Behind the Scenes: Force of Evil (Polonsky, 1948) with John Garfield and Thomas Gomez

Force of Evil, a 1948 picture directed by Abraham Polanski, is a classic of the American cinema, a film that deserves its proper attention. It's been a major influence on my work and particularly on Mean Street's Raging Bull and Goodfellas. I first saw the film on television when I was 13 years old and I was overwhelmed by its writing, its direction, its use of music, and its acting. From then on I tracked it down every time I played again. After that I viewed it where I could and studied it. And over the years I've had the pleasure of introducing the film to Francis Coppola, Robert De Niro, and Michael Powell, among many others. In 1969 I showed this film as an important example of American filmmaking and a course in American cinema at New York University. Abraham Polanski had previously written the screenplay for Robert Rawson's Body and Soul, closely watching the actual film production. Encouraged by the producer Bob Roberts and by the star of the picture, John Garfield, he went on to direct Force of Evil. And the film was mostly ignored by American critics or treated as a routine gangster drama, but it was highly praised in Europe and in retrospect it's been re-evaluated as a classic. Force of Evil was the first film I can remember seeing that applied directly to a world that I knew and saw. Later on, On the Waterfront was another. The film is primarily about the relationship between the two brothers, John Garfield and Thomas Gomez, and the moral responsibilities one has for the other. Actually, elements of this relationship later found its way into my film Raging Bull. But in Force of Evil, the dialogue itself is quite special. In fact, in the 60s, it led one British critic to exclaim as he was watching it, my God, it's written in blank verse. It is quite extraordinary. And the film is elevated by the use of the dialogue, as in the last voiceover narration of John Garfield at the end of the film as he tries to find his brother, or in the scene where Thomas Gomez, waiting in a restaurant, describes sensations of mortality. But these are just two examples. I mean, the whole film is filled with this. Its poetry creates a hyper-reality. But for me, the poetry culminates in the graceful and tormented presence of John Garfield. His face becomes a landscape of moral conflicts. Force of Evil appears to be, on the surface, a tightly structured 90-minute B-film, but has so much more going for it. The moral drama has almost a mythic scale. It displays a corrupted world collapsing from within. In this respect, Force of Evil is very different from other film noirs. It's not just the individual who's corrupted, but the entire system. It's a political as well as existential vision. Force of Evil was the only film that Polanski was to direct for 21 years because it was blacklisted. It was one of the great losses to American films and world cinema. So Force of Evil is a film that operates within certain recognizable conventions. Most obviously, those of the gangster film and the good girl, bad girl opposition that was quite commonplace in 1940s movies. But what it does with that conventional material is highly unusual. And this is a very exceptional film, I think. And most of the critics who've actually written about the film recently see it as a film that's drawing upon the kind of common materials of crime films from the 1940s, but taking them in a totally different direction. The writer-director, Abraham Polanski, said he wanted to make an aesthetic experiment with a Marxist meaning and that he pushed the film as far as he possibly could in this direction because he felt it might be the only chance he would have at directing a Hollywood movie. And this more or less proved to be the case, at least for 20 years or so, because the unrepentantly communist Polanski was actually blacklisted in 1951 and didn't get a chance to direct another Hollywood movie until 1970. Force of Evil was often categorized as a film noir because of its style, its mood, and its subject matter. But Polanski was very uneasy about this way of identifying the film. He didn't see it as a very adequate description of what he'd set out to do. Basically, he said that most noir movies were constrained by budget, by genre, and by studio, and he regarded Force of Evil as a film that wasn't so constrained. He described it as a relatively free film. Looking back from the vantage point of the 1970s, he claimed that Force of Evil is a genuine free expression of a point of view, and nobody told me what to do, and nobody was telling my backers what to do. We own it. We're the bosses. So whatever relationship it has to those kinds of feelings are really expressed here. They're not hidden and getting away by hiding as film noir. In other words, what he sees film noir as being, if you like, is identified by struggle with makers of these movies having to kind of work against a series of constraints that prevent any kind of overt critique of American social values, for example. Whereas the subversiveness of Force of Evil is all on the surface, Polanski is tackling these issues directly. He had the freedom, he says, to make the film he wanted to make, and to make it in the way he wanted to make it. So that's the kind of key differences he sees between this movie and other noir films. If you actually do look at Force of Evil by comparison with other films called noir, it is a film that works in a very, very different way. One thing, for example, a lot of critics have pointed out is the dialogue. The dialogue of this film is very different from the dialogue of any other film you'll see made by Hollywood. And also the critique of capitalism is so upfront that there's no need to try and bury it beneath the kind of convention of the crime genre. It's there immediately in your face. So Polanski was able to make this film in the way he wanted to make it, not simply because of his own talents, but because he was able to draw upon a group of gifted collaborators. In particular, these included the star John Garfield, who was also one of the bosses of the production company, which gave both of them a degree of freedom. The veteran cinematographer George Barnes, whose magic touch really enhances this film, I think, and the co-screenwriter Ira Woolford, who had written the original novel the film was based on. As well as his collaborators, the film was able to achieve what it does because of some historically specific industrial circumstances that made such an unusual film possible. There's no way, I think, Force of Evil could have been made a few years later or even a few years earlier. So during the war years, cinema had boomed. America had experienced some of its most profitable years ever. After the war, there was great optimism about what may in store for cinema in the future, in terms of the medium's economic, social and creative possibilities. Conditions after World War II greatly enhanced the opportunities for independent film production in the United States. This also coincided with a move towards location shooting that liberated films from the studio aesthetic. Both these factors play into Force of Evil in a really major way. Top flight stars and directors at the time could break away from studio control by setting up freelance production companies, even if they still relied on the major cinema corporations for distribution. Confidence in the industry's fortunes also inspired the formation of outfits like Liberty Pictures, which was set up by directors Frank Capra, William Wyler, George Stevens and executive Sam Briskin. Enterprise was an ambitious company that was formed in 1946 by a group of well-connected Hollywood executives. These were David L Lowe, who was formerly a vice president at Lowe's Inc, the parent company of MGM, Charles Einfeld, a former vice president of Warner Brothers, and the producer A. Pam Blumenthal. The studios took its cue from United Artists in providing funding for independent producers on a profit-sharing basis. They started out with a rolling line of credit from the Bank of America, I think for about 10 million dollars, and set up an arrangement to release its films initially through United Artists and then later on through MGM. Enterprise leased and refurbished a 40-acre Hollywood studio on Melrose Avenue and they initiated a diverse roster of productions that included a couple of Joel McRae westerns, Ramrod and Four Faces West, the romantic melodramas The Other Love starring Barbara Stanek and the Max Ophuls film Court, the comedies No Minor Vices and So This is New York, and the company's big hit Body and Soul which starred John Garfield. In fact, Body and Soul was really the Enterprise's only really really big hit. Garfield at the time was a major star and when his contract with Warner Brothers finished in 1946, he set up an independent production company with his business manager Bob Roberts which they called Roberts Productions. They struck a deal with Enterprise in September 1946 and began work on their inaugural production which was Body and Soul in which Garfield played the lead. The initial idea was to bring to the screen the controversial life story of boxing champion and marine hero Barney Ross who had taken a downward spiral owing to drug addiction. Now at the time, drug addiction was a taboo subject in Hollywood. There'd been a couple of films like The Lost Weekend and Smash-Up, a story of a woman that had recently been tackling alcoholism but drug addiction was something that wouldn't be embraced by Hollywood as a topic until the 1950s with films like The Man with the Golden Arm. So the Hollywood censors had objected to the story and this created real problems for the production team. The initial screenwriter Arthur Manoff had trouble developing a workable script and he recommended Abraham Polonsky to the producers as someone who might be able to fix it up. So Polonsky comes on board and he's excited to be working on a kind of an independent film made in Hollywood and he immediately decides to scrap the Barney Ross concept and to devise a totally different story about a boxer. So Polonsky's story draws on some of the boxing movie conventions that were established by films like Golden Boy which is based on a 1937 play by the admired leftist dramatist Clifford Odets. Golden Boy was staged on Broadway by the group Theatre and Odets actually wrote the play with John Garfield in mind to play the lead role but then the director Harold Clawman overruled Odets and cast Luther Adler in the role instead and Garfield does actually appear in the play but he's relegated to a supporting role as a cab driver. So Garfield unfortunately loses out on this big chance to start him on Broadway. Warner Brothers later refuses to loan Garfield to Columbia when they wanted to make their 1939 adaptation of the play and the part instead goes to William Holden. Polonsky's script for Body and Soul tells the story of a proletarian New York City boy Charlie Davis who in his desire to escape extreme poverty effectively sells his soul for money and fame. In the process he transforms himself into a commodity, a brutalized commodity that's controlled and exploited by others and he also sacrifices all the relationships that sustained him previously. So it's sort of about the perils of ambition and also the more he succeeds in the boxing ring the more arrogant he becomes and the more he kind of sells his soul to the American dream if you like. Anyway Body and Soul opens in November 1947 and is a huge critical and commercial success. It won Oscar nominations for both Garfield and Polonsky and the Roberts company was so pleased with what Polonsky had achieved that they offered him a chance to direct Garfield's second film for them. Garfield and Roberts asked Polonsky to come up with a melodrama perhaps with gangsters that would be suitable for the star and he suggested adapting Tucker's People by the Pulitzer Prize winning author Ira Walford. Now Polonsky admires the novel because he sees it as more than a mere crime story but he argued that Walford had offered an autopsy on capitalism in the guise of melodrama. Garfield and Roberts were initially a little skeptical about the suitability of the project but they had such great faith in Polonsky's talent that he won them over and the film begins production in March 1948. The film's political subtext was also well suited to Enterprise as the company was very sympathetic to left-wing practitioners. Many of the creative personnel who worked on Body and Soul for example like Polonsky and Rosson were leftists or they were left-leaning liberals like Garfield and the assistant director Robert Aldridge. The critic Jay Hoberman later described John Garfield as a Jewish Brando suggesting that his emotional volatility, rapid-fire sarcasm and confrontational sexual charisma made him a new sort of screen presence, a Brando before Brando. He was actually Elia Kazan's first choice for the role of Stanley Kowalski in the 1947 stage production of A Streetcar Named Desire, the play that effectively makes Brando a big star. But Garfield turns down the role because he wants to commit himself to his film projects. Garfield became a kind of poster boy for the Hollywood left carrying with him a kind of proletarian Jewish street kid aura that spoke volumes about class issues, ethnicity and masculinity in America. So Wolfert's very large novel is boiled down, characters are dropped, there's a lot of compression, a lot of substitution and the script becomes something quite different to the novel. Another key influence on the film was the cinematographer George Barnes who provided a crucial creative resource for Polonsky on this movie. He'd actually won an Oscar several years earlier for cinematography on the Hitchcock film Rebecca. So he's a very respectable cinematographer as well and in fact his use of deep focus cinematography, which is very evident in Force of Evil in several sequences, greatly influenced Greg Toland who would develop the style further in his films of John Ford, Orson Welles and William Wyler. And in particular Hopper's use of a single source lighting is a kind of key stylistic register in Force of Evil as well. Force of Evil is a very short film but a very densely packed one and I think it requires multiple viewings to really unravel its complexities. The dialogue and the images for example are built around interweaving motifs and stylistic strategies that are likely to be missed the first time around and the film's thematic texture is also tightly wrought as well. The dialogue has proved to be perhaps the film's most controversial feature. Polonsky said that with this film he tried to avoid American standard movie dialogue which is a genuine Hollywood convention but he aimed instead for a stylized form of speech through which he sought to approximate the language of the unconscious. A lot you know real estate business living from mortgage to mortgage stealing credit like a thief and the garage that was a business three cents overcharge every gallon of gas two cents for the chauffeur and a penny for me penny for one thief two cents for the other well Joe's here now I won't have to steal pennies anymore I'll have big crooks to steal dollars for me. The speech in Force of Evil nonetheless does have a poetic quality in the way it mobilizes alliteration, repetition, metaphor and unusual rhythmic and syntactical patterns that operate as a form of elevated vernacular. A good example is the first encounter between Joe and Leo in the film which contains the following dialogue exchange. Why do you talk this way to me in front of strangers? She's no stranger to me you're the stranger and I'll tell the whole world because you're my brother and I owe it to the whole world because you're my brother what you are a crook and a cheat and a gangster. Leo be calm Tuck will make you honest Tuck will make you respectable he's giving me a quarter of a million dollars to create public sentiment to make policy legal like bingo bango and the Irish sweepstakes I'm paying you back Leo I'll make you rich with an office in Wall Street up in the clouds be calm Leo be sensible all right I am sensible I am calm I'll give you my answer calmly and sensibly my final answer my final answer is finally no the answer is no absolutely and finally no finally and positively no no no no no. The film further departs from American Standard movie dialogue by establishing a shifting relationship between speech and image sometimes they work in harmoniously together but other times they conflict with one another so we don't simply have the the dialogue as being a support to the image as it is in many Hollywood movies Polonsky said that his general technique with the film was to aim for unfinished polar relationships I use a rhythmic line of the dialogue sometimes with the images and sometimes against the images. In terms of theme the film's one of the film's overarching concerns is this comparison between business and gangsterism now this analogy is by no means rare in crime films especially in the 1950s syndicate films or in the Godfather movies for example but Force of Evil uses this comparison in an unusually purposeful and unusually developed manner as Polonsky pointed out he was excited by the possibility of using the story to deliver an autopsy in capitalism that he admired in Woolford's novel and by juxtaposing Wall Street finance and the aggressive machinations of Tucker's combination the film mounts a critique of monopoly capitalism with a numbers racket operating as a metaphor for capitalist enterprise more generally it's also significant I think that the film's production coincided with a period in which the film industry's own monopoly was facing intense scrutiny 1948 was the year of the paramount decrees through which the US Supreme Court declared illegal the vertically integrated combine that was responsible for the success of the Hollywood system as a result the major cinema corporations were forced to sell off their theater chains to ensure greater competition so as well as the film dealing with monopoly also there's this whole kind of discourse about monopoly uh that's taking place in and around Hollywood at this time as well although Polonsky described uh Force of Evil as a free film uh this is not this does not mean that he was able to get away with exactly what he wanted because the film did face several censorship problems so the production co-administration objected to some of the things that Polonsky was trying to do initially the producers wanted to release the film with the title the numbers racket but this led to a heated battle with the the PCA the production code which objected to the word racket and it's a bit of a shame I think because I think numbers racket's a great title um because the concept of numbers explicitly connects the world of Wall Street finance and the illicit enterprise of um of betting um which is a meta key metaphor in the film but the idea of numbers is something that holds the two together and also emphasizes how both uh both uh Wall Street finance and and illicit gambling reduce human life to numbers and to money the PCA director Joseph Breen also protested and I quote the completely antisocial basic theme of this story which presents wrong as right and right as wrong in violation of both the letter and the spirit of the production code so the whole moral underpinnings of the story was something that Breen was was kind of um hostile to but despite these kind of censorship pressures it's amazing how much of the film's um political critique remains intact in the final movie