This is an exceedingly well-researched book about the making of High Noon and the people involved. It's more than that though, it's a commentary on the blacklisting of writers, directors, actors and others who were severely impacted by it.

Very informative, well written read about the making of a classic movie.

A look at the fraught political environment in which the movie High Noon was made.

A great book that covers the story of High Noon and the Blacklist with aplomb. I remember watching High Noon at least once a year when I was young - a truly great movie. Now this book fills in the gaps on how it was made and the political climate of the time. Much of the book describes how the main players (Foreman, Zimmerman, Kramer and Cooper) interacted with the HUAC and the red-baiting world of the early fifties. The book is balanced but paints a clear picture how so many people were hurt by the House committee. Also featured is how cowardly Hollywood was at standing up for the true principles. Read the book.

At the start there is a lot less of "High Noon" and a lot more of contextual background of both the Hollywood blacklist in general and of the main characters in the narrative in particular than I perhaps expected, so I guess mostly for that reason it took me a while to get caught up into the story as the author presents it.

Like reality often is, it is a complicated business to relate, and there are a Tolstoyan number of characters involved who need to be presented and made sense of relative to one another. One I was finished, I felt like I had learned some of the history of the Hollywood blacklist and was left to ponder the implications or similarities in what happened then and some of what we see today.