9.1 Abraham Polonsky & John Garfield

 9.1 Abraham Polonsky & John Garfield

Abraham Polonsky

Abraham Polonsky

Blacklisted for refusing to name any fellow Communists before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1951, writer-director Abraham Polonsky still managed to compile an impressive array of screen credits in a career interrupted nearly 20 years. Strongly influenced by his pharmacist father's socialist ideals, he practiced law for a few years and taught at NYC's City College before leaving the law behind in 1937 to devote himself to writing, first for radio. After joining the American Communist Party in the late 30s, Polonsky established and edited a local newspaper, The Home Front, then published his first novel, "The Goose Is Cooked," written with Mitchell A Wilson under the joint pseudonym Emmett Hogarth. Before signing a screenwriter's contract with Paramount, he published another novel, "The Enemy Sea" (1943), and his 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).

Polonsky hit a home run with his Oscar-nominated script for Robert Rossen's boxing classic "Body and Soul" (1947), starring John Garfield as a pugilist who works his way up by nefarious means to become the champ. Its credits read like a litany of McCarthy-era witch-hunt victims: Garfield, who refused to name names and died of a heart attack at 39; Anne Revere (blacklisted), who played his mom; Rossen, who ultimately underwent the purification ritual of ratting on his friends; and Garfield's trainer Canada Lee (also blacklisted). Polonsky was present on the set exercising nearly the influence of Rossen and earned his first directorial assignment, "Force of Evil" (1948), a taut noirish drama about the numbers racket, which he co-wrote with Ira Wolfert from Wolfert's novel "Tucker's People." One of the most eloquent experiments in American film and a vastly underappreciated classic, the picture employed blank verse without preciosity throughout, the veiled formalism of the language offsetting the hard-boiled subject and clipped coldness of Garfield as a know-it-all crooked lawyer.

Though Polonsky had chucked his interest in Communism and the Soviet Union by the end of World War II, "Body and Soul" and "Force of Evil" strongly dramatized and questioned the priority of material gain, and in the paranoid Cold War climate of the early 50s, such sympathies flew in the face of the American dream. 

Refusing to knuckle under to the strong-arm tactics of HUAC, he made a perfect sacrificial lamb for the Hollywood altar, another provocateur blacklisted in order to keep the movies safe for democracy. Polonsky shared credit for the screenplay of "I Can Get It for You Wholesale" (1951), which was his last under his own name for 17 years. Ironically, he made almost as much money while blacklisted as he did at his Hollywood peak ($2000 a week), moving to NYC and working for the new medium of TV. Selling through a "front," he wrote for the CBS series "Danger" (1950-55) and "You Are There" (1953-57), not to mention his efforts as a novelist and uncredited doctor of screenplays. He also reportedly did uncredited direction on Tyrone Guthrie's film version of "Oedipus Rex" (1957) and scripted (through the front John O Killens) Robert Wise's "Odds Against Tomorrow" (1959).

Long after the rehabilitation of such peers as Dalton Trumbo, Joseph Losey and Carl Foreman, Polonsky finally saw his name on screen again as the writer of Don Siegel's detective drama "Madigan" (1968). 

The following year, he helmed his second feature (21 years after his debut), "Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here" (1969), the story of a rogue Indian tracked down by a callous society, bearing more than just a little resemblance to his own persecution.

 His third and final directing turn, "Romance of a Horse Thief" (1971), returned to his ethnic roots, the Polish border region his father had fled at the turn of the century. Screenplays for "Avalanche Express" (1978) and "Monsignor" (1982) rounded out his film career, but he remained vital, still teaching a course at USC film school at the time he shared the Los Angeles Film Critics Career Achievement Award with Julius Epstein in 1999.

 Evidence on screen reveals Polonsky as a better writer than director, but 21 years between directing assignments begs the question: What would he have done in those two decades? He could write using fronts, but the director's chair remained absolutely off limits.

Article From Turner Classic Movies - Link Here

More Polonsky - Interview LA Times

In a January 20, 1999 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Polonsky was asked, "Your movies often paint a dark view of relationships and morality. Why?" He replied:

"'I look at it as reality. When I was a boy, thieves broke into my father's pharmacy, which during the Depression was one of the few places where you could legally sell alcohol by prescription. The night after a new shipment of liquor arrived, someone stole all the alcohol and cocaine. My father was very upset because if he reported the robbery, he'd have to deal with the Treasury Department. But there were three old Italian men who hung around his shop, sitting and talking and taking their hats off when an Italian funeral passed by. They heard about my father's troubles and several days later, when we opened up the store, miraculously all the liquor and drugs were back in their rightful place. They said that the person responsible for the theft wanted to come and personally apologize for causing any trouble. My father said, 'That's not necessary, but if he really wants to, I'm here all week.' And they said, very apologetically, 'Actually you'll have to wait till he gets out of the hospital.' He laughs. And that's what introduced me to how politics and relationships really work in America.'"

Until his death on October 26, 1999 at the age of 1988, Polonsky remained very involved with writing screenplays, teaching about film and speaking out about the political issues facing Hollywood. For example, he was on the front lines of the protests against presenting a Lifetime Academy Award to informer Elia Kazan. In a typical example of his hard-bitten wit, Polonsky told a reporter that on the night of the Oscars, "I'll be watching, hoping someone shoots him. It would no doubt be a thrill in an otherwise dull evening."

JOHN GARFIELD

John Garfield in Four Daughters

The sign that greets John Garfield’s hard-boiled hobo at the start of The Postman Always Rings Twice portentously reads “Man Wanted.” That marker might well have met him at the studio gate in 1938 when he blew in like a gust of wind from the East. The New York-born star arrived in Hollywood at age 25, bearing the chip on his shoulder that would become his trademark, the result of a meager tenement upbringing and gang affiliation that taught him, in his own words, “all the meanness, all the toughness it’s possible for kids to acquire.”

Introduced to drama at a school for juvenile delinquents, Garfield studied acting with Russian expat Maria Ouspenskaya (best remembered as the gypsy soothsayer from The Wolf Man), an early proponent of the Stanislavskian “system” that supplied a model for Method acting. Following a term of vagrancy, he found his way into the leftist Group Theatre, where he would make a name for himself (literally, changing his given name, Jacob Julius Garfinkle) in Clifford Odets’s social drama Awake and Sing. The headstrong Garfield finally agreed to a Hollywood contract when Warner Brothers consented to allow him time off for stage work, and after a number of discarded projects they dropped him in Michael Curtiz’s Four Daughters like a bead of ink in a glass of water.

For its first 36 minutes, Curtiz’s film is a cornucopia of wholesomeness. When they’re not swinging on their garden gate, the titular Lemp sisters are accompanying their maestro father (Claude Rains) in living room concerts and nursing crushes on their new tenant, composer Felix Dietz (Jeffrey Lynn). The biggest conflict is between Felix and Mr. Lemp as to the merits of modern music. But just when the Americana is becoming as saccharine as Aunt Etta’s tea, the film plays its trump card: Mickey Borden (Garfield), a musician from New York brought in to orchestrate Felix’s composition. His “hair reaching for the ceiling, [his] tie at half-mast” as one character describes him, Mickey is a riposte to the hermetic harmony of the Lemp clan. Right away he sets about asserting the banality of the household, reducing the family members to types. (Of Etta: “the name fits right in with the curtains—domestic.”)

With alternate casting this might play as comical—the streetwise city boy lampooning the Norman Rockwellian small town virtue. But Garfield makes it the opposite: call it dramatic relief. Seated at the piano, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, he manifests the pain behind his derision, the defense mechanism of mocking what he’s never known and is unlikely to have. The arrival of the youngest sister, violinist Ann (frequent Garfield co-star Priscilla Lane), gives Mickey an audience to regale with his belief in the fates and their quarter-century persecution of him. In short order we learn that he was afforded no parents, no education, and just enough talent to help others succeed. In one of many cases of actor-role simpatico, Mickey announces that he changed his name from the (more ethnic) Michael Bolgar in an effort to outrun the destinies. When Ann suggests the topic must be upsetting to him, Mickey replies that talking about his hard luck is the only fun he gets, and indeed he does seem to be enjoying himself, unloading his life story to a total stranger—or, more accurately, to the pert and sympathetic Ann, who undertakes to reform his attitudes, little comprehending the effects of kindness on one who’s never experienced it.

Garfield’s considerable skill is crucial to investing emotion in a character introduced late into a fast-moving story. Our first scene with Mickey supplies his background and worldview; our second conveys his emotional attachment to Ann, whose romance with Felix (like the gate) is in full swing; and the third, a party sequence, finds Ann and Felix announcing their engagement as Mickey silently grasps that the fates have thwarted him again. As is often the case when the camera pans across the large ensemble, Mickey is shown last, the eternal afterthought. Only in this scene there is another dissident—sister Emma (Gale Page), who carries a torch for Felix: a fact apparent solely to Mickey, who, unlike the others, is attuned to the indices of human suffering. (As he later tells Ann, “I guess when you’re used to standing on the outside you see things other people can’t.” Emma’s sorrow makes him “feel very close to her.”)

Putting aside the implausibility of Ann and Emma preferring the oatmeal-bland Felix to the charismatic Mickey (whose resignation and self-pity ebb under Ann’s ministrations), Garfield’s response to finding himself in a love quadrangle is both heart-wrenching and real. It was also like nothing Hollywood had ever presented to the public. As biographer Lawrence Swindell explains, “Garfield’s work was spontaneous, non-actory; it had abandon. He didn’t recite dialogue, he attacked it until it lost the quality of talk and took on the nature of speech.” The nearest Garfield predecessor was probably James Cagney, with his raw energy and downtown demeanor, but where Cagney projected ebullience Garfield offered something entirely new: pessimism, a sense that all is not right with the world, that people suffer and die for no good reason—as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. His Group Theatre training, steeped in the doctrines of Stanislavsky, brought interiority to his performance, a palpable sense that he’s weighing his words, feeling the emotions in concert with Mickey. When he speaks of childhood disadvantages, it’s no great leap to imagine Garfield recalling his years as a motherless derelict on the streets of New York.

When Mickey exits the story, with him go all traces of urbaneness, ethnicity, and gloom, and the tale resumes its erstwhile tempo. But his impact on screen acting was irreversible. B.R. Crisler of The New York Times called Mickey “the most startling innovation in the way of a screen character in years—a fascinating fatalist, reckless and poor and unhappy . . . so eloquent of a certain dispossessed class of people.” He would receive an Academy Award nomination for Four Daughters, and in the words of his daughter Julie, “overnight the rebel as hero was born.”

Garfield continued evolving the cynical outsider paradigm throughout his short career, memorably in The Postman Always Rings Twice, a rare loan-out to MGM. Again he plays a sarcastic drifter taken in by a folksy older man and an alluring blonde, but this time it’s Nick and Cora Smith (Cecil Kellaway and Lana Turner), the genial owner of a roadside diner and his much younger wife. Garfield’s Frank Chambers is instantly smitten with Cora, who dresses head to toe in white but whose arrant ambition is anything but innocent. His voice takes on a startling edge of meanness when he confides to Cora of the tippling Nick, “I’d like to see him get plastered some night and drive off a cliff!” Entrusted to another actor, this line would speak only to Frank’s wish to remove all barriers in his conquest of Cora, but Garfield’s reading resounds with acrimony for all those who’ve had the breaks he never had: businessmen, property owners, husbands content with their lot.

The same violence pervades his voice when he orders Cora to kiss him before he socks her. Indeed, Postman is a film about compulsion: Frank and Cora, despite their combustible attraction, spend most of the film despising and mistrusting one another. Frank has ample opportunity to leave her, before and after they engineer Nick’s cliffside demise, but he always returns; they’re “chained to each other.” And his disruptive presence here is a bead of ink in a bucket of tar. Frank’s desperate act, motivated by lust and envy, is nothing compared with the blackmail and lawyerly double-crosses he encounters in the film’s second half—or the possibility that Cora wants him dead, too.

At the end of 1946, the year of Postman’s release, his contract with Warner’s expired and he struck out on his own, making uncompromising films about personal integrity (Body and Soul, Force of Evil) until his own progressive politics and tight-lipped code of honor ran afoul of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Method-trained stage actors Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando would extend his legacy of sensitive, troublemaking characters, but perhaps never in such stark contrast with their frameworks as was the case for Garfield and the torrent of chaos he unleashed against an unsuspecting prewar world. Garfield might have been channeling Mickey of Four Daughters when he scoffed, “No actor can be really good until he’s reached 40.” The fates wouldn’t allow it. The postman rang for John Garfield at age 39.

- Steven Mears, "Becoming John Garfield," Film Comment - Link Here

NOTES FROM DENAH'S PRESENTATION:

module 9.1

 So, we have two really interesting figures kind of behind everything that we're looking at this week with force of evil. Abraham Polonsky is the director and he was blacklisted for refusing to name any names to the House on American Activities Committee in. 51

He still managed to do to you know garner some screen credits in a career of 20 plus years. He is a super interesting guy. Uh, his Oscar nominated script for boxing classic body and Soul, which also started John Garfield. I think Canada Lee is in that with him. So those of you that may have taken the Hitchcock class Canada Leo was in lifeboat as one of the rare African American actors and characters in Hitchcock's filmography.

But. Body of the soul is another one that I often think of, kind of swapping into this class actually. But you know, it's interesting. Around this time we've we've talked about, you know, Dalton Trumbo and a number of other people who had been blacklisted, which we can easily understand and have seen how it totally annihilated peoples careers. Some people like Trumbo. And Polonsky were able to under other assumed names or aliases, kind of, you know, do work from the shadows and still, you know, kind of bring in an income. But of course, you can't demand the same kind of salary if your name isn't or can't be used. So it did certainly hinder their financial success in their continuation to be you know. As visible in the community as they had been.

 

Um so. This this is my favorite in the January 20th 1999 interview with the LA Times, Polonsky was asked your movies often paint a dark view of relationships and more morality. Why he said I look at at it as reality. When I was a boy, thieves broke into my father's pharmacy, which during the depression. It was one of the few places where you could legally sell alcohol by prescription the night after a new shipment of liquor arrived, someone stole all the alcohol and cocaine. My father was very upset because if he reported the robbery, he'd have to deal with the Treasury Department. But there were three old Italian men who hung around his shop sitting and talking. Talking their hats off when an Italian funeral will pass by, they heard about my father's troubles and several days later when we opened up the store, miraculously all the liquor and drugs were back in their rightful place. They said that the person responsible for the theft wanted to come and personally apologize for causing any trouble, my father said. That's not necessary, but if he really wants to, I'm here all week and they said very apologetically, actually, you'll have to wait till he gets out of the hospital.

 

He laughs, and that's what introduced me to how politics and relationships really work in America. So I gives you a little background on Polanski's kind of coming of age and seeing how different entities. Uh, you know, money and power and influence really kind of worked behind the scenes. And I I guess you could say a kind of underworld certainly growing up during the depression. With his father being a business owner and there being, you know, like mobsters hanging out in front of his store,

 

 JOHN GARFIELD

 John Garfield is another real intense personality. A lot of passion and fire in this guy. You may recognize him from the original post. Always rings twice from 1946. Um. He was introduced to drama at School for juvenile delinquents, so he kind of lucked into that one. So maybe there's a little bit of, you know, like James Cagney's origin stories in John Garfield. Somebody with real kind of experience on the streets that kind of makes a pivot into acting. And kind of drawing on that real life experience to inform his characters and performances. He. Was in some several noirs crime-ish films, mobs and all of that. This one is perhaps his best known and one of his final films, if not his final film. He was 39 years old when he had a heart attack and died. And if I'm recalling it correctly, it was the direct result of the kind of kickback that was received from this week's films. Response because there were plenty of people that did not take kindly to force of evil.