From the archive: "Force of Evil"

The breakthrough film of soon-to-be-blacklisted Abraham Polonsky, Force of Evil sets out with tremendous B-pic efficiency the sort of complicated numbers racket that died out with the wind-up gramophone and rickets, and now requires a hell of a lot of explaining; a contemporary remake would have to involve something comparatively simple like an online poker scam. Mob lawyer John Garfield finds himself with a dilemma after discovering the number his brother has bet his entire business on isn't scheduled to come up over the Fourth of July weekend. Does he keep schtum and turn his back on the ties that bind, or should he betray his employers, who've kept him rich all these years, but instilled him with deep-rooted feelings of guilt?

A romantic subplot tries to smooth away its cold, hard edges, but otherwise Polonsky's film is entirely distinctive in the way it moves away from guns and gumshoes to focus its attentions on a crime poised on the very brink of legitimacy, and a lot of haggling over nickels and dimes; it realises that, more than aspiration, it's negotiation that lies at the heart of the American dream, which is why there's symbolic value in having a lawyer as the hero. You can see how the film might be held up as evidence of un-American sensibilities (to rail against monopolies, to cavil at the making of money!), particularly at a time when corporate thinking was beginning to take root in American society, trusts and securities coming to sound newly appealing after the widespread betrayals of war. Yet it's a sign of just how arbitrary the McCarthy charges were that, while Polonsky was drummed out of the business for the next twenty years, his assistant director Robert Aldrich went on to see his career flourish over the next decade, making almost exactly this sort of tough, socially acute urban fable.

(August 2009)

Force of Evil screens on BBC2 tonight at 1.10am.