Body and Soul
Category=ATC
Category=ATFB
Category=ATFX
Charlie Chaplin
Cold War
Communist Party
David Raksin
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eq_non-fiction
Ernest Hemingway
Force of Evil
Great Depression
Hollywood blacklist
Joe Leo Morse
John Garfield
Joseph McCarthy witch hunt
Madigan
material society
New York City NYC
noir cinematography
Odds against Tomorrow
Oscar nomination
Paramount Studios
Robert Rossen
screenwriter
Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here
voiceovers
World War II WWII
Product details
- ISBN 9781617036606
- Weight: 333g
- Dimensions: 152 x 228mm
- Publication Date: 10 Dec 2012
- Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Abraham Polonsky (1910-1999), screenwriter and filmmaker of the mid-twentieth-century Left, recognized his writerly mission to reveal the aspirations of his characters in a material society structured to undermine their hopes. In the process, he ennobled their struggle. His auspicious beginning in Hollywood reached a zenith with his Oscar-nominated screenplay for Robert Rossen's boxing noir, Body and Soul (1947), and his inaugural film as writer and director, Force of Evil (1948), before he was blacklisted during the McCarthy witch hunt.
Polonsky envisioned cinema as a modern artist. His aesthetic appreciation for each technical component of the screen aroused him to create voiceovers of urban cadences--poetic monologues spoken by the city's everyman, embodied by the actor who played his heroes best, John Garfield. His use of David Raksin's score in Force of Evil, against the backdrop of the grandeur of New York City's landscape and the conflict between the brothers Joe and Leo Morse, elevated film noir into classical family tragedy.
Like Garfield, Polonsky faced persecution and an aborted career during the blacklist. But unlike Garfield, Polonsky survived to resume his career in Hollywood during the ferment of the late sixties. Then his vision of a changing society found allegorical expression in Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, his impressive anti-Western showing the destruction of the Paiute rebel outsider, Willie Boy, and cementing Polonsky as a moral voice in cinema.
Polonsky envisioned cinema as a modern artist. His aesthetic appreciation for each technical component of the screen aroused him to create voiceovers of urban cadences--poetic monologues spoken by the city's everyman, embodied by the actor who played his heroes best, John Garfield. His use of David Raksin's score in Force of Evil, against the backdrop of the grandeur of New York City's landscape and the conflict between the brothers Joe and Leo Morse, elevated film noir into classical family tragedy.
Like Garfield, Polonsky faced persecution and an aborted career during the blacklist. But unlike Garfield, Polonsky survived to resume his career in Hollywood during the ferment of the late sixties. Then his vision of a changing society found allegorical expression in Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, his impressive anti-Western showing the destruction of the Paiute rebel outsider, Willie Boy, and cementing Polonsky as a moral voice in cinema.
Andrew Dickos is the author of Street with No Name: A History of the Classic American Film Noir and Intrepid Laughter: Preston Sturges and the Movies. He is a commentator on Paramount Home Entertainment's DVD of Preston Sturges's The Miracle of Morgan's Creek and the contributor on film noir to the Columbia World of Quotations.
