Abraham Polonsky

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.