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COPYRIGHT 2001 Cineaste Publishers, Inc.
by Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001.275 pp., illus. Hardcover: $27.50.
Abraham Polonsky, who was blacklisted at the very moment when he seemed to be developing into a major artist, was responsible for two of the most memorable closing lines in the history of American media, both of them shaped as answers to rhetorical questions. First was John Garfield's remark to a gangster at the end of Body and Soul (1947): "Whaddya gonna do, kill me? Everybody dies." Second was Walter Cronkite's address to the audience at the end of the You Are There television series on CBS in the early Fifties: "What kind of day was it? A day like all days, filled with the events that alter and illuminate our times--and YOU WERE THERE!"
As Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner's excellent biography demonstrates, these lines were consistent with Polonsky's life, which was marked by a strong ethical and political integrity, a willingness to risk his career for his beliefs, and a constant awareness of how history influences our daily lives. And yet, when he was summoned to the HUAC hearings on Hollywood communism in 1951, Polonsky was described by Harold Velde, a U.S. Congressman from Illinois, as a "very dangerous citizen." Using similar language, FBI special agent R. B. Hood of Los Angeles, who helped make Polonsky one of the chief targets of Bureau surveillance in the postwar decades, identified him as a "dangerous" filmmaker. He then wrote an extended thematic analysis of Polonsky's masterpiece, Force of Evil (1948), to prove the point.
Driven out of Hollywood because of his unapologetic Marxism, Polonsky might have settled permanently in Europe, much like his contemporaries Jules Dassin or Joseph Losey. Instead, after a brief stay in France, he returned home (he wasn't named after Abe Lincoln for nothing) and during the next two decades managed to write incognito for movies and television, often introducing political nuances into his scripts. Gradually, he became a kind of cult figure, his preblacklist work admired by a wide range of critics and directors, including Lindsay Anderson, Andrew Sarris, and Martin Scorsese. Although he briefly returned to directing in 1969, heart problems soon forced him into a quieter life of teaching and writing....
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