"In the end, he must meet his chosen fate all by himself, his town’s doors and windows firmly locked against him. It is a story that still happens everywhere, every day" ~ Fred Zinnemann.
"...The beauty of High Noon is that its themes are universal. On the surface it may be a western, but its themes of conscience, fearlessness and a sense of both what is right and of duty – not just to the law, a cause, or even to others; but to yourself and how you wish to live and be perceived – transcends the trappings of the genre to connect with audiences who perhaps would never consider themselves as horse opera aficionados. That High Noon has been uprooted from its old west setting time and again to effectively be remade or paid homage to in everything from the 1981 sci-fi actioner Outland to a 2010 episode of the Jimmy McGovern Manchester-set drama The Street starring Bob Hoskins, serves as a testimony to the strength and continuing relevance of the film’s human story of a man who feels compelled to fight rather than flee..." Read my full review at The Geek Show
The beauty of High Noon is that its themes are universal. On the surface it may be a western, but its themes of conscience, fearlessness and a sense of what is right and of duty, not just to the law, a cause, or even to others, but to yourself and how you wish to live and be perceived, transcends the trappings of the genre to connect with audiences who perhaps would never consider themselves as horse opera aficionados. That High Noon has been uprooted from its old west setting to be effectively been remade or paid homage to time and again in everything from sci-fi actioner Outland (1981) to a 2010 episode of the Jimmy McGovern Manchester-set drama The Street, starring Bob Hoskins, serves as a testimony to the strength and continuing relevance of the film's human story of a man who feels compelled to fight rather than run.
The film's screenwriter Carl Foreman intended High Noon to be an allegory of the McCarthy witch hunts that plagued Hollywood and destroyed the lives and careers of many involved in the business at that time. The House Un-American Activities Committee sought to investigate 'Communist propaganda and influence' in the film industry and declared Foreman, a former Communist Party member who declined to identify any of his colleagues and contemporaries of being fellow members, to be an 'unreliable witness'. He was subsequently blacklisted and moved to the UK.
However, when you add Fred Zinnemann to the mix as the film director, you get a further resonance to the metaphorical aspect of High Noon and one that supports the theory that the film is a film that just so happens to be set in the west, rather than being a western. As Zinnemann said; "High Noon is not a Western, as far as I'm concerned; it just happens to be set in the Old West". His shooting style certainly supports this too - out goes the traditional landscapes and painterly panoramas of John Ford, in favour of tight close-ups and crisp newsreel style footage in keeping with the social realist approach the director worked in, which reaches its zenith here with the real time setting that makes the tense atmosphere really palpable.
The critic Stephen Price believes that the Polish-born Zinnemann progressed the anti-McCarthy allegory by allying himself to the core values of Gary Cooper's character, seeing what he represented as being the physical embodiment of his greatest wish for all his films to be about "trying to preserve our civilisation". Price argues that it is easy to see the outlaws arriving to wreak terror and revenge upon the town as a threat to their way of life akin to the fascism of the Nazis who killed Zinnemann's parents in the Holocaust in the previous decade.
Such resonance has run throughout the intervening years and rightly continues to do so to this day, as Zinnemann himself said in his autobiography "In the end, he must meet his chosen fate all by himself, his town's doors and windows firmly locked against him. It is a story that still happens everywhere, every day" This was certainly proved in 1989 when the then 22-year-old Polish graphic designer Tomasz Sarnecki adapted the original Polish language poster for the film by Marian Stachurski as part of the campaign for Solidarity in the first partially free elections in Communist Poland. Referring to his very own High Noon on 4th June, 1989 Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa discussed the metaphor the film presents and its relevance to his politics; "Cowboys in Western clothes had become a powerful symbol for Poles. Cowboys fight for justice, fight against evil, and fight for freedom, both physical and spiritual" Call me an idealistic Corbynista (which I am) if you will, but Labour wouldn't go far wrong if they adopted it for their campaign now - like Gary Cooper, Corbyn seems to stand alone, shunned by a soft and self serving, blissfully and blithely ignorant society but compelled to do what is right for them nonetheless, as an encroaching dangerously fascistic menace appears over the horizon.
Rightly regarded as a classic film, not just a classic western, HUAC poster boy John Wayne hated it, calling it "the most un-American thing I've ever seen in my whole life" and went off to make Rio Bravo with Howard Hawks (who also detested High Noon, disparagingly believing that no good Marshall should "run around town like a chicken with his head cut off asking everyone to help", only to be saved by his 'Quaker wife' in the final reel) as a direct result. And if the likes of John Wayne hating High Noon and believing it to be unpatriotic doesn't immediately make High Noon a five star film then I don't know what does.
I had a brilliant early evening out tonight, watching a 'twilight' performance at the Everyman of Arthur Miller's The Hook, a play that has been largely suppressed for 60 years, only now getting its world premiere.
The Hook is set in the Red Hook district of Brooklyn's busy port and tells the tale of Marty Ferrara (brought vividly to life by Scottish actor Jamie Sives) a deeply moral man amidst the very real rats of the waterfront. Tired of seeing the corruption rife within the union and the risk to life and limb a day's work exacts upon his fellow longshoremen, Marty takes a heroic stand and runs against the union president and mobster Louis (brilliantly played by Joseph Alessi)
Miller was inspired to write The Hook after hearing, as a young man working nights in those very same navy yards, the story of longshoreman Pete Panto who attempted to challenge the corruption in the same way that Ferrara does, only to be kidnapped and murdered by the mob. Miller wrote his fiction as a 'play for the screen' rather than a piece for the stage, determined to get his message across in the widest terms possible. However this was the 1950s and a time when America was gripped by McCarthy's witch hunts, extreme paranoia and red-bating. When faced with the screenplay delivered by Miller and director Elia Kazan, Columbia Pictures baulked at the perceived Communist message but Miller refused to rewrite or soft soap his work even when the FBI intervened, fearing social unrest in the very docks Miller had written about should The Hook get made. The feds pretty much outlawed it, and Miller and Kazan had no option but to withdraw their script from Colombia. Soon after Kazan made On The Waterfront, a similar tale of corruption on the docks, and would testify before McCarthy, identifying Communists in his social circle. Miller on the other hand, remained steadfast and refused to name anyone. He was convicted of contempt of Congress, but this was later overturned and his courage to take a stand proved to be not too dissimilar to that of the hero he created in The Hook, who he described as 'a genuinely moral man...pressing towards everything that is established and accepted'. We have to thank director James Dacre and writer Ron Hutchinson to finally get The Hook on stage after an extensive six years research of several versions of Miller's script and notes, producing a screen play of which 'every word of the play is Miller's', a deeply fitting tribute and a production as vital and important now as it was when first suppressed in the 1950s. It may not be as Miller dreamed, ie for the screen, but The Hook finds it natural home on the stage; the arena for debate, and in Liverpool - with its rich dockworker history - particularly.
Their adaptation is definitely in keeping with Miller's vision of a play for the screen, bearing all the hallmarks of the pacy, punchy, naturalistic dramas that dominated the cinema at the time and have subsequently, rightfully, gone down in history as classics. There really is no let up across the near two hour running time and the audience is treated to a blistering, intense and deeply authentic piece that really makes you think.
The Everyman is a fabulous theatre which places you mere inches from the performers and often literally in the thick of the action. Patrick Connellan's set is a thing of beauty, a design so realistic and deeply evocative that you can practically smell the salty sea air. It doesn't take much imagination to get a sense of the bustling and busy waterfront, helped immeasurably by the actors and the theatre's community ensemble tramping across the stage and in and around the audience.
At its heart The Hook is still a contemporary drama with as much to say about 2015's United Kingdom as it has to say about 1950s Brooklyn. The scenes of longshoremen shuffling onto the waterfront in the cold, foggy, morning air at gang call hoping for a day's work and often having to bribe their way into work with a bottle of wine for their union delegate, isn't so different than the poor souls who have to endure zero hour contracts today, turning up for work never knowing if they're going to be needed or not. Equally the sense of having to settle for small victories, of democracy not always working for you; with people's dreamy eyed idealism quickly sobering up in the cold light of pessimistic hard experience and of a fear taking hold of you to ensure you don't use your voice for what you really want, has some parallels in the recent election results.
It's especially fitting that this beautiful and thought provoking production has played in Liverpool and pledged a strong allegiance with the city's own extensive dockyard history, with a powerful display of images and materials relating to the Merseyside dockers TU movement and of the pivotal 1995-'98 strike from the archives of the Casa, the help and advice and social hub created as a direct result of that strike which is currently struggling due to a lack of funding. T-shirts on sale and buckets for donations for the advocacy and bar service were out in the foyer, and well... I couldn't walk by. I'm now the proud owner of a Casa 'Get Hooked' T-Shirt.
I was blown away by The Hook with its unrelenting pace, its honesty and its integrity and its depiction of the courage required in standing up for what you believe in, at a time of austerity and corruption.
Whatever happened to Kelly McGillis? I've always rather liked her in films, but watching The House On Carroll Street I was truly struck by the strong and largely independent leading lady role she embodied. There's a touch of the Ingrid Bergman in Hitch's Notorious about her, which sums up perfectly the kind of influence Peter Yates' film, from a script by Walter Bernstein, has; good old fashioned thrillers from the 40s and 50s which features an innocent getting tangled up in a deadly web of intrigue. Indeed you could watch this with the colour turned down on your TV and almost convince yourself you're watching a movie made back then. It's that good.
The House On Carroll Street is a very engaging, beautifully evocative 1950s set suspense thriller set around the backdrop of the McCarthy witch hunts (Bernstein himself was a blacklisted writer, having fallen foul of the HUAC) McGillis stars as a young politically engaged picture editor for Life magazine who loses her job when she refuses to testify before the committee. She finds work reading to an old lady (Jessica Tandy in an all too infrequent supporting role) on Carroll Street, but is hampered by a near constant tail from two FBI agents, including the laconic loping Jeff Daniels. One day McGillis goes out into the yard and overhears an angry conversation in German from the window of the house opposite and recognises one man in particular in the heated debate as the man who interrogated her on the committee; a slickly duplicitous Mandy Patinkin.
Piecing things together with the help of the young and frightened German she overheard being threatened, she uncovers the HUAC's plan to smuggle in Nazi war criminals to America to share their technical know how and experiences to help strengthen their fight against communism.
McGillis is superb in this and really suits the 1950s style. She's a tall broad shouldered amazon who carries each outfit of with considerable aplomb. I don't think I'd ever truly noticed how big she was until this movie; she's evenly matched here with Daniels but she must have looked like a beast next to diminutive cinematic irritant and alien believer Tom Cruise in Top Gun. It's interesting and satisfying that Bernstein chooses someone whom the upper echelons of 50s America viewed with such contemptuous mistrust to be the most trustworthy, good and rational figure in this labyrinth of deceit and there's a pleasing irony to see Daniels' FBI agent come to realise that the 'bad' person he is investigating is in fact good, whilst his superiors are really the evil ones.
As befits the strong female role in the film, Daniels is not your traditional hero. He refuses to carry a gun, comes off worse in every fight, doesn't really save the day and doesn't even get the girl. His only really impressive, heroic acts are the discovery of a bomb in McGillis' stove (which he cannot diffuse because he nearly failed the bomb disposal course) and principally his growing faith and belief in McGillis and her suspicions. It's a refreshing depiction of a leading man - playing second fiddle to the heroine - and it's a testament to the likeable, open faced Daniels that he pulls it off without ever appearing weak, ineffectual or surplus to the proceedings. With the final season of HBO's (divisive but hey I absolutely LOVE it) drama The Newsroom ending on Sky Atlantic this week I can predict a glut of Daniels films to come, just to keep my fix going.
Romance of a Horsethief is an uninvolving and largely forgotten feature from one time blacklisted writer and director Abraham Polonsky, a man whose career never really reached it's full potential thanks firstly to McCarthy's paranoia and later because of an enforced retirement from directing on medical grounds. A light and insubstantial take on Polish Jewish peasants - including Eli Wallach in their number adopting his usual comic bandit acting and the lusty busty beauty Lainie Kazan - who make their boisterous living stealing, smuggling and trading horses, suddenly finding their livelihood threatened when placed under the Cossack rule of Yul Brynner who orders all horses to be requisitioned for Russia's war with Japan.
Into this tale steps the beautiful Jane Birkin as a prodigal daughter newly returned from Paris with her weedy bourgeois husband played by then real life partner Serge Gainsbourg (who else?) and socialist ideas that she hopes to spread among the villagers, whipping them into action against their oppressors.
British actor and face of the 70s Oliver Tobias, making his film debut, plays an honest and handsome village boy who falls for Birkin. It's certainly true to say his acting at least improved in later years because, whilst he would never reach Olivier standard, he is truly terrible here.
Inconsequential and just not funny - surely a failing for anything purporting to be a comedy? - this is one for ardent Jane and Serge fans only, even if their roles are ultimately quite one dimensional and slight.
"Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?" So began the interrogations by the House of Un-American Activities Committee that led to the ruination of many Hollywood figures who could claim to have ideals or a conscience and a desire to help their fellow man. Entered onto the infamous blacklist often just through hearsay and scaremongering, the committee - drunk on power - prohibited them from their right to work and, driven to despair, they were humiliated and publicly shamed 'lepers' who remained in the shadows for a further twenty years.
Guilty By Suspicion is a faithful and engrossing depiction of that time which focuses largely on one director (played by Robert De Niro) and his internal battle to choose over his friends or his country. Marking the directorial debut of veteran producer Irwin Winkler, the film scores successfully on authenticity (thanks in no small part to contributions from blacklisted names such as actor Sam Wanamaker in front of the camera and, behind it, scriptwriter Abraham Polonsky, as well as several characters and scenes echoing real life figures and events - the western film star who intervenes when De Niro is thrown off set is said to have been inspired by Gary Cooper's stance on the witch hunts) but perhaps loses a little in terms of enjoyment thanks to a largely pedestrian air from the first time director. Winkler may be an unshowy helm for a movie but ironically he's helped greatly by an unshowy turn from his leading man, De Niro - a world away from his Mafioso heavies. A great supporting cast includes the likes of Annette Bening, Cheers star George Wendt in a rare straight role, the aforementioned Wanamaker, a young(ish) Chris Cooper, Patricia Wettig and a coolly professional cameo from director Martin Scorsese playing (what else?) a director, who avoids his subpoena by exiling himself to London, an action taken by many including Jules Dassin whose film there, Night and the City, was remade a year on from this by De Niro and Winkler to poor reviews.
It's interesting to note the controversy that occurred behind the scenes of the production which saw Abraham Polonsky take his name off the script and refuse an executive producer credit when it transpired Winkler changed the backstory of De Niro's central character from that of a committed Communist Party member to a fairly apolitical liberal with a strong sense of injustice. There may be something to be said for the depiction of a man forced to take a stand, neither hero, fighter or fanatic but the decision to take this path leaves a bad taste in the mouth; suggesting that even in 1991, Hollywood still wasn't ready for a hero who truly claimed to be a Communist.
Here's a very rare UK TV interview with De Niro on the Wogan show done to publicise Guilty By Suspicion.
When is a B Movie not a B Movie? When it's Invasion of the Bodysnatchers. Like the pod people, the film's disturbing threat, this 1956 movie looks familiar and like something it isn't. Sure it has all the hallmarks of a B Movie; it's low budget sci fi, it has a cast of largely unknown journeymen and women of film and TV, it has the clunky expositional dialogue and ludicrous leap of deduction which exist solely to expediate the plot that is utterly familiar to the genre, yet Invasion of the Bodysnatchers is a work so intelligent, so accomplished and so of the moment that it refuses to comply with its limitations and successfully transcends its trappings to become something whose indelible and distinctive handprint can be seen on almost every suspense packed sci fi and horror movie that followed.
Director Don Seigel, producer Walter Wanger and screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring (adapting Jack Finney's serialised magazine story) may deny the metaphors at play here. They may argue that no one intended it to be an allegory of Communism and McCarthyism, but it's beside the point whether theye did or they didn't. The point is they literally caught the zeitgiest, whether they did it consciously or not. They were working in an America whose spine was constantly beset by ice cold shivers - the fear of dehumisation and loss of identity from reports of brainwashing techniques in the Korean War, the loss of autonomy witnessed in communist systems across the world, the growing concern regarding what many saw as a harmful idealogy creeping like a virus into public consciousness, the bland conformity of 50s America, and the fear of a possible Nuclear War - all of these things helped shape the mindsets of those involved in the production, intentionally or not, and subsequently shaped the minds and appreciation of the film's audiences. It's a quintessential Don Seigel picture, displaying his flair for a particular kind of taut and lean efficiency that cannot help but impress. Claustrophobic and relentless in its haunting of the viewer (though the optimistic ending - and prologue - at the request of the studio bosses does ultimately neuter the intentions of writer, producer and director) it's wonderfully executed and equipped with an effective, unsettling score from Carmen Dragon.
Invasion ofthe Body Snatchers may be a B Movie, but it's a Grade A one in my eyes.
This was a first watch for me. Yes you read right, a first watch not a rewatch. I know, I'm a huge Woody Allen fan and a committed socialist who, at 34, has only just got round to seeing this. Hey, what can I tell ya?
The Front is a film from that wonderful, socially conscious director Martin Ritt and that equally wonderful, socially conscious writer, Walter Bernstein. It sees auteur Woody Allen as an actor for hire, in his straight(ish) debut, playing - somewhat ironically - a front for hire for blacklisted communist sympathising writers of 50s America. Allen's character Howard Prince may come from the pen of Bernstein but it's easy to view it as an extension of the familiar Allen persona. Prince is a wisecracking cowardly loser, distinctly small time. Through accepting the adulation for better men who must remain in the shadows on account of the paranoid and ignorant McCarthy witch hunts this small time chancer initially becomes even smaller, before unexpectedly shining nobly in the final reel.
It's a well crafted tale of the rise, fall and rise again from Ritt and Bernstein that sees Prince - and no doubt possibly some viewers - have their eyes opened to the injustice of the time. Naturally the politics and sentiment of the film immediately find favour with me and I must confess my admiration increases to near teary eyed levels when the closing credits reveal that not only were Ritt and Bernstein blacklisted in the 50s (which I was aware of) but so too were the film's stars Zero Mostel, Herschal Bernardi and Lloyd Gough. Mostel's character in particular - whose fall, seen through the example of him taking a significant cut in wages to perform at one club, was based on fact - has an extra added dimension of poignancy with the knowledge that he faced such an ordeal in reality.
I must also mention Dave Grusin's simple yet utterly effective two note piano soundtrack in places - really haunting.
I think I'll watch this again very soon. I can't help but feel it will impress even more on a second watch.
"All right, so I'll go to the Stardust Ballroom. I'll put on a blue suit, and I'll go. And you know what I'm gonna get for my trouble? Heartache. A big night of heartache"
I still really enjoy and admire Hollywood's initial steps towards a more realistic depiction of life. The 1950s saw a turning point as projects began to strive for authenticity, casting actors who looked like real people, actors who had studied or were familiar with 'the method' and scriptwriters like Paddy Chayefsky who excelled at the dialogue that people actually spoke. In short, creative people who had an understanding and appreciation of the world beyond the insular Hollywood hills and wanted to create it as faithfully as possible. Marty is one of these films.
Chayefsky set out to write a love story, but he wanted it to be the most ordinary love story in the world. The kind of love story that happened to the people he knew, where the hero wasn't handsome and the leading lady wasn't pretty. He came up with a teleplay entitled Marty, the story of a gentle but lonely 34 year old New York singleton who worked as a butcher and who lived at home with his smothering Italian mother. Broadcast live in May, 1953 it starred Rod Steiger in the titular role.
Less than two years later, Chayefsky successfully expanded this original 50 minute play for the cinema and under the assured direction of Delbert Mann came this beautiful story of two underdogs played by Ernest Borgnine and Betsy Blair chancing upon romance in the film's 36 hour setting. Speaking of Blair, her then husband Gene Kelly had to lobby hard for her to get the role as she had been - like so many open minded showbiz figures of the time - blacklisted during senator Joseph McCarthy's notorious witch hunts for having communist sympathies.
The cast are all convincing - including the three actors who reprised their roles from the TV play Esther Minciotti, Augusta Ciolli and Joe Mantell as Marty's mother, aunt and best friend respectively - but Borgnine is especially effective as the big and big hearted Marty, a man whose honest sincerity and kindness belies his bulk in a manner that makes him easily loveable for the audience. The film also benefits from shooting in the locations the film is set, namely The Bronx, again a further indication at a Hollywood whose intention was to capture something of reality.
The film was a resounding hit, scoring the double (Academy Award for Best Film and the Palme d'Or at Cannes) and bagging Oscars for Borgnine, Mann and Chayefsky. It's origins on television were not forgotten, least of all by Ronald Holloway of Variety who wrote, "If Marty is an example of the type of material that can be gleaned, then studio story editors better spend more time at home looking at television." Unfortunately, given how much Hollywood relies on TV for inspiration right now, I rather think they took Holloway's quote to literally!
When it comes to love stories, this is the kind I enjoy. It's not at all saccharine but it is sweet and at nearly sixty years later (and a good twenty years since I last saw it) it's still a great watch. It's influences can be seen down the years not just in the more realistic film-making we've subsequently come to appreciate but also more directly in films like the loose remake of 1991 Only The Lonely starring John Candy and Ally Sheedy, Jeff Garlin's 2006 indie I Want Someone To Eat Cheese With (which Garlin stars as a Marty like singleton who is trying to get an audition for a remake of his favourite film, Marty) and most recently the late Philip Seymour Hoffman's sole directorial project Jack Goes Boating.
