Force of Evil (1948).

A blog like this is all about archaeology in one sense.  I don't mean it's concerned with the literal practice of digging through ancient ruins in order to see if its possible to gain a better understanding of the past.  At the same time, there is a sense in which the mission of The Scriblerus Club shares some overlapping with the kind of folks who like to dig up the past for a living.  The one thing we have in common is a desire to broaden the picture, and hence the outlook that a more expansive awareness of what's gone before can grant the careful student of history.  Like the actual archaeologists themselves, I can't seem to help this interest I've got in trying to see if looking at the artistic artifacts of a bygone age can help gain a greater understanding of the present moment I'm living in (whatever that should turn out to be).  What that means in practice is that every now and then, I'll go mining for any book or film of yesteryear, in the hopes that I'll stumble upon some lost and valuable nuggets of gold.  The big difference in my case is that somehow Art seems to have proven more reliable than any rare and yellow metal that can be found in the Earth.  Apparently there's something constant in the human need to tell stories that makes more of a permanent fixture of life in general than the fleeting nature of fortune.  Riches come and go, the only permanence that money might be able to have for itself seems to lie less in it's value as currency, and more in the kind of fables that storytellers are able to spin out of the desiring, getting, and spending of fortunes.  That subject proves to be very pertinent to the hidden gem of a picture that I was able to excavate by pure accident.

I'd never even heard of a film like Force of Evil until I stumbled across it by accident.  I first ran across a mention of it in passing, while watching an old documentary on the history of American Film Noir.  That's where I got a chance to watch none other than Martin Scorsese recall the kind of aesthetic impact that the genre left on his Imagination as an impressionable young cinephile.  "As I was growing up", the director of Goodfellas tells us, "these films were a part of my reality, day by day.  In other words, I didn't analyze them.  I was infected by them.  I related to them emotionally".  The creator of Travis Bickel makes no bones about the reasons why these types of films were so easy to relate to.  It was because all they ever did for him was to reflect back, for the first time ever, the kind of life he knew, heard about, and sometimes even saw growing up as this poor nothing kid on the Mean Streets of old New York.  What Scorsese had to say next is the point where this whole article got started for me.  "The first film that I can remember that had to do very clearly with what I knew on a daily basis, growing up on the Lower East Side was...Abe Polonsky's Force of Evil.  It was about the Numbers Racket, and it was about two brothers.  It portrayed a world that I hadn't seen on film before.  In a very honest way, too".  As the filmmaker of Raging Bull is telling us all this, the documentary is busy showcasing clips from the film in question.  The first time I ever saw it was as snippets playing over Scorsese's words.

If I had to give my initial response to an introduction such as this, then the reaction I had is best described as one of piqued interest.  Here was an intriguing case of a hitherto unknown piece of classic cinema, and it must have been given the right sort of introduction, from the kind of authoritative source that would make you want to stop and listen to what amounts to an onscreen viewing recommendation.  The makers of the documentary must have done a good enough job at it too, because the net result was that I gained an interest in hunting this film out and seeing what it amounted to for myself.  The results have left me with what I hope are a few thoughts interesting enough to share here in this review.  In order to get things started on the right foot, I'm going to turn the job of emcee over to the work of scholar and Noir cinephile Eddie Muller.  The following pieces of relevant starting background information are provided by Muller as part of the Noir Alley segment of Turner Classic Movies.

"Today's film takes us from the shrouded margins of New York's underworld (it's Vice Dens and Bookie Joints) and into the upper reaches of Wall Street; America's Bastion of Big Business.  The two territories have a lot in common in Force of Evil, released by MGM on Christmas Day, in 1948.  Now Metro Goldwyn Mayer distributed the film, but didn't produce it.  It's the work of Enterprise Productions.  An independent studio created by actor John Garfield in 1946, after his contract with Warner Bros. expired.  Garfield's first film as an actor for Enterprise was the 1947 hit, Body and Soul.  Which earned multiple Oscar nominations and remains one of the best boxing pictures ever made".  

Let me just pause the commentary here to note that it wouldn't surprise me to learn that Scorsese might have taken a (so far as I know) unacknowledged bit of Inspiration from this other obscure Garfield film when it came to telling the story of Jake LaMotta.  There's a further interesting bit of trivia that Muller recounts which further links Body and Soul with Raging Bull.  Much like De Niro's searing portrait of the price of reckless fame, Garfield's own ring picture was also drawn from the life.  "Body and Soul was made from an original story by Abraham Polonsky.  The screenplay earned Polonsky an Oscar nomination for its gripping, but grim story of a boxer loosely based on lightweight champ Barney Ross.  Who struggles to keep his integrity while slugging his way to the top of a profession ripe with corruption.  Now, flush with the critical and box-office success of Body and Soul, Garfield set up Polonsky to write and direct his next picture for Enterprise.  Polonsky, essentially, returned to the well (web)".

The Story.

From here, Muller continues his commentary.  "(This) time, instead of Garfield playing a scrappy Jewish street kid turned boxer, he'd be a scrappy...college kid turned high-powered lawyer.  But the greed, graft, and gangsters would be as rife in the banks and penthouses as they were in Polonsky's tenements and boxing gyms.  Polonsky based his script on the novel Tucker's People, by journalist Ira Wolfert.  The book is a fictionalized expose of New York's Numbers Racket, also known as "Policy".  Now this was, of course, before lotteries became state controlled legal rackets.  Something Force of Evil presciently predicts.  Polonsky collaborated with Ira Wolfert on the script, but made substantial changes in order to funnel the narrative into a fast-paced 79 minutes.  These changes transformed a sprawling story into a streamlined tour-de-force for John Garfield, playing lawyer Joe Morse.  A man who's lack of ethics has earned him an office in the clouds, and a side-hustle as personal counsel to a notorious gangster.  The trouble starts when Joe's brother Leo (played by Thomas Gomez), operator of a small-time "Policy Bank", refuses to join the Combination.  A forced merger of small "Banks" into a single conglomerate controlled by Joe's racketeer boss, Ben Tucker (played by Roy Roberts).  So far, so normal, at least for a crime picture.  Force of Evil, however, segues into anything but a routine crime story.  Before it's 79 minutes are up, the film becomes one of the most audacious and subversive American movies of its era (ibid)".  

A fuller, and perhaps even better description of the film's plot can be found in the following summary given by Brian Eggert, over at the Deep Focus Review.  "Joe’s client and the numbers racket boss, Ben Tucker (Roy Roberts), has made gambling “legal, respectable, and very profitable”—at least on the face of it. The numbers are a scam, of course, as evidenced by Tucker’s plan for a hostile takeover that will combine the smaller policy banks into a single entity, which he intends to oversee. Joe helps him organize a scheme whereby every policy bank will be forced to sell to Tucker after a popular number—776, in honor of the impending July Fourth holiday—creates too many winners to pay. Joe’s estranged brother Leo (Thomas Gomez) runs one such bank, and Joe attempts to arrange for Leo to take advantage of the cheat, earn a hefty payday, and transition to Wall Street. But Leo’s sense of responsibility to those who placed bets at his bank, along with his general belief that Joe is shifty, prompt him to refuse Joe’s offer, which he deems “Blackmail!” As Joe tries to corner his brother into accepting the deal, he courts Leo’s assistant, Doris (Marie Windsor), whose innocence and eventual judgment of Joe’s shady lifestyle compel him into self-reflection. Moreover, Tucker’s ruthless takeover forces the bank’s employees to remain on the job against their will, which draws the attention of authorities and competing gangsters, who respond with respective raids and strong-arming. By the end, Leo puts a target on himself with his refusal to acquiesce to his brother’s plan...and Joe is left tortured by his moral awakening (web)".

Conclusion: The First Martin Scorsese Picture.

From here, I think it's best to pick up Eddie Muller's Commentary once more, because a lot of what he has to say seems more or less pertinent enough to the film as I experienced it.  There does come a point where my own thinking branches off from the critical consensus on this film, yet we'll save that part for in a moment.  Right now, Muller's thoughts about the background and nature of the picture are relevant.  He says, "Polonsky may have been making his debut as a film director, but he'd spent his whole life in an intellectual fervor leading to this moment.  He conceived of the film as comprising three main, artistic elements: the visuals, the performances, and the dialogue".  Now of these three ingredients that the director has chosen to make the picture work, it is just possible to claim that two of them have become obsolete.  What I mean by that is I've studied the reactions of contemporary audiences long enough to know that getting into a film like Force of Evil does rest on what might be called an acquired ability to make this sort of mental paradigm shift from one set of dramatic aesthetics to another.  The current audience expectation seems geared more or less to that of the Tentpole Blockbuster, a dramatic setup in which speed and agility are the rule of the day.  This frame of reference is somehow meant to apply to a skill with imagery as much as it does with calls for good acting, so-called.  In this sense, a film like Force of Evil already has a lot of strikes out against it going into the playing field, and this can be seen when its visual style and acting are held up against the current crop of superhero fantasies.

There's nothing at all fast-paced about the film's action.  Instead, everything is treated in this deliberate, slow-burn, slice-of-life sense of pacing that is more akin to that of a stage drama, as one recent critic of the flick pointed out.  This sense of the old-fashioned carries over into the film's acting.  There is nothing ever wrong, or out of place about the performances of the cast in this picture.  However, it is possible to imagine today's viewers going into the film, and come away laboring under the mistaken impression that what they've just seen all amounts to an example of bad acting, when this is clearly not the case.  It is merely different from what current audiences believe good acting to be.  The efforts of Garfield and his fellows cast members is perfectly fine and respectable for what they are able to accomplish.  The crucial thing to keep in mind is merely that they're approach harkens back to a style of performance that has deeper ties to the theater stage, just as much as it does to the modern day studio set.  This also applies to the cut and dry visuals.  In that regard, the acting in Force of Evil can be viewed as a historical piece of information in its own right.  It is a moving snapshot of time when the acting profession was in a state of transition from what might then have been deemed as the Classical approach of the stage, to the more camera focused aesthetics that has come to dominate the public imagination, at least for however long it's moment in the Sun should last, at any rate.    And here is the part where I have to admit I hold no particular loyalties in terms of any kind of stage performance.  

My basic rule of thumb is that even a poor actor can have his chances elevated by a good script.  Everything else beyond that is pretty much of a secondary concern in my book.  I have time for neither the cult of celebrity, nor do I share the modern audience's obsession with finding the fabled Perfect Image which could help to convey a story in the best shorthand way possible.  My main reason for this way of thinking comes from the realization that the ongoing quest for the Perfect Frame, Expression, or Performance, is always, in the last resort, based on a set of criteria that is, by it's very nature, always forced to shift and ebb with the passage of time.  The upshot is that one generation's Perfect Image or performance can always become the next era's encapsulation of artistic embarrassment.  It is far better, therefore, to leave the focus on the quality of the writing rather than the visuals or the acting.  It seems to be the only way that an objectively good film like Force of Evil will ever gain the chance at anything like a fair hearing.  With this in mind, here is where Muller's commentary on the film's dialogue becomes more than relevant.  "Trust me", he says, "Force of Evil unfolds differently than anything else shown to date on Noir Alley.  Things are relatively normal, until Garfield shares a flirtatious cab ride with co-star Beatrice Pearson.  Polonsky gives free-reign to an extraordinary flow of dialogue.

"Unnatural language that seems to have emerge straight from the character's subconscious".  I think here it's best to give the reader an idea of what Muller of speaking of by taking a few snippets of the film's script, and showcasing the peculiar narrative switchover that he's talking about.  Let's take a crucial scene near the beginning of the action.  Garfield's corrupt Wall Street broker, Joe, has gone to see he estranged brother in the hopes of bringing him in on the criminal racket he's a part of.  This encounter leads to heated words, and the naturalistic nature of the dialogue in this scene can be demonstrated thus:  

Leo: "Two thirds for Tucker, Brother Joe, and one third for me.  For my own business.  Do you know what that is Joe?  Blackmail!  That's what it is, blackmail!  My own brother blackmailing me!  

Joe: "You're crazy.  You're absolutely crazy, man, you're not listening!  

Leo: "I don't want it!  

Joe (low, menacing, insinuating) "Ya know why you don't want it?  I'll tell you why, because you're a small man!  Because if it's a small thing you're titan, a tiger!  But if it's a big thing you shout and yell and call me names.  'Oh no, a million dollars for Leo.  Oh no, it must be the wrong address.  It must be somebody next door'!

Leo: "The answer is no!

Joe: "You understand your no won't stop the merging of these banks, yours included.  Leo, this is your chance, the one a I got for ya!

Leo: "You take your chance, Joe, and get out of here.  I'm an honest man here, not a gangster with that gangster Tucker.

Joe: "Are you telling me, a corporation lawyer, that you're running a legitimate business here?!  What do ya call this?!  Pay-offs for gambling, an illegal lottery, Policy!  Violation 9704, the Penal Code.  Policy, the Numbers Racket!

Leo: (vehement) "I do my business honest and respectable!

Joe (sinister sarcasm) "Honest an respectable?  Don't you take the nickels and dimes and pennies from people who bet, just like every other crook, big or little in this racket?  They call this racket "Policy" because people bet their nickels and dimes on numbers instead of paying their weekly insurance premium.  That's why, "Policy".  That's what it is, and that's what it's called.  And Tucker wants to make millions, you want to make thousands, (turns to address his brother's secretary) and you, you do it for thirty-five dollars a week!  But it's all the same, all "Policy".

This should be a good enough sample platter for the audience to feast on.  On its own, it paints a very deliberate and familiar picture of the kind of film we're dealing with.  One that should be recognizable enough to old Noir film buffs.  The dialogue of the story in this moment contains that rough, staccato delivery that was a staple of the Mystery genre back during Hollywood's Golden Age.  There may be a cozy sense of quaintness to this type of writing today.  However back in the 40s and 50s, it was considered groundbreaking, and maybe even a little scandalous for the way it had of reshaping the artistic idioms of expression at the time.  It was seen as reflective a tougher, more down to Earth way of expressing artistic emotions, and with the help of performers like Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney, it lit up the screens of neighborhood cinema houses in the same way that the antics of Deadpool and Wolverine are able to today.  Like a lot of great cinematic innovations, this one had its start not on the sound stage, but rather on the cheap pulp pages of magazines with names like Black Mask.  It's there that authors like Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler pioneered the style and delivery utilized by Garfield and Polonsky in the scene transcribed above.  It's also an expressive strategy that the film both keeps and subtly turns on its head as the action proceeds.  Here's an example Muller gives his viewers.

It's comes at the aforementioned moment when Garfield's amoral protagonist is trying to seduce Beatrice Pearson in the back of a cab.  After a bit of back and forth where the subject is what the crooked mob lawyer does for a living, Garfield surprises the audience by delivering the following example of what I can only describe as an overheard Elizabethan soliloquy.  "Don't you see what a black thing that is for a man to do?", he muses aloud.  "How it is to hate yourself...your brother.  To make him feel that he's guilty.  That I'm guilty...Just to live and be guilty".  It's easy to see how this might come off as a strange bit of a turn for a picture that up to now had played out like a straightforward crime saga.  Everything leading up to that peculiar and gnomic line of dialogue will lead the viewer to believe they know what they're in for.  It's the story of a criminal mastermind who's own personal faults get the better of him, and thus lead to his inevitable, Tragic downfall.  It's one of the oldest stories in the Book of Imagination, and one of the reasons guys like Shakespeare kept coming back to this particular well.  There's just plenty of artistic gold to be mined in hills like these, so there's no cause to stop a good thing if it can provide you with just about all the Inspiration the artist needs.  A modern day equivalent of that same process seems to be what's going on with Polonsky's film, yet what Muller has to say about the particular riff the director is able to find and work with on the Creative Idea is worth hearing in full.

From the exact point after Garfield delivers his strange monologue on the nature of guilt, "Force of Evil is unique.  Each scene coming at the viewer from slightly left of center".  In other words, it's one of those cases where the filmmaker was able to find his own unique Inspired approach to what could otherwise have been just another 50s gangster picture.  The film's sometimes poetic use of dialogue, and the way it structures and creates a heightened sense of tension in the interactions between the characters is one of the ways which serves to give the narrative its compelling sense of menace and intrigue.  The other aspect of the script that counts just as much is the thematic angle or direction in which the story is headed, and which, as things go on, somewhat begins to explain the note of Romanticism mixed in with a claustrophobic aura of Existential Dread that begins to creep up on, and eventually overtake the dialogue all together.  The best way I can explain this latter, crucial part of the film is to claim that what Polonsky has given his viewers with Force of Evil ends up amounting to nothing less than a blueprint for the then future cinema of Martin Scorsese.  Here's what I mean by that statement.  When you're talking about any film by the guy who made Goodfellas, then you're talking about a cinema of guilt.  It's the overarching, pervasive theme to just about every single picture the director has made in his career.

What makes a film like Force of Evil so intriguing when viewed through a Scorsesean lens is that the veteran viewer begins to be able to pick all the little cues, quirks, and character traits that later became a staple of films like Mean Streets, or The Departed.  The presence of these ingredients that make up a typical Scorsese scenario aren't too difficult to parse and understand if you've watched enough of the later auteur's films.  There's the amoral anti-hero who is always walking a tightrope between the light and the dark sides of life in the figure of Joe Morse.  Like a lot of Marty's gangsters, he's caught up in what I can only described as a third-rate gambler's illusion.  He thinks he can use his own little techniques to cheat the system and fill up his own pockets at the same time.  He figures if he plays it smart, and the cards are right, then whether or not everyone goes home happy, he'll still be set for life.  The fatal flaw at the heart of Joe's strategy comes down to just two factors.  Try as he might, he can't not give a shit about the safety of his own brother, and the crux of the film is concerned with the various attempts Joe makes to shelter his fellow sibling from the harsh realities of organized crime.  The trouble is an "Outfit" like the one he's a part of never cared all that much about how well one's family members factor into their schemes.  You either cooperate, or you get run over.  Those are the business rules.

The perfect irony is that try as they might, Tucker and his "Corporation" find their own plans getting thrown out of whack by Garfield's ever growing desperation to protect the meager scrap of a family he still has left.  He's not very good at it, and as the play goes on it's clear that an invisible noose has begun to tighten around the necks of the two brothers.  Perhaps this wouldn't bother Joe's bosses so much if his personal shenanigans didn't get them caught in the drag net as well.  Therefore the film presents its viewers with a perfect irony that is a staple of the classical Tragic drama.  It is also, perhaps not coincidentally, an basic outline of a lot of the main staples that Scorsese is obsessed with in just about every picture he's ever made.  And the fascinating thing about a film like Force of Evil is that it's one of those case studies where the astute film buff can begin to see all of the familiar tropes of Marty's repertoire being assembled together in a well made and executed way that will eventually become famous later on down the line.  The neat and perhaps fitting thing about the construction of what would later become Scorsese's cinema is that it all got its start way back in this now obscure little late 1940s Film Noir.  As a result, what director Abe Polonsky has given his viewers here has to be counted as a genuine success.  A lot of this is down to the way he runs a tight ship, from pacing, to acting, runtime, and above all, the writing.

When a critic like Muller praises Polonsky for being able to create a fast-paced thriller that is able to keep you on the edge of your seat, he is doing nothing less than giving an accurate description of the film's contents.  Every step the protagonist takes to protect his older brother just serves to put them both in greater danger.  As the noose tightens, the paranoiac tone of the film begins to grow at an appreciable and appropriate rate.  And it's here that Polonsky showcases his own considerable skills as a Noir storyteller.  I have described this picture as a slow-burn process, and the beauty of this procedure is the way it has of getting the audience  invested in the characters, the stakes they are in, and most important of all, it allows us the space necessary to become interested in the protagonist's plight, and maybe even to surprise ourselves by how much we give a shit about what happens to him.  A great deal of the logic to the film's ending rests on the shoulder's of Beatrice Pearson.  Her character is the third and final determining aspect of the film's plot, and if I'm being honest, she's sort of the one figure in the story with the most fascinating background.  She comes from a good, yet poor neighborhood, and so she signs up with Joe's brother Leo to make ends meet.  She's a girl next door working for a crime boss.

The funny thing about that is how it creates this character with a fascinating dichotomy at her core.  She chooses to work as basically a secretary and/or book-keeper for criminals, and yet she's still this nice, polite, and even somewhat hopeful individual.  It's a very strange outlook to find in the circumstances that surround her.  Yet the interesting part is how she's the one who sort of gets the final word in the picture.  When Pearson and Garfield first meet in the film, Joe accuses her character, Doris, of being just another two-bit crook helping to operate a gambling skim for chump change.  What's interesting about that exchange is that it's what allows her to turn in her resignation to Joe's brother at the end of the day's shift.  It doesn't amount to much, since the cops are called on the operation, and Joe is there to bail her out.  Garfield has orchestrate the whole bust for his brother's benefit, of course, yet in the process, he starts to take a shine to Pearson's girl next door personality.  What happens next becomes the second crux of Force of Evil.  Joe tries to win Doris over to his way of thinking, promising her the good life she's always been searching for, one that takes place high up in the clouds of Manhattan's skyscrapers.  In effect, Garfield becomes the devil who spends most of the film trying to tempt Pearson's Eve.

This is yet another very familiar setup, one that is able to transcend even the boundaries of the Noir genre, yet it found a welcome home within format for its modern expression all the same.  The fascinating thing that Polonsky's script is able to do with this old trope is find an interesting way to turn it on its head.  Much like with a lot of Scorsese films, such as Killers of the Flower Moon, rather than the serpent tempting an innocent in the Garden, it is Eve herself who ends serving as a strange yet genuine type of confessor for Garfield's snake in the grass.  She becomes the one person who the main character is willing to tell his troubles to, very much to his own surprise.  It's one of the most fascinating relationships that I've ever seen in a Noir film, and if I had to offer a reasonable answer to why that is, then a lot of it might have to do with the situational dynamics between the movie's two Romantic leads.  Doris is a version of Eve who's already taken a bite out of the Big Apple (in perhaps both senses of that term) long before he snakes his way into her life.  Therefore the usual guilty party already finds himself on the wrong foot even before he's gotten to know her.  If Joe Morse wants to play the role of Garden Serpent, he should have stuck with the usual formula that belongs to such a role.  He should never have bothered trying the same trick on someone who already knows what it's like to choose a fall from grace.

Trying all the usual routines on a girl like Doris is perhaps Joe's first mistake.  All he does is spell out the dire consequences of Doris's situation in big, bright, glowing neon (and some of the light fixtures have begun to flicker and burst).  Instead of winning her over to his side, all Joe does for Doris is give her the permission she'd been looking for to set herself free.  It's the not the outcome he was counting on.  Nor was he expecting a girl like her to be the one he would start to pour out his own troubles to.  In setting Doris free from her own predicament, the film's main anti-hero begins to find himself confronted with an intriguing conundrum, whether or not its possible for him to make an escape of his own?  All of this goes together to make for one of those surprise kind of gems where the quality of the final product manages to sneak up on you with not just how subtle it is.  There's also a surprising level of multiple facets at play in the films main action, and hence the themes its able to generate out of its narrative.  Many of these symbolic concepts appear to be laced with several fine shades of irony, both in and out of the story.  In terms of the plot proper, this translates into a feature-length examination of all the main character's blind spots, and what happens when he continually runs face-first into each of them in turn.

The character of Joe Morse is the sort of Scorsese protagonist who likes to think he's got a clear view and control of all the angles that could present any sort of threat to his enterprise.  Someone who figures he knows how to game the system, while always somehow managing to overlook his real points of weakness.  In the case of Garfield's main lead, this comes in the form of a brother he can never turn away from, and the checkered history of the mob boss he works for, and in typical fashion for this sort of story, as the film rolls along each specter from the past begins to assert a greater control beyond the anti-hero's ability to keep a handle on things.  The way this plays out within the confines of the movie's secondary world is both straightforward and complex all at once and by turns.  The story of Force of Evil is probably near as old as the proverbial hills.  What makes Polonsky's riff on this old material so fascinating to both watch and think about comes from how the director-screenwriter is able to find ways of cramming in all these big social issues into the space of just just one hour and nineteen minutes without ever losing sight of the plot.  Instead, it more or less seems as if Polonsky has hit upon a genuine wellspring of Inspiration for his picture.  One that is able to take the seemingly complex issues of the American Way of Life, and boil them all down to their final essence.  In doing so, what it gives the viewers is the story of a man who thinks he understands the fundamentals of the world.  Only for reality to turn right around and prove just how wrong his conception of things are in the long run.

It's the over-arching thesis of the film, and what makes it somewhat bemusing is the discovery that a similar process like it was playing out behind the camera in the director's own personal experience.  This is one of those film's where the drama going on behind the camera is, not really all that fascinating, if I'm being honest.  It's more that it just adds perhaps a fitting touch of further real world irony as a final bit of extra-textual icing on the cake.  Part of the unintended interest this film is able to generate for itself comes from the way the final product has of playing all sorts of havoc with the intended goals the filmmakers had going into this project.  You see, if I had to compare Abe Polonsky to anyone in the history of Hollywood, then it would have to be the character of Barton Fink, from the Coen Brothers movie of the same name.  That's another picture in which the protagonist is insistent he has a clear window for himself looking out on the way the order of things really work.  Just like with Garfield's plight in Force of Evil, the entire plot of the Coen film is just sitting back and watching the strange yet compelling nature of the universe itself go on to prove just how short-sighted and naive the protagonist really is.  That's the best way I can think to sum up the life and career of Abraham Polonsky.  To his credit, it's always possible he meant well.  Yet there's the seeming blind spot in his character that made him something of an easy prey for people like Herbert Marcuse and Joseph McCarthy.  Without going too much into detail.  In trying to combat injustice, the director wound up swimming with the sharks.

Rather, lets say the Polonsky's infatuation with Marxism ended up with him getting caught in the net of a different band of cutthroats.  His greatest flaw as a thinker was that he always had a hard time telling friend from foe, even if it's possible to claim that he had noble goals in mind.  Even if that's the case, then all I can say is wanting to do the right thing isn't going to amount to much whenever you make the sort of move that results in shooting yourself in the foot.  It just slows you down and wastes valuable time that could've been spent in better pursuits than chasing various chimaeras.  In wanting to make the world a better place, Polonsky proved how out of his depth he really was by believing he was getting away from one criminal enterprise, all the while ending up getting drawn into an actual one.  The real punchline is how the story of Force of Evil seems to reflect it's director's personal conundrum.  Much like protagonist Joe Morse, Polonsky was certain he knew how the facts going on around him were like, only to face up to a lifetime of bitter disappointment when the world proved him wrong.  It's what makes the ending of Force of Evil so fascinating to watch in retrospect, in that much like with a lot of the later films made by Martin Scorsese, the story ends on a possible note of positive change.  It's not the rosiest of endings to a Noir film, by any means, yet it is one that holds out the possibility of hope.

All of these elements, both in front and behind the camera go together to make a film that's fascinating and gripping to both watch and think about.  A lot of that has to do with the way history has gone on to shape the nature of this story.  It leads the present day viewer towards a kind of fun conclusion, in a way.  This review began with the help of Martin Scorsese, and now the current reputation of Abe Polonsky's movie sort of demands that I close out this article with the help of the director of Goodfellas as well.  The reason for that is pretty ironic, even if it's true.  The final product that Polonsky has assembled from the bits and pieces of Inspiration he picked up along the way amounts to little more than all of the basic ingredients for what might (at this late date) have to be considered the Scorsese Formula.  It's not something the poet of the Mean Streets has adhered to in every film he's ever done.  Yet it is something in the way of being the ruling idea that he constantly circles back time and again in his work.  It's this basic concept of an Over-reacher, someone who thinks he'd like to try and see if he can fit the Universe in his pocket, only for the nature of things to teach him a different lesson by the time of the final curtain call.  It's an idea that's older than its two most famous literary popularizers, Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe (it might also be possible to add Milton's name on this particular shelf), yet the point is they're the ones who seem to have come up with the main idea that Polonsky was working with.  All he had to do was take the Renaissance Tragedy and give it it's modern voice.

It's something Abe was able to succeed at with flying colors, and all of it in glorious, old-fashioned, Noir black and white.  What he couldn't have known at the time (at least till way later with the benefit of hindsight) is that in telling his little parable of American White Collar corruption, he was, not so much constructing, as perhaps uncovering an old and grand narrative foundation.  One that he was able to put to such good use that a Lower East Side kid named Marty had his own Imagination set alight by the story that Polonsky allowed to play out on screen.  The film lodged in the mind of Travis Bickel's co-creator, and audiences have been reaping the benefits ever since.  In addition to this, there is just the movie's overall quality.  Muller is right.  What Polonsky has constructed here is a tight, fast-paced, and gripping little crime thriller that has had the misfortune to slip through the cracks of time.  One gets the feeling that this result has come about in spite of the best efforts of fans like Scorsese to try and preserve not just its memory, but also its legacy.  That's a shame, too.  Because what we've got here is one of those films that opens with the protagonist stepping into a net of his own devising.  As the film's plot progresses, the net begins to haul in, entrapping all who are in its clutches, including the main character.  The rest of the film is about his increasingly desperate attempts to disentangle himself.

I won't go into spoilers about what happens to the imaginary figure of Joe Morse, though I will admit that it's easy to see how the ending of this guy's story could have resonated with Scorsese's mind at such a young age.  It does count as a very Existential note to end on, and it makes a fitting bow to tie the film up with.  All of which is to say that this is a picture that deserves to have its day in the limelight.  It's never managed to get the kind of accolades that films like The Maltese Falcon have been able to garner for themselves.  Instead, it seems to have spent all this time languishing somewhere on the tip edge of memory.  In many ways, this sort of counts as a crime unto itself.  Because this is not a movie that deserves to be forgotten.  Instead, it's a gripping thriller told with passion and a greater deal of Inspiration than perhaps even the filmmakers themselves were aware of.  I almost worry that I haven't done Polonsky's film quite as much justice as I should.  My only hope is that this review has fulfilled the Club's mission statement of giving it enough of a spot in the limelight for it to have a fair chance of getting the recognition it so justly deserves.  All of which is to say Force of Evil is one of those rare, unheralded gems that merits not just a rediscovery but a regular spot on your viewing schedule.