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Though his films remain some of the most popular and critically acclaimed of the twentieth century, Fred Zinnemann is a shadowy presence in Hollywood lore. Yet this fresh look at Zinnemann's work, based upon extensive research in his personal papers, reveals the filmmaker's lifelong interest in twentieth-century resistance to fascism. Fred Zinnemann and the Cinema of Resistance reveals a director of resistant women and unknown, courageous men; a man who preserved the voices of child Holocaust victims; a Hollywood filmmaker who pushed Hollywood's commitment to Europe and international filmmaking to its breaking point; a politically engaged mind so complex he isolated himself from his generation; a staunch professional who collaborated and fought with the Hollywood system for five decades; and above all, a master director whose consistency was in his resistance.

This chapter focuses on what is often considered the paradigmatic Western, Fred Zinnemann’s 1952 High Noon, beginning with its complicated reception, its varied allegorical readings, its political uses, and its profound influence. The discussion then turns to parallels with Homer’s Iliad: in both, the hero’s initial faith in the justice of the social system gives way to radical isolation when the men who should provide the backbone of this system fail them, and in both, the final showdown functions as a psychological confrontation as much as a physical one. Next, like Homer’s Odyssey, High Noon centers on the threat the hero’s wife poses to his identity through her uncertain fidelity; in the end, however, her loyalty is confirmed, thereby validating masculine goals and values. Finally, like the protagonist of Virgil’s Aeneid, Gary Cooper’s Will Kane is a reluctant hero compelled to defend the community; though both are temporarily distracted by personal desires, they are ultimately moved to resume the heroic mantle by a strong sense of duty anchored to notions of a higher purpose. And like the Aeneid, High Noon is shown to contain a de-mythologizing strain that complicates national identity even as it celebrates it.

This chapter examines the history of the film adaption of the musical Oklahoma!. It explains that the Theater Guild has set a price of $500,000 for the musical in May 1943 and analyzes the reasons behind the guild's decision to hold on to Oklahoma. The chapter suggests that the theatrical sale of Oklahoma! was triggered by the collapse in the number of first-class performances in 1952, and also considers director Fred Zinnemann's work on the film version of the musical.

Oklahoma! was a surprising success on Broadway, and although the Theatre Guild considered other possible creative teams for new musicals, the now-sealed Rodgers and Hammerstein partnership proved hard to resist. A touring company was in place by late summer 1943, and Oklahoma! traveled internationally after the end of World War II (not least, to London’s West End in 1947); meanwhile, the Guild needed to replace cast members leaving one or other productions of the show. In 1953, Rodgers and Hammerstein bought the Guild’s rights to all three of the shows they had done under its auspices (including Carousel and Allegro). In part, this was to maximize their profits from intended film versions. The 1955 film of Oklahoma! took advantage of the new Todd-AO wide-screen process and location shooting to produce a vivid rendition of the show that, however, also needed to be followed, or resisted, in subsequent stage versions.

This chapter considers Fred Zinnemann's film Julia (1977), which is based on Pentimento and An Unfinished Woman, two parts of the autobiographical works of the Jewish American playwright Lillian Hellman. It argues that Lillian's very own nostalgia, her events as they are registered in and deleted from her memory and her writing, expose her to the blessed curse of writing (and the cinema). They add to the complication of the problem of faithfulness both regarding her friend Julia and herself. They reveal how her journey through time stays within the frame of the possible, her possibilities, and they give us the crippling power to judge their friendship. In documenting her life from the start, Lillian subverts her own expectations as well as ours of memory's praxis and dynamic, exactly because with regard to Julia her memory is so fixated, exactly because of her refusal to renew anything. Inventing something new about her friend is wholly outside the range of her possibilities. The economics of invention—which, in this case, is her métier—cannot, and must not, break her spirit. From this angle, Julia is her poetics, a story about the limits and limitations of the author who invents the possible on the basis of the possible, nothing more. No other information whatsoever penetrates, or indeed can penetrate, the idealistic plot she forges.