PBS film on '50s blacklist, 'High Noon' sparks dispute

LOS ANGELES -- Bitterness over the anti-communist Hollywood blacklist of the 1950s has surged anew, and this time the political is very personal.

At issue is a PBS documentary about a blacklisted screenwriter and the production of the Academy Award-winning "High Noon," starring Gary Cooper as a staunch lawman in a town paralyzed by fear.

"Darkness at High Noon: The Carl Foreman Documents," airing 8 p.m. Tuesday on WSIU, uses the 1952 Western saga as a metaphor for writer Foreman's own struggle.

The documentary relies on correspondence and interviews with Foreman's friends and colleagues for a pointed history: It comes down hard on distinguished producer-director Stanley Kramer, who died last year.

That has provoked angry criticism from Kramer's widow, Karen Sharpe Kramer, who dismisses the film as a "fraud" distorted by politics.

Lionel Chetwynd, the documentary maker and an Emmy-nominated writer-director, denies an intent to vilify Kramer. In turn, Chetwynd decries what he calls personal attacks by Mrs. Kramer on him and his conservatism.

Both, in turn, lambast PBS. Mrs. Kramer says PBS is disregarding her position; Chetwynd resents an advisory attached to the film and a hastily produced afterward which he says undercuts his work.

The advisory notes that the documentary is "one point of view in the making" of "High Noon." The follow-up show includes a look at Kramer's career.

"We found 'Darkness at High Noon' to be an intriguing film," said PBS spokesman Harry Forbes. "PBS seeks balance in its schedule over time on controversial issues, and our handling of this matter with a pre-program advisory and a follow-up discussion is entirely with this goal.

"We believe more information than less is good and provides a service to viewers."

The clash comes three years after another blacklist dispute involving a special Oscar given director Elia Kazan. The 1999 award angered some in Hollywood because he cooperated with the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Chetwynd was taken about by the reaction to his show, though he acknowledges how vivid and painful those decades-old events remain. "Like everyone else who works in Hollywood, we're obsessed by the ghosts in that period," he said.

He undertook the film despite those sensitivities, he says, because of his respect for Foreman, whom he considered a mentor.

"This is not about politics," Chetwynd said. "This is about one man whom I knew who was a communist -- a political point of view for which I have no sympathy -- but who was a great man and a great filmmaker."

Foreman's career and life were damaged by "a nasty series of events in which a number of people and a number of institutions participated," Chetwynd said.

The film's goal is to look beyond the "traditional" idea that the blacklist was the fault of "evil studio chiefs and venal politicians" alone, Chetwynd said; it took a village for the blacklist to succeed.

"How does it happen that a community of people who live and work together, create art together ... how was it we turned tail and ran?" said Chetwynd, whose TV films include "Kissinger and Nixon" and "The Man Who Captured Eichmann."

For Foreman, it was his refusal to "name names" before a government committee investigating communist influence in the entertainment industry that helped drive him out of Hollywood and to refuge in England.

Drawing heavily on a 1952 letter from Foreman to The New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther, the program alleges that Kramer failed to support Foreman and deprived the imperiled writer of full credit for "High Noon."

Foreman was not only the screenwriter but should have received the executive producer credit that went to Kramer, the documentary contends.

Nonsense, says Mrs. Kramer, who disputes point after point in Chetwynd's film.

Her husband was intimately involved with "High Noon," she says, as he was with every film he made. Kramer was known for socially conscious work including "Inherit the Wind" and "Judgment at Nuremberg," and received 80 Oscar nominations and 16 awards.

It was Kramer who was betrayed by Foreman, not the other way around, because Foreman hid his past communist affiliation from Kramer, she contends.

Foreman wasn't fired from Kramer's production company affiliated with Columbia, she alleges. He left voluntarily and with a generous $250,000 settlement, according to Mrs. Kramer, a producer and former actress who married Kramer in 1965.

Her husband "didn't do anything wrong. If he had been an independent he would have loved to have fought back. ... He was an employee of Columbia Pictures. He had to follow their orders," she said.

"Stanley would have protected Carl if he could have," Mrs. Kramer said.

Although she questions the authenticity of the letter to Crowther, Mrs. Kramer said Foreman complained about her husband on other occasions. The writer blamed Kramer "for his plight in life," she said, deeming that unfair.

Foreman, whose credits included "The Men" and "The Bridge on the River Kwai," returned from England and resumed his Hollywood career in the 1970s as a writer and producer. He died in 1984.

Since seeing a rough cut of the PBS documentary in December, Mrs. Kramer has worked to collect documents and notarized interviews she says refute Chetwynd's claims.

He, in turn, stands by his own research and film -- and says he hopes to do another blacklist documentary, examining communist influence in Hollywood.

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EDITOR'S NOTE -- Lynn Elber can be reached at lelber"at"ap.org