Force of Evil Blu-ray Review
Perusing the dark side.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, July 17, 2012
The House Un-American Activities Committee left a swath of ruined careers in its wake, but it also created a tangential
reverberation centered around questions of what might have been. How many fantastic actors, writers and directors
might have had significantly different career arcs, at least in the fifties, had the HUAC not engaged in its now notorious
efforts to encourage the studios and their ruling elite to have various people blacklisted within the industry so that they
either couldn't work at all or were forced to do so under pseudonyms. (I should state in the interests of full disclosure
that my perhaps overly negative attitude toward the HUAC may stem at least in part from the fact that my own family
was affected by it. While my own father was a true blue American patriot and U.S. Army General, both of his brothers
were rather well
known leftists and one of them was hauled before the HUAC and the Dies Committee, and Martin Dies himself
attempted—spectacularly unsuccessfully—to corner my late Uncle and keep him from making a living, calling him "the
baby faced Pinko of New York City's docks". The irony here is
that my Uncle, despite having been at the least a "fellow traveler" in the American Communist Party in the 1930s and
1940s,
ended up being a multimillionaire who owned a great deal of property in lower Manhattan and several other boroughs
at the time of his death.) One of the more notable careers sidelined by the HUAC was that of Abraham Polonsky, a man
who made no bones about his Marxist leanings but who, like so many Communists back in the day, had signed up to
fight what was then considered the
real menace—Fascism—in World War II. After the War, Polonsky quickly
made a name for himself as a writer in Hollywood, earning an Oscar nomination for his screenplay for
Body and Soul. Polonsky
followed up
Body and Soul by both writing and directing
Force of Evil, though the second film failed to
receive either much critical appreciation or box office appeal. And shortly thereafter Polonsky found himself deemed
"dangerous" by the "powers that were", exiled into a forced hiatus where to this day his pseudonymous contributions
are still largely unknown. Polonsky managed to start getting work under his own name again in television in the mid-
sixties, and did finally direct another film in 1969, the Robert Redford starrer
Tell Them Willie Boy is Here.
Polonsky also evidently continued to make largely uncredited contributions to a number of films, including rather
incredibly
Mommie Dearest, but his output is sadly small, a lasting legacy to the devastating effects of the Red
Scare.
In his interesting if too brief introduction included on this Blu-ray as a supplement, Martin Scorsese mentions
On the
Waterfront in passing as one of many films that obviously bore the imprint of
Force of Evil, but the
similarities
are in fact more than skin deep, and it's fascinating to peer beneath the surface at their two filmmakers, Polonsky and
Elia
Kazan, and how they handled their interactions with the HUAC so differently. Polonsky was perhaps a more screed-like
writer than
On the Waterfront's Budd Schulberg, and if in
Body and Soul Polonsky posited a man torn
between wrong and right within a Capitalist system that was seen as inherently corrupt, in
Force of Evil,
Polonsky
goes for broke as it were, giving us a lead character who has already given in to the seedier side of Capitalism, even if
his
intentions are at least partly noble. But much like
On the Waterfront, Force of Evil also examines the sibling
relationship between two brothers within the context of a seedy world of moral turpitude and shades of gray.
John Garfield portrays Joe Morse, an attorney working for a gangster named Tucker (Roy Roberts), a "shyster" (as
Tucker's thug buddies call him) who is helping Tucker achieve a level of legitimacy with his numbers operation. It's
indicative of Polonsky's cynicism that a major plot point of
Force of Evil deals with Tucker attempting to put a
coterie of smaller number operations out of business by rigging a July 4 lottery so that the number 776, a popular
choice for that day, "hits", thereby bankrupting all the small time bookies. Polonsky is obviously taking one of the most
iconic celebrations of American identity and sullying it with this kind of behavior. For Joe's character, the situation
becomes personal as one of the small time racketeers turns out to be his brother Leo (Thomas Gomez, looking rather
like a young Zero Mostel), and the central
conflict of
Force of Evil is whether Joe will do Tucker's bidding while simultaneously attempting to save his
brother from destitution.
Along the way Joe gets involved romantically with Doris (Beatrice Pearson, in one of only two feature films she made),
his brother's secretary. The love angle is actually one of the weaker elements of the film, one obviously there to
provide a kind of mainstream interest in what is otherwise a rather unseemly exposé of the darkness in men's souls.
Critics evidently didn't know quite what to make of
Force of Evil's flowery language and its arty camera work at
the time of the film's release, but rather oddly they seemed to react more positively at the time to the film's love story,
the most glaring element that seems out of place to modern day sensibilities.
Force of Evil is a brisk (not even an hour and a half), visceral journey, and if Polonsky ultimately lets Joe redeem
himself in the film's closing moments, the overall feeling generated by the film is one of moral degradation and people
forced to compromise. It's almost humorous when Leo insists he's an "honest businessman" as he defends himself
against Tucker's attempts to take over his little corner of the numbers racket, but the fascinating thing is, in Polonsky's
formulation where all things are relative, Leo is probably right.
