Abraham Polonsky: Interviews

Conversations with Abraham Polonsky

33 Conversations with Abraham Polonsky William S. Pechter / 1962 & 1968 From Film Quarterly 15, no. 3 (Spring 1962): 48+; and from Twenty-four Times a Second: Films and Film-makers by William S. Pechter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 147–61. Copyright © 1971 by William S. Pechter. Reprinted by permission of the author. In 1948, a writer, whose experience, with the exception of two previous screenplays and two unmemorable novels, had been primarily in radio, made an adaptation of another writer’s undistinguished, journalistic novel to the screen, and directed a film of it. The event would not seem to be a particularly auspicious one nor much of a novelty for Hollywood, where every other day finds one hack adapting the work of another hack into a piece of adapted hack work. Nor would it have been much more promising to know that the film made use of several elements that were sufficiently familiar—the good-bad guy involved in the rackets who finally goes straight, the ingénue who tries to reform him, etc. Yet, apparently , to have known all this was not to know enough. How else to account for the fact that out of it all was created an original, moving, and even beautiful work, whose only tangency with clichés was at the point at which it transformed and transcended them? I think it is accounted for by that phenomenon which never ceases somehow to be inexplicable and unpredictable: by the presence of an artist. But the event was, perhaps, not quite so unpredictable as I may, somewhat Hollywoodishly, have made it sound. The artist’s name was Abraham Polonsky, and his film was Force of Evil; previously, he had written the original scenario for the film Body and Soul. Body and Soul did not lack acclaim; although independently produced, it won an Academy Award, and was financially successful. Force of Evil went largely without 34 abraham polonsky: inter views acclaim or appreciation; noticed chiefly by the British film periodicals, it was allowed to die an inconspicuous death, a gangster film with only muted violence, a love story without romantic apotheosis, a Hollywood film without a happy ending. Both Sight and Sound and Sequence cited it among the best films of the year, and it still occasionally crops up in catalogues of neglected works. Lindsay Anderson, in his analysis of the last sequence of On the Waterfront which appeared in Sight and Sound, invoked Force of Evil as foil to that film’s inflation and dishonesty. The habitual British reader may have caught the aptness of the comparison; for the American one, it must have been merely a little baffling. In theme and meaning, Body and Soul and Force of Evil form an extraordinary unity. In each, the protagonist, played in both films by John Garfield with his most characteristic combination of tough cynicism and a dreamy sense of the city’s promise of exaltation, allows himself knowingly to become involved in some kind of corruption only, finally, to experience an intense self-revulsion, and to attempt to wrest himself free. In both films, the protagonist is not moved to this final breach without first having caused some irrevocable violence to those most close to him, and both films end not with any cheap and easy redemption, but deep in anguish and ambiguity. “What can you do? Kill me? Everybody dies,” are the final words of Body and Soul, as the fighter says to the gambler whose fight he has refused to throw, and, heroic as the words may be, they do not undercut the essential bleakness of the film’s concluding prospect, or transform it into any conventional concession to an audience ’s expectations. What the audience was given, however, was the physical excitement of the prizefight scenes, dynamically photographed by James Wong Howe on roller skates, and the comfortable familiarity of the basic plot: ambitious young man from slums climbs ruthlessly to success. Probably, it is these elements in Body and Soul that account for its commercial success and Academy Award, but the film’s true distinction is rather to be found in its lyrically rich language, its evocative sense of an urban poetry, and the sensitively observed drawing of characters and their relationships which flesh out the success story’s skeleton and give it life. Force of Evil is not so accessible a film, one without Body and Soul’s more immediate compensations for its serious demands. Joe Morse, the protagonist of Body and Soul...