High Noon film script owned by screenwriter Carl Foreman: Museum Object and Cultural History

The object in the museum catalogue

High Noon film script owned by screenwriter Carl Foreman. The script is printed on white, blue, and pink paper and is bound in a blue cardboard cover with three metal brackets. The front cover reads "Property of Stanley Kramer Productions, Inc. 846 North Cahuenga Blvd. Hollywood 38. Calif. / 'High Noon' Screenplay by Carl Foreman / No. 3." The script includes an introductory section titled "SOME NOTES ABOUT THIS STORY" detailing the setting and characters. Individual pages within the script are dated from 7/30/51 to 9/4/51, and have pencil annotations throughout, including strikes through dialogue, rewriting, sketches, and notes on settings and characters. These notes were made by Foreman and director Fred Zinnemann.

This was screenwriter Carl Foreman’s personal copy of the script for the film High Noon, featuring his notes and annotations. Foreman was a successful and influential Jewish American screenwriter whose career was endangered and damaged at the height of his fame by the 1950s Hollywood blacklist. Foreman was a member of the Communist Party from 1938 to 1942 while beginning his career in the entertainment industry.

“The idea was just in the air,” he said, especially for those holding left wing political views and worrying about the rise of fascism and antisemitic violence in Europe. He quit the party in 1943 after enlisting in the army, and not only served in uniform but also made military training films with Frank Capra, including the 1945 propaganda film Know Your Enemy-Japan. Foreman had earned his first screen credit with the 1941 Monogram Pictures East Side Kids film Bowery Blitzkrieg, but his career took off after the war when he began working with producer Stanley Kramer. Foreman wrote a number of hit films including Champion (1949), Home of the Brave (1949), The Men (1950), Cyrano de Bergerac (1950), and Young Man with a Horn (1950). His career was at its height when he wrote the film he’s best known for today, High Noon. In the years that followed, Foreman worked in Great Britain, including work on The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), The Mouse that Roared (1959), and The Guns of Navarone (1961).

High Noon is a critically acclaimed and influential Western film directed by Fred Zinnemann from a screenplay by Carl Foreman, starring Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly. The film, released by United Artists in 1952, tells the story of small town New Mexico Marshal Will Kane (Cooper), who faces a moral and ethical crisis when he learns that a violent outlaw he once sent to prison is returning to take revenge on the town’s citizens. Kane had just married Amy Fowler (Kelly), a devout Quaker and pacifist, and planned and leave the town to start a family and live out his retirement in peace. Instead, he decides that he must attempt to rally the town’s citizens to defend themselves and, finding that they lack the courage to do so, he instead commits to making a final stand alone against the criminal gang, who plan to return to the town at high noon.

The film, based on the short story “The Tin Star” by John W. Cunningham (first published in Collier’s magazine in 1947), was controversial on its release for its political subtext. Critics read it as an allegory of the 1940s-50s “red scare,” the hysterical witch hunt for communist infiltration in the United States during the Cold War, especially the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings on "Communist propaganda and influence" in the motion picture industry. In those hearings, Hollywood actors, filmmakers, and writers suspected of left wing political views were forced to appear before Congress and confess to their political beliefs, state their party membership, and “name names” of other prominent members of the industry they believed to hold left wing views. Screenwriter Carl Foreman, the driving creative force behind the film, had been forced to testify before HUAC, where he was labeled an “uncooperative witness” for his moral refusal to name names, making him vulnerable to the Hollywood blacklist, the de facto work ban enforced by producers and executives in the entertainment industry. After news broke of Foreman’s intransigence before the committee, High Noon producer Stanley Kramer decided to go uncredited on the film and dissolved his long and successful partnership with Foreman, fearing guilt by association.

High Noon was a box office success and was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won four (Actor, Editing, Score and Song) and also won four Golden Globe Awards (Actor, Supporting Actress, Score, and Black and White Cinematography). Reviews were mixed upon release, with critics bemused by the film’s unorthodox plot and moralistic tone, but in the years since its release, High Noon has been celebrated as one of the most significant and influential Western films in American history. Later critics and historians have lauded its subversion of the stereotypes and tropes of the traditional Hollywood Western, its more nuanced take on the usual clearly demarcated heroes and villains and unequivocal celebration of good triumphing over evil, and its cynical take on American morality and society. Director Fred Zinneman imbued the film with a dose of social realism, with its psychological and moral quandaries, innovative real-time chronology, and stark, unfiltered cinematography, so different from the painterly beauty sought by other Western filmmakers.

Materials, dates and provenance

• date made: 1951
• Object Name: script
• Physical Description: paper (overall material)
• Physical Description: printed (overall production method/technique)
• Measurements: overall: 11 1/2 in x 8 3/4 in x 7/8 in; 29.21 cm x 22.225 cm x 2.2225 cm
• place made: United States: California, Los Angeles
• associated subject: Movie
• associated subject: Motion Pictures
• ID Number: 2024.0092.01
• catalog number: 2024.0092.01
• accession number: 2024.0092
• Credit Line: Gift of the Foreman Family
• Data Source: National Museum of American History

Sources and reuse

Catalogue descriptions and facts adapted from National Museum of American History through the Smithsonian's official Open Access dataset. This record explicitly marks its metadata CC0 1.0; formatting and selection have been changed.