Abraham Polonsky: Interviews

Interview with Abraham Polonsky

176 Interview with Abraham Polonsky Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner / 1997 From Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist by Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997), 481–94. Reprinted by permission of the authors. Abraham Lincoln Polonsky, the son of a Jewish pharmacist, grew up in New York and graduated from City College and the Columbia Law School. He taught at City College and started writing for radio, scripting episodes of The Goldbergs, during the mid-1930s. By the end of the decade he was also writing for Columbia Workshop Theatre and Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre of the Air. As he continued working on plays and fiction, he visited Hollywood for the first time in 1937. But instead of immediately attempting a career there alongside so many other leftwing writers, he made a political choice. For two crucial years when the American labor movement was at the apex of both its influence and its collective idealism, he operated as educational director and newspaper editor of a regional CIO union north of New York City. Right before World War II, Polonsky had a novel serialized in Collier’s that attracted renewed attention from Hollywood. But military duty took precedence. After serving with the Office of Strategic Services [the OSS, the wartime precursor of the Central Intelligence Agency], at times behind the lines in France. Polonsky returned to Hollywood at last, in 1945. After a disappointing start at Paramount, he became the leading scenarist for Enterprise, the best of the new, small production companies . With the hit boxing film Body and Soul under his belt, Polonsky then wrote and directed Force of Evil, considered by critics to be one of the best films noirs of the era, an intensely poetic, radically stylized work that nonetheless managed to observe the conventions of the crime genre. A script for I Can Get It for You Wholesale, produced while Polonsky paul buhle and dave wagner / 1997 177 was out of the country, rounded out his Hollywood life before the blacklist drove him out of the industry. Polonsky had better luck than most of the blacklistees. In collaboration with Arnold Manoff and Walter Bernstein, he pseudonymously wrote the great majority of the scripts for one of television’s “quality” shows, You Are There. In 1959, he wrote, without credit, a caper film for Harry Belafonte, Odds Against Tomorrow, the first of what was intended to become a series of projects with African American stars and themes but which, like so many other blacklistees’ projects of those days, failed to materialize. His “comeback” film, Madigan, directed by Don Siegel, is regarded as a classic cop drama, the model for Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry series. Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here was one of the most unusual westerns of the late 1960s. Romance of a Horse Thief, which Polonsky took over as both scenarist and director in mid-production, offered a radical version of Fiddler on the Roof, the pre-Holocaust Eastern European Jewish saga as only an unbroken Marxist could tell it. Although they have their bright moments, his last two credits, Avalanche Express and Monsignor , were poorly received; in any event, both were impersonal jobs over which Polonsky exercised little control. Question: When and why did you join the Communist Party? Abraham Polonsky: I joined the Party very late, after I got out of college , around 1935 or 1936, at the time of the Spanish Civil War. It was kind of funny, because I wasn’t “joining” in the usual sense—I was already meeting with some of these people, mostly other instructors at City College, who were all members of the Anti-Fascist League. I myself taught English literature at City College from 1935 until the war started. I came from a family of Socialists. Philosophically, I was always a materialist and a leftist. And I never felt alone. I came of age in a country that had come to a standstill, with fifty million people unemployed and the banks closed. I voted for FDR, and the New Deal was “left” enough for many of us. Question: What effect did your work in the Party in the thirties have on your development as a writer? Polonsky: It didn’t shape my artistic goals at all, because I had already taken a position of wanting to do socially significant art. The theoretical work of Marxism that everyone was talking about then I had already done. That kind of...