Carl Foreman, the screenwriter for High Noon. called the film "a parable about Hollywood and McCarthyism".

He described Hollywood as "a community beginning to crumble around the edges as these high powered politicians came in ... putting this community through an inquisition that was getting more and more painful for a lot of people, and people were falling to the wayside one way or another. They were either capitulatingto these gangsters - political gangsters from out of town - or they were being executed by them here. And I could see that my time was coming sooner or later - it was just being delayed by a couple years or so - and I wanted to write about that. I wanted to write about the death of Hollywood. So all that shaped the writing of High Noon. That was very conscious, see."

from 1981 American Film Foundation documentary Carl Foreman, Words Into Images, Portraits of American Screenwriters