Force of Evil (1948)
Director Abraham Polonsky | DP George Barnes
This is Wall Street… and today was important because tomorrow – July Fourth – I intended to make my first million dollars. An exciting day in any man’s life. Temporarily, the enterprise was slightly illegal. You see I was the lawyer for the numbers racket.
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I know the location well, in fact I was there just two weeks ago after visiting Chinatown and J & R.’s Music World. What a great cap there, and the Polonsky film is a corrosive expose. With Manhattan, I guess the urge is always to go with Dassin’s THE NAKED CITY for obvious noirish reasons, but this is an equally excellent choice.
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Hi! Tony and Sam Juliano,
I have to agree that is a great screenshot too…from the film Force of Evil.
Speaking of, Dassin’s Naked City I ‘am in the process of sending author Eddie Muller’s Film Noir Foundation Archives a lobby card from the film Naked City.
DeeDee 😉
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http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/polonsk.htm
Odds Against Tommorow is a gripping noir and Polonsky attained credit years later for the writing. It bespeaks the impossibility of many men to unite in a goal even of crime based on senseless parochialisms and a malevolent fate overhanging them like a thiok impenetrable cloud.I would like to see ROMANCE OF A HORSETHIEF (1971), from the description in the article. I learned he was the director of TELL THEM WILLIE BOY IS HERE (1970). My reading this engrossing article and many others always affords me unlimited opportunities for learning and the amazement that comes with knowing more about the directors and shades of noir and the the background it has embraced in the US and worldwide.
QUOTE “Body and Soul made money. It was a hit. When it was a hit, I was a hit. I had never directed anything. But I figured I could do it. And I could. I knew that was where the fun was. The director spends the money. And it’s harder to replace him. You can get rid of him, but it’s a very expensive hobby. Getting rid of the writer is cheaper.” (Abraham Polonsky in ‘If You Don’t Get Kiled It’s a Lucky Day’ by Lee Server, published in The Big Book of Noir, ed.by Lee Server, Ed Gorman, Martin H. Greenberg.1988)
Polonsky’s first film as a director, FORCE OF EVIL (1948), is considered most overtly political of all the crime films of the 1940s. After completing his first directorial effort Polonsky went to Europe to write a novel and acquire the screen rights for Thomas Mann´s short story Mario and the Magician, an allegorical tale of the power of fascism.
“The analogy between the numbers racket and capitalism itself, with the reduction of human life to money and numbers, and the irresistible urge to monopoly, are there for all to see, reinforced by several location sequences in which the skyscrapers and steel bridges of New York dwarf the human dramas enacted below.”
Force of Evil did not gain success in the United States but it was hailed as a masterpiece in England, and enjoys nowadays a cult status. The film was based on Ira Wolfert’s underworld novel Tucker’s People. In the story a lawyer, Joe Morse (John Garfield), has sold his expertise to Tucker (Roy Roberts), a gangster, who considers himself a businessman. “I wasn’t strong enough to resist corruption, but I was strong enough to grab a piece of it,”
With Harry Belafonte and Robert Wise he made ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW (1959). Polonsky wrote the script but was given public credit for it forty years later. In the crime story three men plan to rob a bank, but racial hatred causes the enterprise to fail. Robert Ryan played a racist ex-con, Belafonte was a gambler, and David Burke a former policeman. The jazz score was composed by John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet.
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