Tuesday, February 21, 2017

High Noon was a Commie Film

NPR Radio Fresh Air just broadcast an episode on how the 1952 movie High Noon was made by a Communist. He knew the the Commies were evil but refused to testify about them and got a fat financial settlement.

The guest was pushing a book claiming that the movie was some sort of statement about Communism. In his view, the town was a metaphor for Hollywood, and its spineless amoral cowardly residents represent the leftist Jews who run the movie business.

The guest also complains about the Hollywood blacklist and President Trump.

I do not see this movie as creating sympathy for Communists and leftist Jews who refused to testify. I do not get whatever point the guest was making.

NPR says:
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, as anti-communist sentiment gained ground in the United States, paranoia and persecution swept through Hollywood. The House Un-American Activities (HUAC) began interrogating some of the country's most talented filmmakers and actors, accusing them of being communists or communist sympathizers.

Author Glenn Frankel tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that the government was "looking to see or to prove that there had been communist infiltration in Hollywood, that this was part of a mass plot engineered by Moscow to take over our cultural institutions."

Many who appeared before the HUAC were put on a blacklist that made it impossible for them to work in show business. Among the blacklisted was screenwriter Carl Foreman, whose 1952 classic western High Noon is seen as a parable about the toxic political climate of the time.
But as the program explains, Foreman was not blacklisted for appearing before the HUAC. He was blacklisted for being a Communist, for refusing to repudiate Communism, and for cowardly refusing to testify about Communist infiltration of Hollywood.

It may seem paranoid today to suggest that Hollywood filmmakers were communists or communist sympathizers, but this author confirms that Foreman was both. He was a member of the Communist Party, and he went to a lot of trouble to cover up for other Communists who were putting propaganda into films. Apparent Foremen himself was putting propaganda into High Noon, altho his thinking was apparently so twisted that most ppl missed it.

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