Background
Carl Foreman was born on 23 July 1914 in Chicago, Illinois, United States.
Carl Foreman was born on 23 July 1914 in Chicago, Illinois, United States.
Foreman was on the edges of the film industry until the war, but then worked on military documentaries. In the peace, he joined Stanley Kramer and George Glass in what some took for the breakthrough of “tough, journalistic, socially orientated works.” These were problem pictures for complacent audiences, films that voiced commitment but offered easy answers. Foreman wrote many of them: So This Is New York (48, Richard Fleischer); The Clay Pigeon (49, Fleischer); Home of the Brave (49, Mark Robson); Champion (49, Robson); more at home with the BLx Beiderbecke biopic, Young Man With a Horn (50, Michael Curtiz); The Men (50, Fred Zinnemann); and Cyrano de Bergerac (50, Michael Gordon). As late as 1968, a National Film Theatre program thought that such films had helped “establish the concept that good movies require good scripts.” Whereas, they are bad, underlined scripts, vastly inferior to such contemporaries as: I Was a Male War Bride, The Fountainhead, Adam's Rib, They Live by Night, Whirlpool, Winchester 73, In a Lonely Place, All About Eve, Sunset Boidevard, or Strangers on a Train.
In England, Foreman worked in pseudonymous collaboration on The Sleeping Tiger (54, Joseph Losey) and without credit on The Badge on the River Kwai (57, David Lean). But soon after that, he set up as a writer/producer and moved toward his real home—mundane, commercial cinema: The Key (58, Carol Reed), a pretentious love story against a war background; The Guns of Navarone (61, J. Lee Thompson); The Victors (63, which he also directed); Bom Free (65, James Hill), a film that not even McCarthy could have disapproved of; The Virgin Soldiers (69, John Dexter), which he only produced; MacKenna's Gold (69, Thompson), as writer and producer; Living Free (72, Jack Couffer); that inane piece of conservative hagiographv, Young Winston (72, Richard Attenborough); Force 10 from Navarone (78, Guy Hamilton), a sad return to past glory; and When Time Ran Out (80, James Goldstone).
There is no reason why the House Committee on Un-American Activities should be regarded as a more reliable test of talent than any other. To be sure, it righteously excluded or impeded some of the most interesting writers, directors, and actors in America during the McCarthy era. But it was not always so discriminating; it also blacklisted Carl Foreman. Thus, in retrospect, the “talking clock” Western, High Noon (52, Fred Zinnemann), that Foreman had written, was reassessed as a trenchant critique of American social spirit— this in the year that The Lusty Men and Bend of the River (true American pictures) were neglected. Foreman glowed like a martyr, went to England, worked under pseudonyms, and gradually revealed himself as a plodding middlebrow, possessed of dull ideas and rigidly conventional means of expressing them. High Noon remains the product of pretension, commonplace mentality, and an inability to relate the Western genre to credible or intriguing people.