LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Fred Zinnemann: High Noon
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The correspondence files date from the mid-1940s; ... the bulk of the letters are from the 1960s to the 1990s, with each succeeding decade yielding more correspondence (carbon copies of Zinnemann's letters are present, particularly in the 1990s). There is a lack of depth, with no more than a handful of letters in many files. Correspondents include Jon Cleary, Floyd Crosby, Norman Dyhrenfurth, Audrey Hepburn, Henwar Rodakiewicz, Han Suyin, Dan Taradash, and Gunther Von Fritsch. Zinnemann's business and financial affairs are illuminated in voluminous correspondence with his various personal managers, lawyers, and agents. The William Morris Agency file covers a 50-year span dating from 1939. Correspondence with Christopher Mann Ltd., first with Roger Burford in 1958 and then with Christopher Mann, Zinnemann's British agent/personal manager, covers Highland Films, various story properties, and financial and contractual matters.
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Zinnemann was born in Rzeszów, Poland, on April 29, 1907, and grew up in Vienna, Austria. He was of Jewish background, and his father, a doctor, expected him to pursue a professional career. After going to a college-preparatory high school, the Franz-Josef Gymnasium, Zinnemann dutifully enrolled in law classes at the University of Vienna. But he was bored with the law and discouraged about his prospects. "As a Jew, one was a second-class citizen," Zinnemann told David Robinson of London's Guardian newspaper. "I would probably have become a doctor like my father, but there were too many doctors after the first world war, so I was made to study law.
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Zinnemann's casting choices were often as daring as they were judicious. For his screen adaptation of the play The Member of the Wedding (1952), Zinnemann chose the 26-year-old Julie Harris as the film's 12-year-old protagonist, although she had created the role on Broadway just as the two other leading actors, Ethel Waters and Brandon De Wilde, had. In From Here to Eternity (1953), he cast Frank Sinatra, who was at the lowest point of his popularity. As the likable loser Maggio, Sinatra won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. From Here to Eternity ... featured Deborah Kerr, best known for prim and proper roles, as a philandering Army wife. And Audrey Hepburn, previously cast in delightful comedic roles, gave the performance of her career as the anguished Sister Luke in the highly acclaimed The Nun's Story.
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Like Howard Hawks, Zinnemann made films in the eternal present tense (in fact, Sister Luke is commanded to forget her memories). Injustices in the past may haunt the protagonists of The Search, Act of Violence and High Noon, but it is not until Julia, Zinnemann's penultimate film, that flashbacks predominate. Memory becomes the organising principle, as six distinct time periods overlap, both visually and aurally, in an allusive style recalling the memory structure of Resnais' Muriel (1963), just as Zinnemann's Behold a Pale Horse anticipated Resnais' La Guerre est finie (1966), with its Spanish Civil War veteran's crisis of inaction and mounting irrelevance.
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High Noon