High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic by Glenn Frankel, and: The Broadcast 41: Women and the Anti-Communist Blacklist by Carol A. Stabile (review)
2019; Volume: 49; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/flm.2019.0038
ISSN1548-9922
Autores Tópico(s)Italian Fascism and Post-war Society
ResumoReviewed by: High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic by Glenn Frankel, and: The Broadcast 41: Women and the Anti-Communist Blacklist by Carol A. Stabile Christine D'Auria Glenn Frankel, High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic. Bloomsbury, 2017. 400 pages; $16.20, paperback; $25.20, hardcover; $14.40 eBook. Carol A. Stabile, The Broadcast 41: Women and the Anti-Communist Blacklist. Goldsmiths Press, 2018. 320. pages; $29.95, hardcover; $16.46 kindle. Two recent studies of the mid-century blacklists in U.S. film and broadcasting, Glenn Frankel's High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic and Carol A. Stabile's The Broadcast 41: Women and the Anti-Communist Blacklist, contribute in important ways to the ongoing project of recovering lost and repressed narratives from the Second Red Scare. Recasting the politics of the era through the perspectives and experiences of individual industry workers, these books illuminate the ways in which cultural works were shaped by and resisted the mandates of the emergent anti- communist movement of the postwar period. Both works interweave biography with social, industrial, and political history, but their different focuses provide readers with two distinct perspectives on how the Cold War affected cultural workers and the conditions of artistic production: while Frankel's study primarily organizes its analysis around a single film, Stabile reconstructs the repressed history of a diverse group of progressive women who were blacklisted in the broadcast media industry. But inasmuch as Stabile and Frankel share both a respect for their individual subjects and an attentiveness to the politics of culture, their books are welcome additions to the field of blacklist studies. A Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, Frankel's accessible study of High Noon (1952) analyzes the House un-American Activities Committee's effect on Carl Foreman's screenplay for the film. Foreman first conceived of the screenplay as a celebration of the United Nations but transformed it into a blacklist allegory as HUAC gained legitimacy in Hollywood and began to issue subpoenas and hold hearings, eventually targeting Foreman himself. Admiring of the screenplay's straightforwardness, Frankel discusses the similarities between its content and Foreman's resistance to HUAC. In the film, Marshal Will Kane (played by Gary Cooper, another major figure in Frankel's study) stands in for Foreman's self-conceptualization as a person who refuses to capitulate to fear and injustice, paralleling Foreman's refusal to provide the Committee with any names of current or former Communists. In fact, Foreman did not "utter[] one word of criticism of Communism" (201); this is important to Frankel because, even though Foreman and his wife, Estelle, had since "drifted away" from the Communist Party (91), their original membership was spurred by the Party's Depression era commitments to anti-fascism, anti-racism, and immigrant and workers' rights (26). Frankel upholds Foreman's principled stand against HUAC as stemming from longstanding, ethically legitimate political and social commitments and in so doing, enriches the reader's understanding of the cinematic allegory. Yet Frankel's reading of the film is not reflexively allegorizing, nor does it reduce the film to solely being a reaction against HUAC. The book offers thematic readings of High Noon that illuminate [End Page 4] other, equally important elements of the film's political consciousness. To this end, Frankel discusses High Noon characters Helen Ramírez (Katy Jurado) and Amy Fowler Kane (Grace Kelly), drawing on the work of feminist film scholars to show how the film subverted regressive gender conventions. Much like Foreman's screenplay, Frankel here foregrounds the theme of community, seeing Helen Ramírez's exceptional shrewdness in terms of her ability to see the broader social stakes of Will Kane's ostensibly individual struggle: "Helen, better than any other character," Frankel writes, "understands intuitively that what's at stake is not just Kane's life but the fate of the entire community. Kane "'will be a dead man in half an hour, and nobody is going to do anything about it,' [Helen] tells Pell in what is perhaps the most perceptive comment by any of the film's characters….'And when...
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