It’s Pride Month and I’ll start off by remembering two closeted Republican gay assholes, namely Joseph McCarthy and his protégé Roy Cohn, who later became the mentor of one Donald Trump, so his vile influence continues to the present day.

Of course, I don’t care what those two did behind closed doors in the bedroom, it’s their public persecution of suspected communists in the early 1950s that raises my blood pressure.

For in that period Republicans used “communist” to rile the low information voters that they depended on to get elected the way they use “trans people” these days. Some things never really change, they simply evolve. Oddly, most Republicans don’t believe in evolution. Go figure.

One of the folks caught up in that Red Scare of the early 50s was Carl Foreman, a Jewish screenwriter who was working on a script about a marshal in a town in the old west where the townspeople were all deserting him as he had to face an outlaw who was returning to seek revenge. The script eventually became the film High Noon.

Foreman had briefly been a member of a communist organization as a young man but had become disillusioned with it and quit. Still, he was subpoenaed to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and he discovered that his so-called friends in Hollywood were not supporting him. He quickly re-tailored his script to echo what he was experiencing; thus many of the excuses that the townspeople give for not supporting the marshal are taken directly from conversations Foreman had with former friends. 

His testimony occurred during the production of the film, and unlike some people ([cough] Elia Kazan [cough]), he refused to cooperate with the committee and as a result the producer, Stanley Kramer, was forced to fire Foreman from the movie. The two never spoke again, and Foreman moved his family to England, where he remained until 1975.

Foreman was not the only person connected with High Noon who was blacklisted because of his former membership in the communist party. 

Howland Chamberlain, who played the hotel desk clerk, also refused to cooperate, and as a result he was blacklisted for over 20 years.

Cinematographer Floyd Crosby was also blacklisted, though he managed to continue working on B-movies with Roger Corman. Crosby was the father of rock musician David Crosby of Crosby, Stills, and Nash fame.

Co-star Lloyd Bridges was graylisted (difficult but not impossible to find work) for having had ties to the Actors’ Laboratory Theatre, a group found to have had links to the Communist Party USA.

I’ll have more to say about the movie High Noon itself, which richly deserves its reputation as a classic film.