direction, screenwriting and editing---and he tied together those two disparate elements---the political context and the cinematic artistry---into one coherent and compelling package. By the time he was finished I knew I had my next book project.
DW: You cover the social and political movements leading up to the HUAC (House of UnAmerican Activities Committee) and communism in the 1950s, yet this is clearly a personal film, really starting with the writer, Carl Foreman. Did anyone see the film as intensely personal?
GF: Some anti-Communist critics like John Wayne and gossip columnist Hedda Hopper saw a simplistic connection between Carl’s personal politics and the movie, i.e. Carl Foreman is an ex-Commie; he refused to cooperate with HUAC; he wrote High Noon, therefore High Noon must be a Commie movie. But very few people understood that Carl had written a blacklist parable about his own political and personal plight. He told no one at the time of the film shoot because it would have killed the project. But afterward he wrote a confidential letter to Bosley Crowther, the influential film critic of the New York Times. After the film’s release, Crowther wrote a column strongly praising the movie for its depiction of courage in the face of evil, and said that many folks in Hollywood could learn a lesson from watching it. It was the closest anyone came to linking it to Carl’s own story.
DW: You seamlessly blend politics with art, including what political party controlled what sections of government throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Are federal politics that intertwined with what films are made?
GF: Generally I would say no. But it’s certainly true that movies reflect the spirit and sensibility of their eras, and politics are part of that mix. During the New Deal era, movies like The Grapes of Wrath, Meet John Doe and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
reflected the liberal views of the Roosevelt administration. So did pro-Soviet films during World War Two like Mission to Moscow and Song of Russia, which were designed to encourage popular support for our military alliance with Moscow against fascism. And during the blacklist era, films like I Was a Communist for the FBI, Big Jim McLain and My Son John reflected the anti-Communist hysteria fanned and fed by politicians in Washington.
DW: HUAC appeared to have a touch and go relationship with Hollywood. Would you agree? Why was this the case?
GF: I do agree. The politicians in HUAC were always looking for juicy targets, and Hollywood, with its well-known celebrities and high public profile, was perhaps the juiciest. At first the major studios and many celebrities resisted---they didn’t want a group of politicians dictating whom they could hire or fire and what kind of movies they could make. But by 1951, public anxieties over the Cold War and fear of Communism had risen to such heights that the studios sought to ally themselves with the committee. They blacklisted and fired anyone who failed to cooperate with the committee’s investigation and set up an elaborate mechanism to vet actors and crew members to make sure that only those cleared of any possible radicalism or left-wing sympathies were allowed to work.
DW: Gary Cooper as the strong, silent type doesn’t appear to be on the screen much in film these days, though it shows up in foreign films. Why is this?
GF: Not sure I agree. I think we still find the strong, silent type as hero of many contemporary films. Matt Damon as Jason Bourne, Liam Neeson in the Taken series, Denzel Washington, Kevin Costner, Clint Eastwood and Harrison Ford---these are often stoical, inarticulate men of action and few words. Of course, our concepts of masculinity and relations between men and women are constantly changing, as has what we value and expect of men. But Cooper as iconic cinematic folk hero and protector of the weak and defenseless has lessons to teach every generation.
DW: High Noon somehow falls into the category of westerns that transcend the genre. Why do you think that is?
GF: I believe the movie has endured for sixty-five years in part because of its cinematic qualities: the great performances, direction, editing, theme song, etc. But the larger reason is because it depicts great moral courage in the face of overwhelming odds. Will Kane has no desire to be martyr---he’d much prefer to ride away and begin a new life with his beautiful new bride. But he can’t. At the end of the day, even though all of his friends and the upright citizens of Hadleyville forsake him, he still has to stand up against evil, even though he has to stand alone. As Americans we identify with and celebrate this kind of reluctant but unbreakable courage. And it transcends simple categories of genre and media to become an enduring theme.
DW: Do the themes and storyline apply to America today? How?
GF: They do indeed. The failure of democracy and breakdown of values in the small town of Hadleyville as depicted in High Noon mirrored the failure of our democratic institutions to protect and defend civil liberties and the rule of law during the blacklist era. The three branches of government, the political parties and the press all failed us during a time of high anxiety, toxic political rhetoric and public inquisition. And we face another crisis today under leadership that has no respect for democratic values or the meaning of truth. There are many lessons from the blacklist that apply to our own perilous political era---let’s hope we learn and apply them.
DW: What’s next for you?
GF: I’ve launched on another Hollywood cowboy film, but one quite different from The Searchers and High Noon: the making of Midnight Cowboy, one of the greatest films of the brief New Hollywood moment when directors like Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Mike Nichols, Arthur Penn, Robert Altman and Woody Allen were at the height of their creative powers. John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy was in many ways the bleakest, most powerful and most unconventional of all those films, with many great themes to explore.
DW: What is your favorite cinematic moment? One that inspires you to this day?
GF: Good question! I love the ranch house scene in The Searchers after the posse arrives the morning after Ethan Edwards comes home (it’s maybe ten minutes into the film). It starts with a raucous, beautifully choreographed exchange of pleasantries between the family and posse members, segues into a barbed dialogue-interrogation between Ethan Edwards and his old comrade-in-arms, Sam Clayton, who is both a reverend and a Texas Rangers captain; and ends with the most tender moment in American cinema, when Martha Edwards silently hands her overcoat to Ethan, her beloved brother-in-law. Those last seventy or so seconds includes a chaste kiss on the forehead and a brief look of longing between two people who are deeply in love yet can never act on that love, and the wise, discreet passivity of Clayton, who knows what is taking place just behind him yet makes no attempt to intervene or comment. It tells you everything about these three people, their moral code and the world they live in without a word being spoken. Sublime artistry from the master of cinematic emotion, John Ford.
Clip: The Searchers
Founder and editor of Movies Matter, Dave Watson is a writer and educator in Madison, WI.
