Cooper

Gary Cooper usually comes up in connection with High Noon, the western where a marshall is unable to get townspeople to help out when bad guys ride into town. Made at the height of the McCarthy era, it's a visualization of the adage that "for evil to triumph, good men need only do nothing." That anti-communist crusaders were able to ruin lives with the backing of the U.S. government was bad enough, but that nobody would do anything to stop it was the tragedy that this movie points out.

 Often brought up at this point in a High Noon discussion is that Cooper was a friendly witness for the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947. That is, he supported government investigation into Communist infiltration of Hollywood productions. Here, less than five years later, he's taking an opposing stand. What happened?

While his testimony was friendly, it might have been less so if Cooper hadn't been able to convince the members of the committee that some of their sources were faulty. In response, for example, to a report that had him in front of a crowd of 90,000 people at a Philadelphia Communist convention, he replied:

COOPER: Well, a 90,000 audience is a little tough to disregard, but it is not true.

Oddly, the chairperson eventually says that he knows this is not true. And Cooper is clearly not especially political, except to the extent to which he's able to deflect the committee's questions. If one was going to ask what made the difference between 1947 and 1952, one could postulate that it was the rise of these anti-Communist crusaders, and seeing what sort of damage they could do - again, with government support - that started tilting his mind around.