ZINNEMANN’S QUERIES OF CONSCIENCE

Fred Zinnemann came of age as a director just as the country entered the bleak and dangerous postwar McCarthy era.

While such Zinnemann films as “The Search” (1948), “The Men,” “High Noon” (1952), “The Member of the Wedding” (1952) and “From Here to Eternity” (1953) were bringing to the screen a new realism and maturity, the film industry was being torn apart by the blacklist, the studios were being shorn of their theater chains, and television was beginning to change the movie-going habits of the nation.

The lean, elegant director who has specialized in films dealing with personal struggle found himself in the midst of political strife, when he would have preferred to deal with artistic matters.

Today, the 78-year-old Zinnemann is proud of his membership and role in both the Directors Guild, which is marking its Golden Jubilee, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which is paying tribute to him Monday evening on the occasion of his donating his personal papers to its library. But he is especially proud to be among those directors who stood up to Cecil B. De Mille’s 1950 attempt to take over the guild and to force its members to sign loyalty oaths.

“One of the great things about the guild was that it was not political. We met on a professional level,” said Zinnemann, sitting in the dining room of his handsome, ranch-style home overlooking Mandeville Canyon. “When attempts were made to intimidate us politically by the C.B. De Mille faction, six or seven of us--John Huston, Delmer Daves, Richard Brooks, myself and one or two others--had a meeting at the Hillcrest Country Club. Huston said, ‘Boys, the fat’s in the fire.’

“Someone found that 25 members could petition the guild for a general meeting, and I’m very proud to have been one of those who called for it. The hysteria was so great at the time it was dangerous to sign your name to anything. In that atmosphere 25 people signed the petition; it showed the guild at its best. John Ford, who was politically on the far right, was really the one who stood up to De Mille and brought down his faction.”

Even though Zinnemann’s career flourished without interference, he did not come through the witch hunts completely unscathed. He said actor Ward Bond and his supporters claimed that at the end of “High Noon,” when beleaguered sheriff Gary Cooper, having faced off the bad guys, threw down his tin star, a symbol of federal authority, this could be read as a subversive act. (Zinnemann said that when it was pointed out to Bond that Cooper did not also step on it, as Bond claimed, the actor insisted that Zinnemann had reshot the sequence.)

And more than 30 years after the fact, Zinnemann can quote from Los Angeles Times film critic Edwin Schallert’s review of “From Here to Eternity”: that in going “all out in making the military situation look its worst,” the film “could probably be used by alien interests for subversive purposes.” (Schallert also declared that the film, adapted by Daniel Taradash from James Jones’ novel set in a Honolulu Army base just before Pearl Harbor, was “a provocative screen smash.”)

Significantly, Zinnemann remarked that he thought soon-to-be-blacklisted writer Carl Foreman’s interpretation of his script for “High Noon” as a McCarthy-era allegory was too narrow a view--that it involved the “wider context of a question of conscience.”

Zinnemann always has been drawn to characters confronted with questions of conscience--e.g., Sir Thomas More in “A Man for All Seasons” (1966), Audrey Hepburn’s novice in “The Nun’s Story” (1959)--and is drawn to scripts in which “the conflict is interior. I find the question of conscience very challenginging to dramatize, a very delicate matter. This usually means there’s not going to be a hell of a lot of external action. It’s very difficult to do in today’s market!”

Over the years, the Vienna-born Zinnemann, whose first Hollywood job was as an extra in “All Quiet on the Western Front,” worked and corresponded with virtually all the legendary studio moguls.

“You could have a frank correspondence with a studio head because it was understood we were talking about show business -- something that’s very difficult to do today,” he said. “You could even have heated arguments and win. Jack Warner, in fact, liked to say, ‘Never argue with success.’ They were all showmen. Sam Goldwyn said of one of his films, ‘I don’t care if it makes a nickel, but I want everybody in America to see it.’ I love that one, but we could use a few people like that now, couldn’t we?”

Forsaking law school in Vienna for study in Paris at its newly founded Technical School of Cinematography, Zinnemann served a long apprenticeship, working as an assistant to such wildly diverse film makers as documentarian Robert Flaherty, who was to leave a deep impression on him, and dance wizard Busby Berkeley. He further developed his craft in the short subjects department at MGM, which he describes as an ideal training ground for its tight discipline of time and budget.

“When I was asked to join the guild shortly after it was formed (in 1936), you can’t imagine the thrill,” said Zinnemann. “The great film makers treated all us kids like equals. These were people whose main concern was quality; they were dedicated to excellence, which was something totally new at the time. All these men spent night after night concerning themselves not just with the problems of directors but assistant directors as well.

Having launched Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando on their screen careers, Zinnemann recalled that because of their training, Clift and Brando were similar--”up to a point. Their talent was incredible, but they behaved differently. Brando at first was totally locked into himself--he kept his own counsel--but Clift was very forthcoming. He had a very clear idea of what he wanted to do and was devious in defending it. With people of such talent, you don’t force them to do what they don’t feel. They got so deep into their characters they started living the character’s lives vicariously. There are traces of Stanley Kowalski in Brando’s paraplegic in ‘The Men’--he’s still Stanley Kowalski, really. And it took months after we finished ‘From Here to Eternity’ for Montgomery Clift to get out of Prewitt.

“Then there are the other kind of actors, like Paul Scofield or Peggy Ashcroft, who say, ‘It’s my job to make you laugh or cry--it doesn’t mean I have to laugh or cry.’ ”

One of his favorite moments in his own films is not among his most famous or successful pictures: It’s Gregory Peck’s shoot-out with the gendarmes at the end of “Behold a Pale Horse,” a drama set in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War.

Could Zinnemann, whose last film was the 1982 “Five Days One Summer” starring Sean Connery, be lured back to the set? “I’m not retired!” he said sharply. “I’m just in no need to be in a rush to do the next film.”