Happy Birthday, Abraham Polonsky! Born today in 1910 as Abraham Lincoln Polonsky, this American essayist, novelist, screenwriter and film director was blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studios in the 1950s, in the midst of the McCarthy era.
Born in New York City, New York, Polonsky was the eldest son of Russian Jewish immigrants.
Years later, he attended DeWitt Clinton High School in The Bronx. This included meeting two fellow classmates and lifelong friends.
These were American film composer Bernard Herrmann and American professional photographer, herpetologist, writer, journalist, war correspondent and pilot Roy Pinney.
Strongly influenced by his pharmacist father's socialist ideals, Polonsky, in 1928, practiced law for a few years and also taught at City College of New York (CUNY). Following graduation, he earned his law degree in 1935 at Columbia Law School.
After several years of practice, mixed with teaching, Polonsky decided to devote himself to writing. He later wrote essays, radio scripts and several novels before beginning his career in Hollywood.
A committed Marxist, Polonsky joined the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) in the late 1930s. While there, he participated in union politics and established and edited a left-wing newspaper The Home Front.
Some years later, Polonsky published his first novel. This was The Goose Is Cooked (1940). It was written along with American novelist and physicist Mitchell A Wilson (under the joint pseudonym Emmett Hogarth).
Afterwards, Polonsky signed a screenwriter's contract with Paramount Pictures. However, before signing a screenwriter's contract with Paramount, he published another novel, The Enemy Sea (1943).
This was before leaving the United States to serve in Europe in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II (from 1943 to 1945).
Upon release of his book, Polonsky's politics did not preclude his service behind enemy lines during World War II as part of the OSS (after all, Joseph Stalin was our ally).
However, Polonsky did not have the opportunity to write screenplays for the studio until after the end of the war.
Three years after his service, Polonsky co-wrote and directed the film of which he is best known. This was the 1948 American black and white noir/crime film 'Force of Evil'.
Set in New York City, it tells of unscrupulous lawyer Joe Morse (John Garfield). He has the opportunity to make it big by teaming up with cutthroat gangster Ben Tucker (Roy Roberts) to consolidate the numbers racket.
The only hitch in the plan is Morse's brother, Leo (Thomas Gomez), who refuses to involve his bank in the plan.
As a result, Leo's bank would go from being saved to being another casualty in Morse and Tucker's thirst for power. Now, Morse must choose between money and family.
Upon release, 'Force of Evil' was not successful in the United States. However, it was hailed as a masterpiece by film critics in England.
Over time, the film has since become recognized as one of the great American film noirs.
'Force of Evil' also marked the first on screen acting role of Beau Bridges, who was seven years old at the time of the film's release.
The film had been adapted from American Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent and a fiction and non-fiction writer Ira Wolfert's 1943 mystery thriller historical noir political fiction novel Tucker's People.
The influence regarding 'Force of Evil' has been acknowledged many times by Martin Scorsese in the making of his own crime dramas.
Polonsky's career as a director (and credited writer) came to an abrupt halt when he refused to testify before the congressional House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1951.
American Republican Illinois congressman Harold Velde called the director a "very dangerous citizen" at the hearings.
While blacklisted, Polonsky still continued to write film scripts under various pseudonyms or fronts, most of which have never been revealed.
Until his death, Polonsky was a virulent critic of Elia Kazan ('A Streetcar Named Desire', 'On the Waterfront', 'Splendor in the Grass'), of whom had testified before HUAC and provided names to the Committee.
In the early 1980s, Polonsky went as an uncredited script writer for the 1981 American biographical drama/docudrama film 'Mommie Dearest'.
The feature was based off of American author and actress Christina Crawford's 1978 autobiographical memoir and exposé of the same name regarding to her adoptive mother Joan Crawford.
In the 1990s, American filmmaker, film critic and teacher Thom Andersen interviewed Polonsky about the events of the years when the Hollywood Ten were blacklisted for his film Red Hollywood.
In 1994, 'Force of Evil' was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Five years later, Polonsky received the Career Achievement Award of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association in 1999.
Prior to that, Polonsky taught a philosophy class at the private USC School of Cinema-Television called "Consciousness and Content" in Los Angeles, California.
While no longer a member of the Communist Party, he remained committed to Marxist political theory, stating "I thought Marxism offered the best analysis of history, and I still believe that."
Also, in 1999, Polonsky was enraged when Kazan was honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) for lifetime achievement.
Afterwards, Polonsky stated that he hoped Kazan would be shot onstage: "It would no doubt be a thrill in an otherwise dull evening."
Polonsky also said that his latest project was designing a movable headstone: "That way if they bury that man in the same cemetery, they can move me."
Although blacklisted for refusing to name any fellow Communists before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1951, Polonsky still managed to compile an impressive array of screen credits in a career interrupted nearly twenty years.
Perhaps the main reason for Polonsky’s lack of recognition as a “great director” is that he never imagined that he would find himself in Hollywood.
He instead wanted to be a novelist. His road to Hollywood was as long and turbulent as his subsequent career there.
When thinking of “great directors”, Polonsky’s name is not one that immediately springs to mind.
His output as a director stretches to three films, with a gap of twenty-one years separating his first and second films, while his third and final film has been the victim of poor distribution and exhibition.
Polonsky is, in fact, probably most famous for his blacklisting from Hollywood between 1951 and 1968 due to his membership of the Communist Party.
And yet, Polonsky remains an important director, not least because of the importance of “reclaiming” and remembering the work of those blacklisted by Hollywood as a result of the HUAC, but also because he attempted to create mainstream films with political meaning by infusing a socialist critique of American society into “popular” genre films.
This was initially during the end of the “Golden Age” of the Hollywood Studio system – a project apparent in his screenplays but most strongly realized (for obvious reasons) in the films directed by him.
Few directors working in Hollywood during the late 1940s (and, arguably, even today) can claim to have attempted to use the form of a mainstream Hollywood genre film, as 'Force of Evil'.
This also included the 1969 American Technicolor Western/drama film 'Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here' did in order to take an explicitly political worldview out into the public eye.
The damning critique of crime as business comments on American imperialism and the genocide of Native Americans regarding 'Force of Evil' (and vice versa) and 'Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here'.
These films were, at the times of their respective releases, radical in their wholehearted embracing of a Marxist critique of the capitalist system.
This also included the history of which the system was built upon that is central to American society.
One of the most prominent victims of the Hollywood blacklisting of communists and social progressives in the post-World War II period, Polonsky, an unreconstructed Marxist, unabashedly never hid his membership in the Communist Party.
Polonsky had been active from 1947–1982.
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