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Jerry Monaco's List: movies
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Feb 15, 14
Tom Fadden is one of those bit actors that I see all the time when watching movies from the forties and fifties: He is the bridge toll keeper in "It's a Wonderful Life"; he's the taxi driver in "The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers" ; he popped up in two Bogart movies "The Big Sleep" and "Dark Passage": and he was Grimshaw in "Raw Deal." He always has a few lines but not many and rarely in more than one scene and he is strangely memorable, maybe because of his long face and his voice that seems to come from constricted vocal cords. He was also in those television shows that I watched from sheer boredom in my childhood: "Perry Mason", "Petticoat Junction", "Gunsmoke.". In old Hollywood such actors always gave depth to the atmosphere of the movie and they were always around. He died at 95 and didn't seem to retire until he was 85.
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Tom Fadden
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Oct 13, 13
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The most interesting parts of the documentary dealt with two important Cooper films. The first was an adaptation of Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls”, in which the political conservative Gary Cooper played a member of the anti-fascist resistance in the Spanish Civil War. It turns out that Hemingway had Cooper in mind when he developed the character Robert Jordan, long before the film was made.
The other was “High Noon” that was very much contested territory of the Cold War and the witch-hunt. Cooper had been a friendly witness in a HUAC investigation of Communists in Hollywood in 1947 but had not named names. This angered Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s wife, a lot more than it did him. Gellhorn was a famous war correspondent and very much part of the cultural front of the New Deal.
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Even Foreman’s most loyal supporters like Fred Zinnemann were threatened because of their association with him. Just like in the film, Gary Cooper seemed to be the last man standing in supporting Carl Foreman. But once threats ensued from MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer and the powerful independent producer Walter Wanger, even Cooper had to relent, fearing an end to his acting career. When the actor called Foreman with the news, the writer sympathized. “I know. Nobody can hold up against this…not even you.”
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