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I was introduced to Abraham Polonsky through two films on late-night television that aired around 1957. The films were Body and Soul and Force of Evil. Both starred John Garfield at the peak of his powers, both were written by Polonsky, and he directed the second, darker film as well. Abraham Polonsky was a filmmaker and novelist whose work consistently critiqued the violence and corruption of capitalism.

Made soon after World War II by the independent Enterprise Studios, the films hearkened back to the Depression. Both are rich in imagery and language. Body and Soul follows the career of middleweight boxer Charlie Davis. Attempting to slug his way out of the slums, he finds himself turned into a money machine by the gamblers controlling the fight game.

Force of Evil charts the course of mob lawyer Joe Morse as he tries to force his older brother into the corporation controlling the numbers racket. Polonsky’s Marxist critique was organic to the film’s structure, making this the most truly radical film to come out of Hollywood. The haunting final sequence, shot at dawn, shows Joe descending an endless staircase to find his brother’s body on the rocks below the span of the George Washington Bridge.

As a middle-class teenager growing up in the post-war boom years, I had no idea who had made these amazing films and no clear picture of the Great Depression. All I saw was Garfield. After that, I looked for anything he appeared in, and while some of the other films were good, it was the two by Polonsky that made the deepest impression. Later, I would read William Pechter’s interview with Polonsky in Film Quarterly and begin to know the man behind the movies. Later still, I would meet him and have the privilege of becoming his friend.

Polonsky was born in New York City in 1910. He attended the City College of New York (CCNY) and later taught literature there until the Second World War. He also worked his way through Columbia University law school. Briefly employed with a law firm, he found the work unexciting and was happy to meet Molly Goldberg, the author and star of the long-running radio show, The Goldbergs. She was hoping to find someone who could help her with a story that involved legal matters.

Goldberg was so impressed with the young attorney that in 1937 she asked him to accompany her to Hollywood to help her write a film for the popular boy-singer, Bobby Breen. Some of Polonsky’s CCNY friends were there working in the film industry and involved in the causes of the day – helping to build the union movement, anti-fascism and support for Republican Spain. On his return to the East Coast, he and his wife Sylvia moved to upstate New York. At this time he was writing for a number of radio shows and commuting to New York City to teach at CCNY. He became involved in efforts to organize autoworkers at a GM plant near his home in Briarcliff, and in 1939 he began working as educational director of the CIO in upstate New York.

It was during this period that he wrote his first novel, The Discoverers. Peopled with a disparate cast of radicals, frustrated intellectuals and bohemians, the book was announced for publication by Modern Age, but the publisher went out of business. Considered by many who’ve read it to be his best book, it remains unpublished.

Two books followed, The Goose Is Cooked, published in 1942 by Simon and Schuster, and The Enemy Sea, an adventure story, originally serialized in Colliers Magazine and published in hardback by Little Brown. Polonsky had briefly gone to sea after college and brought that experience to the novel, which he dedicated to the National Maritime Union. Enemy Sea caught the attention of Paramount Pictures, and they offered Polonsky a screenwriting contract.

By this time America was in the war. Turned down for active service because of poor eyesight, he managed to get into the OSS which, at the time, welcomed radicals into its ranks. Prior to going overseas, he signed a contract with Paramount that guaranteed him a job on his return. Polonsky’s first assignment was in London where he was put to work interrogating high level German officers who’d been taken prisoner (he chatted with Rudolf Hess about the future of computers!) and working in what was called Black Radio, broadcasting false information into Germany.

Later he was part of the Normandy invasion and spent the concluding year of the war with French partisans. He left the OSS (soon to be transformed into the CIA) when he was asked to take part in an operation designed to prop up the corrupt regime and derail the coming revolution in China. He moved his family (there were now three children) to Hollywood and went to work at Paramount.

He got an official screen credit as co-author on Golden Earrings. Polonsky’s draft was a depiction of Hungarian Jews as Holocaust victims, but by the time it reached the screen it was transformed into a fanciful tale involving a British Intelligence operator and his love affair with beautiful gypsy. Polonsky claimed that despite the credit, not one word he’d written made it to the screen.

He was happier writing for the radio program, Reunion USA, sponsored by Hollywood Writer’s Mobilization and broadcast over ABC in Los Angeles throughout 1945. One of his scripts, The Case of David Smith dealt with an officer who had fought with native partisans in the South Pacific and had suffered a complete mental breakdown on his return from the war. During the course of his analysis, his doctor realizes Smith’s breakdown was not related to combat but to the betrayal that followed. Smith had told the partisans that winning the war would also bring an end to colonialist oppression. Seeing his promise broken with reinstitutionalization of the colonialist regime had been the true cause of Smith’s breakdown.

Unhappy at Paramount, Polonsky had a visit from an East-Coast friend, Arnold Manoff. Manoff, who had been working on a script about middleweight champ Barney Ross for John Garfield at Enterprise Studios, had just learned that Ross had been arrested on narcotics charges (he’d become addicted as a result of painful war wounds). Narcotics addiction was still a movie taboo and Manoff found himself out of a job. He suggested that he and Polonsky walk over to Enterprise and talk to Garfield. Polonsky composed the story of Body and Soul on the two-block walk from Paramount to Enterprise, and that afternoon he found himself on loan from his studio to write the script.

Body and Soul turned out to be the only hit Enterprise ever had. Both a financial and critical success, it earned Garfield a Best Actor nomination and cleared the way for Polonsky’s complete artistic control on Force of Evil. Unfortunately, the studio took enormous losses on what was to be their blockbuster, Arch of Triumph, forcing them to sell distributing rights to MGM. Because of their losses, MGM released Polonsky’s film with little publicity, and it was years before it would be recognized for the great work that it is.

Polonsky then wrote a screenplay for Fox based on Jerome Weidman’s I Can Get It for You Wholesale. The 1937 novel about the garment industry was riddled with anti-union and anti-Semitic passages. Changing the protagonist from Harry to Harriet and adding a major character, a Jewish tailor, to serve as conscience and narrator, Polonsky was able to deliver a progressive film with something to say about equal rights for women. Polonsky then moved his family to France and worked on a new novel, The World Above. He also hoped to write and direct a film version of Thomas Mann’s parable about the rise of fascism, Mario and the Magician.

There were growing rumors of a second round of HUAC hearings. Stars like John Garfield felt their careers threatened and saw offers vanish. Yet Darryl Zanuck had been pleased with Polonsky’s work on Wholesale and offered him an opportunity to write and direct for Fox. Fully expecting a subpoena and welcoming an opportunity to stand up to HUAC, Polonsky accepted and returned to Hollywood. Called to testify in April 1951, he refused to cooperate and was blacklisted. During the course of his testimony Congressman Velde demanded the names of Polonsky’s associates in the OSS. At that point, an unidentified man (presumably CIA) appeared at Velde’s side and after a brief whispered conversation, the line of questioning was dropped. The thwarted interrogator then accused Polonsky of being "the most dangerous man in America." "Only to yourself," his wife retorted on his return home.

The World Above was published to generally good reviews. The novel’s protagonist, a scientist/psychologist who, after dedicating his life to pure science and avoiding social engagement, concludes that the injustices of capitalist society represent a major contributor to mental illness, and that the sickness of the society must be eradicated. Brought before a committee that mirrored HUAC and asked to recant, the scientist refuses.

His next novel, A Season of Fear, published in 1956 by Cameron and Associates, portrayed the witch-hunt through the eyes of an engineer for the Department of Water and Power in Southern California. This neglected work, a classic in the tradition of Raymond Chandler and Horace McCoy, brilliantly captured the terror of the McCarthy era. By then Polonsky had moved his family back to New York where, writing under the disguise of various "fronts" and in collaboration with fellow blacklistees Walter Bernstein and Arnold Manoff, he wrote for the hit television series You Are There. From 1953 to 1955, when the show moved to the West Coast, he wrote scripts championing free thought and speech, grassroots democracy and justifiable revolution. He also worked uncredited on a number of films, the most famous being Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), one of the last and best of classic films noir, starring Harry Belafonte.

As the 1960s drew to a close, Polonsky made his way back into movies under his own name. First, he wrote the screenplay for Madigan (1968) and then scripted and directed Tell Them Willie Boy is Here (1969), a Western with things to say about the treatment of American Indians and, obliquely, anti-war and youth movements. He completed one more film, Romance of a Horsethief (1970), before a heart attack ended his directorial career. The film was a sunny parable involving Jews, Cossacks and the Russo-Japanese war, ending happily with boy and girl escaping to the new world.

Continuing to work as a highly paid script doctor, he began teaching again at the University of Southern California. He was a frequent lecturer on panels about the blacklist. Both Garfield films, now recognized as classics, were screened and introduced by Polonsky at film festivals all over the world. Critical editions of his scripts were published. He published one more novel, Zenia’s Way (1980), and directed a production of his play Piece de Resistance in Los Angeles in 1981. He was working on another novel at the time of his death in 1999. The World Above was reissued in 1999 by the University of Illinois Press as part of its "Radical Novel Reconsidered" series. One would hope for a second printing of A Season of Fear and that perhaps The Discoverers might finally be made available to readers.

Polonsky’s gift was his passion. He may have preferred to be remembered as a novelist, and his books are vivid and unforgettable, yet it is the always restless, ever stirring cinematic images that flash forever through our waking and sleeping dreams: Charley Davis coming back in the final round like Blake’s Tyger, hitting out at the system that betrayed him; Joe Morse, having lost everything, going "down and down and down...to the bottom of the world" to find his brother and regeneration.

-     Michael Shepler (previously published in Political Affairs - reprinted by permnission of the author)