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| 1952's Oscar frontrunners: The Greatest Show on Earth (left) and High Noon (right) |
The ceremony for the 25th Academy Awards was held on March 19, 1953. It was the first Oscar ceremony to be televised, allowing viewers at home to watch in real time as the Academy Motion Picture Arts and Sciences named its picks for the best movie achievements of 1952.
The big winner that year was producer/director Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth, which has gone on to be viewed as one of the very worst Best Picture winners. As I wrote in my review, I don't agree with that assessment. I'll acknowledge that I don't think it didn't deserve to win, but it's an entertaining film, one that I'd easily rank above The Broadway Melody, Cimarron, Cavalcade, or The Great Ziegfeld.
Its main competitor was High Noon, which was regarded as the favorite. High Noon was the critical darling of the year and a box office success in its own right, and it has gone on to be regarded as one of the greatest westerns ever made. After the upset, many believed that the choice to give the big award to Greatest Show had less to do with film quality than with the political climate of the day.
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| A demonstration for "The Hollywood Ten" - and the beginning of the Hollywood blacklist. |
THE RED SCARE AND THE HOLLYWOOD BLACKLIST
"The presence within the Government service of any disloyal or subversive person constitutes a threat to our democratic processes... maximum protection must be afforded the United States against infiltration of disloyal persons into the ranks of its employees."
-from the text of Executive Order 9835, marking the official start of the Second Red Scare.
High Noon was viewed by many, even at the time, as an allegory of the Hollywood blacklist, the motion picture industry's response to increased public and government scrutiny during the period now known as the Second Red Scare. The First Red Scare, in the early 20th century, was concerned not with the nascent movie industry but rather with labor politics, and so will go unmentioned in the rest of this posting.
The seeds of the Second Red Scare were planted throughout the 1940s, but its "official" start came in 1947, via President Harry S. Truman's Executive Order 9835. This order was a mandate to screen federal employees for associations deemed "totalitarian, fascist, communist, or subversive." By the end of that year, the House Un-American Activities Committee began focusing on Hollywood, with "The Hollywood Ten" - a group of writers, producers, and directors - cited for contempt of Congress when they refused to answer questions about their involvement with the Communist Party.
Government scrutiny of Hollywood grew... and the public was firmly on the government's side. In response, the motion picture industry responded much the way it had done in the early 1930s, when it had come under fire for depictions of immorality. The studios decided to police themselves in order to keep the government from doing so.
The result was the Hollywood blacklist, in which industry figures who were suspected of ties to communism were barred from work by film studios. Some were members of the Communist Party USA; possibly the most famous blacklist example was screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who was an active and fairly open communist until 1947 - the same year his contempt citation was issued. More often, such as in the case of director Edward Dmytryk, the blacklisted men had flirted (sometimes quite briefly) with communism but had left that political philosophy behind years earlier.
Meanwhile, the early 1950s saw multiple cases of espionage involving communist nations. State Department official Alger Hiss, accused of having spied for the Soviet Union, responded by suing his accuser for libel... which backfired spectacularly when new evidence saw Hiss tried and convicted of perjury in 1950. A year later, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of supplying the Soviet Union with American military secrets. None of which really had anything to do with Hollywood or its blacklist - except that it further stoked America's fear that communist agents really were lurking around every corner.
And it was in 1952, at the height of the Red Scare, that the movie High Noon was released - with its credited screenwriter a man who had been recently blacklisted...
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| With killers coming for him, Marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper) is left to stand alone. |
CARL FOREMAN, HIGH NOON, THE COOP, AND THE DUKE:
"Everybody says High Noon is a great picture... It's the most un-American thing I've ever seen in my whole life. The last thing in the picture is ole Coop putting the United States marshal's badge under his foot and stepping on it. I'll never regret having helped run (Carl) Foreman out of this country."
-John Wayne on High Noon, in his May 1971 Playboy interview.
High Noon was scripted by Carl Foreman, who had been a member of the Communist Party from 1938 to 1942. He testified to the HUAC that at the time, communism was "just in the air," and he had quit the party when he enlisted in the military. However, he refused to provide names of party members to the committee and was therefore classified as an "uncooperative witness." That was more than enough for him to end up blacklisted by the major studios.
That was far from the end of Foreman's career, as he took refuge in the UK and worked on movies without credit for the next several years. One of those was The Bridge on the River Kwai… which means that this post will likely receive a sequel when I reach that movie in my Best Picture reviews.
1952's High Noon follows lawman Will Kane (Gary Cooper), who is credited with cleaning up the town and is considered a pillar of the community. But on the morning of his joint wedding and retirement, he receives a message: Frank Miller, an outlaw he jailed years earlier, has been pardoned and will arrive back in town in a little over an hour to seek his revenge. Will tries to round up a posse of "special deputies," only to discover that nobody wants to help. When he makes an appeal at the local church, a community leader praises him for his years of service, right before metaphorically stabbing him in the back:
"If (Will)'s not here when Miller comes, my hunch is there won't be any trouble, not one bit. Tomorrow, we'll have a new marshal. And if we can all agree here to offer him our services, I think we can handle anything that comes along... Will, I think you better go while there's still time."
It's not hard to see how, even at the time, this was seen as a blacklist allegory: Cooperate with the committee, and we'll all be able to go on with our lives without any trouble.
Being a western, it was first offered to superstar John Wayne - "the Duke." Wayne, a conservative icon and strong supporter of the blacklist, recognized those parallels and decried the script as "un-American." He retained his low opinion of the film in the decades to come, though he did bend enough to accept Gary Cooper's Best Actor Oscar on his behalf.
Like John Wayne, Cooper was a conservative Republican and was staunchly opposed to communism. Unlike Wayne, he did not support the blacklist. When Foreman came under scrutiny, Cooper publicly spoke out on the writer's behalf, calling him "the finest kind of American." Foreman would later name him as "the only big (name) who tried" to help.
From a cinematic perspective, Wayne rejecting the script was the best thing that could have happened to the movie. Gary Cooper's performance is a masterclass in nonverbal acting: a face that becomes increasingly drawn and weary as the hour progresses; eyes that dart around, sometimes in fear and sometimes in harsh judgement; a lanky form that gradually starts to droop from sheer exhaustion. Will isn't memorable for anything that he says, but rather for all the thoughts and emotions that he indicates but never gives voice to. It's possibly Cooper's greatest performance - one that Wayne, even on his very best day as an actor, simply couldn't have pulled off.
The movie's director, Fred Zinnemann, denied any overt politics, calling it "a story about a man's conflict of conscience" and calling it a spiritual sibling to his own later film, A Man for All Seasons. It would go on to become a favorite of figures both liberal and conservative. Republic Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan were fans of it, as was Democratic President Bill Clinton. It remains commonly regarded as a blacklist parable, however, and it doesn't require a particularly detail-intensive viewing to see why.
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| An extended parade showcases some of the spectacle of Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth. |
THE OSCAR: POLITICS, POPULARITY, OR A LITTLE BIT OF BOTH?
"As a technical tour de force, The Greatest Show on Earth defies description... No merger in the theatrical world has ever come off more stunningly than this."
-David Hanna's 1952 review in The Hollywood Reporter.
"...A vast vulgar strident Technicolored turmoil of circus-life under the biggest Big Top imaginable, and with more clowns, elephants and trapeze artists to any square inch on the globe's surface."
-Virginia Graham's 1952 review in The Spectator.
I've written a lot about High Noon here and not very much about The Greatest Show on Earth, the film that actually did win the Best Picture Oscar. I'll just briefly restate what I already noted in my review of the film: I found it to be well-made entertainment. On a story level, it's shallow soap opera; but as a spectacle, it holds up pretty well even today.
It was also safely apolitical. There's a reference to a nearby Republican convention - but only as an offhand quip from circus manager Charlton Heston when he searches for a wayward elephant. The movie is concerned with the circus as a way of life, one that was soon to change, while its story worries about which of two men star Betty Hutton will end up sleeping with. Anyone who thinks they see complex parables in there is probably looking a bit too hard for them.
It's an open question as to why this movie won Best Picture over High Noon, which was already recognized as the superior motion picture. Certainly, politics may have played a part. It's not crazy to suggest that, at the height of the Second Red Scare, Academy voters may have been shy about giving the big award to a film from a blacklisted writer that was already seen as an implicit criticism of the blacklist.
However...
Even if High Noon was deemed "politically unacceptable," there were "safe" alternatives that were likewise considered to be better movies. One of the year's other Best Picture nominees was The Quiet Man, directed by perennial favorite John Ford and starring pro-blacklist, ultra-conservative John Wayne. Like High Noon, it is widely regarded as a superior movie to Greatest Show, and it is regularly named among both Ford's and Wayne's best - but it also lost to The Greatest Show on Earth. That's not even mentioning Gene Kelly's Singin' in the Rain, which is now considered one of the greatest musicals ever made - and which wasn't even nominated!
Finally, there is The Greatest Show on Earth itself. The movie has not gone on to be well-regarded over time. Even so, there are several reasons why Academy voters might have opted for it that stem from the film itself, with no relation to its competition. It was a mammoth production, filled with the kind of spectacle that the Academy had responded to before and would respond to again. It was produced and directed by Cecil B. DeMille, an aging industry veteran whose career spanned back to silent film, and whom the Academy likely wanted to recognize. It was also enormously popular, earning $36 million dollars in 1952. Adjusting for inflation, it remains among the top hundred grossing films of all time - and the Academy has traditionally rewarded success.
CONCLUSION: MOVIE AWARDS AS CULTURAL ARTIFACTS:
I've said before that movies are cultural artifacts, reflecting the values of the times in which they are made. This also is true of the awards given to movies.
I don't think it's controversial to say that the Best Picture Oscar rarely goes to the year's actual best picture. But even when the Academy gets it wrong - even when they get it very wrong - the movie they choose to enshrine will always represent something that was valued at the time of its release. This is true of the all-time classics, and it is also true of the films that age like milk. Even when that value boils down to politics, technical achievement, or simple popularity, the fact that this one movie was named "Best Picture" is a snapshot that, if only for a moment, it reflected something of its era.
We'll never know exactly why individual Academy voters checked The Greatest Show On Earth on their ballots. Then again, that's true every year. It was not the first Oscar headscratcher, it would not be the last, and I would rank it as far from the most egregious - even if I also happen to believe that High Noon was far the better movie.
Review: The Greatest Show on Earth
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