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A Very Dangerous Citizen
Abraham Lincoln Polonsky and the Hollywood Left
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by Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner
University of California Press
Due/Published
May 2001, 282 pages,
cloth
ISBN
0520223837
When he was summoned before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1951, Abraham Lincoln Polonsky (1911-1999) was labeled "a very dangerous citizen" by Harold Velde, a congressman from Illinois. Lawyer, educator, novelist, labor organizer, radio and television scriptwriter, film director and screenwriter, wartime intelligence operative, and full-time radical romantic, Polonsky was blacklisted in Hollywood for refusing to be an informer. The New York Times called his blacklisting the single greatest loss to American film during the McCarthy era, and his expressed admirers include Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Sidney Lumet, Warren Beatty, and Harry Belafonte. In this first critical and cultural biography of Abraham Polonsky, Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner consider this survivor of America's cultural cold war and present a new study of the Hollywood left. The Bronx-born son of immigrant parents, Polonsky--in the few years after the end of World War II and just before the blacklist--had one of the most distinguished careers in Hollywood. He wrote two films that established John Garfield's postwar persona, Body and Soul (1947), still the standard for boxing films and the model for such movies as Raging Bull and Pulp Fiction; and Force of Evil (1948), the great noir drama that he also directed. Once blacklisted, Polonsky quit working under his own name, yet he proved to be one of television's most talented writers. Later in life he became a most acerbic critic of the Hollywood blacklist's legacy while writing and directing films such as Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1970). A Very Dangerous Citizen goes beyond biography to help us understand the relationship between art and politics in American culture and to uncover the effects of U.S. anticommunism and anti-Semitism. CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Adventures of the Artist as Intellectual
2. The Good War and After
3. The Politics and Mythology of Film Art: Polonskyıs Noir Era
4. Polonskyıs Fifties
5. Triumph and Retrospect
Appendix
Notes
Bibliographical Note
Index |
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Review
Abraham Polonsky, the director of the influential noirs Body & Soul and Force of Evil, is one of the most notorious and interesting victims of the Hollywood blacklist. He was in many ways larger than life - a charming, mercurial figure, witty, sophisticated, and fervent in his beliefs. Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner have superbly recounted the life and thought of Abraham Polonsky as well as provided an incisive analysis of the political and artistic elements of his work. A Very Dangerous Citizen is also a rich evocation of the activity and sense of hope that many leftists experienced during the 1930s and early 1940s and the cruel disillusionment that followed during the McCarthy years. More so than his Hollywood contemporaries, Polonsky had a firm grounding in both the theoretical and activist wings of leftist causes that informed his artistic work. As a student at CCNY and then later as a college English instructor, Polonsky immersed himself in Marxist thought and aesthetics and passionately involved himself in a range of union activities. Having previously written modernist and realist novels, Polonsky went to Hollywood and wrote and directed films that were both trenchant and nuanced critiques of American capitalism and the commercialization of life. They were also, as Buhle and Wagner demonstrate, serious attempts at developing a more artistic cinematic style that would later influence Martin Scorcese and a variety of French and Japanese directors. Polonsky and his films got the attention of the FBI, HUAC, and studio heads, who essentially banned him from working in Hollywood. Polonsky found sympathetic allies in the film industry, though, and he continued to work pseudonymously in Hollywood, and to champion leftist causes. Polonsky's life, remarkable on its own, is also a fascinating lens through which to understand the political and artistic struggles of the United States in the middle of the century. For other recently published titles in |
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