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75 Interview with Abraham Polonsky Michel Delahaye / 1969 From Cahiers du cinéma, no. 215 (septembre 1969): 30–39. Translated by Andrew Dickos. Polonsky wrote in 1966: “The blacklist has never been abandoned. It has extinguished itself little by little. Those who haven’t perished in the course of these witch-hunts are still around, for the most part doing new projects. Me too.” Polonsky co-wrote the screenplay for Don Siegel’s Madigan (1968) under trying conditions and, in 1968, wrote and directed Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, which we will see here this fall [in 1969]. The Hollywood witch-hunt period has recently aroused a rather suspect interest over one aimed at learning about its oppressive mechanisms —collective or not, pathological or not—of certain groups. One prefers to indulge in a purely anecdotal research of it, whether about the exemplary conduct during the period or about naming names, strongly resembling in the opposite the witch-hunts themselves and attempting to restore the limitless complacency of the past from fear of recognizing the present. Many will be more interested to know that Polonsky worked clandestinely on a (justly) celebrated antiracist police noir [the 1959 Odds against Tomorrow] to understand that the blacklist has far from limited his activities to the “silent decade” of tyrannies under J. Parnell Thomas and Senator Joseph McCarthy. One sees that Polonsky does not share their views, and that the climate, if not the word, of such views still exists today. The problem of the blacklist is many-sided: political, moral, practical, creative. These considerations have generally been confused and, apart from some strictly historical works, painful to recount. In Polonsky’s case, for example, it is of interest to explore his relationship with Enterprise Pictures, as well as his stay in Europe (Polonsky: “I always considered myself as being a ‘passenger,’ before I discovered Europe. There, I understood that, for better or worse, I wasn’t an American like 76 abraham polonsky: inter views the others.”)1 To speak of, or to, Abraham Polonsky, one needs to avoid confusing him with his contemporaries, a difficult task to undertake given their intersecting work and careers. “Everyone makes his choices, everyone follows his nature, and we’ve managed rather badly. I believe Force of Evil reflects all this,” Polonsky observes. Recollections are hasty to take the temperature of actual conditions and forget that the connections , the relationships, are not established or necessarily only within a group (blacklisted) or genre (the police noir). To paraphrase Tynianov about Khlebnikov, only when these matters cease to be spoken of over the years will they begin to crystallize. . . . —Bernard Eisenschitz Cahiers: Can you tell us about the movie you just finished, the first one you’ve had the possibility to do since Force of Evil in 1948? Abraham Polonsky: The title is Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here and its starting point an incident that took place in 1909 in California, in a desert region near the towns of Twenty-nine Palms and Banning, between the San Bernardino and Bullion Mountains, at the moment when the Old West was changing into the modern U.S. And, seeing as we too are living in a transitional period at this moment, I thought that that could be interesting. It had to do with the problem of the oppressed races, of political problems, and their numerous connections with the situation presented. I’m summarizing the history for you to understand it well. In California, in 1909, lived an Indian named Willie Boy, and whose Indian name was Running Fox. He was an Indian unlike the others in that he didn’t live on the reservation with them, he played on a baseball team in Victorville, in California. In fact, he distanced himself from the Indians as well as the whites. He was the kind of guy who drew a line around himself and said, “Stay outside the line, I can live; cross my line, I cannot live.” At that moment, he was in love with a young woman, an Indian, whose father threatened to kill him if he continued to see her. Finally, Willie kills the father. Some white men and three Indian policemen begin to pursue him. They chased him five hundred miles into the desert and never caught him. At that moment too, and in the interest of history, thirty miles away from there President Taft was making a trip across the United States trying to get members of...

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