Lance Mannion: Coop was a sweet man

Posted Saturday night, April 7, 2018.

Gary Cooper and my third favorite Bridges, Jeff and Beau’s father Lloyd, as Marshall Will Kane and his unreliable, opportunistic, and rivalrous deputy just before they begin their epic fistfight in “High Noon”,” a scene they would have to film twice, thanks to seven-year-old Beau.

Ken and I are listening to Glenn Frankel’s “High Noon:The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic”. It’s a pretty grim book which isn’t a surprise, considering it’s centered on on one of the most shameful periods in post World War II American history. But it’s not without fun, being also about making movies, and this is one of my favorite moments of fun in the books. In fact, I love this story, mainly because of what it says about Gary Cooper but also because I’m a Bridges fan. All three Bridges. Lloyd, Beau, and especially Jeff. I became a fan of Lloyd when I was a little kid and “Sea Hunt” was one of my favorite Saturday morning TV shows. So I was predisposed to become fans of his sons when I became aware of them. I became a fan of Beau when I was a teenager and he starred as a young Ben Franklin in "The Lives of Benjamin Franklin", one of the most interesting of TV miniseries of the time---five different actors played Franklin at various stages of his life, including Willie Ames, Richard Widmark, Melvin Douglas, and Eddie Albert. I thought Beau was the best.---and “Gaily, Gaily”, a movie I took as predicting my future even though it was set in the 1890s. Jeff was already a movie star but I was later and slower to join his fan club. The movies that made him a star---“The Last Picture Show”, “Fat City”, and “Bad Company” were rated R and I wasn’t allowed to go see them. But then I saw “Rancho Deluxe” and then, with greater appreciation and affection, “Hearts of the West”, another movie I took as predicting my future even though it was set in the 1920s. It contained an exchange between Bridges as a would-be novelist and Andy Griffith as a one-time famous one I took to heart and that’s stayed there ever since. “Son,” Griffith says, “You’re not a writer until someone else calls you a writer.” (You can imagine how I felt in grad school when the novelist Fred Busch called me a writer.) After that, it was “Starman”, then “The Fabulous Baker Boys” (which also renewed my fanship for brother Beau), and finally “The Fisher King” that convinced me that Jeff was the greatest movie actor of his generation. (No apologies to Meryl necessary. This is why I contend we need the word actress. It cuts down on wordy clarifications like this one.) But to get back to “High Noon” and the making of “High Noon”:

The last day on location was devoted to filming the fight scene between [Marshal Will Kane and Deputy] Harvey Pell, played by Gary Cooper and Lloyd Bridges] in the livery stable. Lloyd Bridges says [Cooper, who was fifty and an old fifty] was reluctant to do the scene because his back was hurting and he had other physical ailments as well. But in the end he decided to perform it without a stunt double.

Before the filming began, Bridges smuggled his wife, Dorothy, and his seven-year-old son, Beau, who were visiting the set, up to a hayloft to watch. Lloyd explained to Beau that it would be a pretend fight and no one would get hurt. But when at the end Cooper threw a bucket of water on Beau’s supposedly unconscious dad, the boy burst out laughing. “My father did not tell me he was going to get knocked out,” recalled Beau, himself now a highly respected actor, more than sixty years later. “Then Cooper goes over and throws a bucket of water on him, and I wasn’t ready for that, and I just started cackling and laughing and I destroyed the shot.”

The two men had to film the entire fight scene again. Cooper never uttered a word of complaint.

Beau said his father bawled him out all the way back to the hotel, but when Cooper got on the elevator with them he invited Lloyd and his family to join him for dinner. “He was a sweet man,” Lloyd Bridges would recall”

Bridges, by the way, was a committed ultra-liberal activist who for a very short time was a Communist, which earned him an appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He named names. Just about everybody named names. If you didn’t you risked being arrested for contempt of Congress and then blacklisted. Actually, naming names didn’t always save people from the blacklist. Bridges wasn’t blacklisted but he was “graylisted.” He had been a young star on the rise but he didn’t work steadily again until he was cast in “Sea Hunt”, eight years later.

I told you it’s a grim book. Very few people come off well in it. But you know who comes out among the best? Cooper. Who was a very conservative Republican.

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“High Noon” by Glenn Frankel is available in paperback and for kindle at Amazon and as an audiobook from Audible. “High Noon” the movie is available for streaming, also at Amazon.

April 2021