Abraham Polonsky may be the most gifted artist to have his career cut short by the Hollywood Blacklist of the '50s. One can only say "may" because his exile from Hollywood fell so early in his career -- after only four screenplay credits and one directing job -- it is impossible to know what he might have accomplished had his career not been interrupted. As he himself would acknowledge, his seventeen years on the blacklist cost him his peak years of development as a director. But even with his limited output, his work demonstrates a mature approach to film genre as a vehicle for social commentary. An unrepentant Marxist, he informed his writing with a cynical view of the blessings of modern life in a capitalist economy. As such, his early work was a key influence in the development of film noir, with its near paranoid emphasis on the corruptive nature of city life, and a heavy influence on Francis Coppola's Godfather Trilogy.

Polonsky was born in 1910 to a family of Russian-Jewish immigrants in the Bronx. To please his father, he got a law degree, but worked his way through law school teaching English at City College of New York, all the while dreaming of a writing career. Ironically, the law led him into professional writing. One of his firm's clients was actress-writer Gertrude Berg, and he was assigned as legal consultant for an episode of her hit radio series The Goldbergs. When Berg heard him dictate a scene to his secretary, she hired him as one of her writers. That led to other radio work, including some scripts for Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre of the Air.

Like many American intellectuals during the '30s, Polonsky had turned to the Communist Party in search of answers to the problems facing the country during the Great Depression. By 1939, he had tired of radio work and went to work as a labor organizer, writing in his spare time. His 1943 novel The Enemy Sea marked his first attempt to use familiar genres to deal with political issues; it was a tale about the attempts of Nazis to sink an American oil tanker. The book generated interest in Hollywood, where Paramount signed him to a writing contract.

Paramount had little to offer Polonsky. His only credit at the studio was Golden Earrings (1947), a Marlene Dietrich film that he claims does not feature anything written by him. Hearing that John Garfield was looking for material for his new Enterprise Pictures, Polonsky successfully pitched a story about a Jewish boy who rises from the slums as a boxer only to become corrupted by gamblers. Garfield produced the film as Body and Soul (1947) and gave the writer unprecedented access to the set. When director Robert Rossen felt Polonsky's scripted ending was too ambiguous, Garfield sided with the writer, giving the film its classic ending, in which Garfield faces off against the gangsters with the line "What are you going to do, kill me? Everybody dies!" The result was a huge hit which was also Garfield's biggest independent success. Body and Soul also brought Polonsky an Academy Award® nomination.

Garfield then gave Polonsky the chance to direct his own script, an adaptation of Ira Wolfert's 1943 novel Tucker's People which he filmed as Force of Evil (1948). Polonsky turned in a searing film noir associating the corruption of Wall Street with the numbers racket. Decades before the Godfather films, Polonsky was the first to treat organized crime as a metaphor for American business. By the time the picture was finished, however, Enterprise was broke, forcing Garfield to sell the film to MGM. Force of Evil was rather bleak for Hollywood's most glamorous studio, which may explain why it was buried on the bottom half of a double bill released at Christmas. Critics were impressed nonetheless, and in later years the film has become a cult favorite.

By that time, Hollywood was under investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which was looking into Communist infiltration of the film industry. At first, Polonsky found his work opportunities limited. Over the next three years, he only earned one writing credit, for the Susan Hayward vehicle I Can Get It for You Wholesale (1951). That year, he was called before the HUAC after having been named as a Communist by other witnesses. When he refused to testify, he was blacklisted.

Like many blacklisted writers, he continued to work under pseudonyms or by having fronts submit his scripts under their names. He would later claim to have made more money while blacklisted than he ever had before. Out of loyalty to the friends who helped him work, Polonsky never told anybody what films he had written between 1951 and 1968. Even without his efforts, in 1996 the Writers Guild restored his name to the credits for Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), which he had written under the name John O. Killens. Critics have hailed the picture as the last "classic" film noir for its tale of a trio of out-of-luck men who join forces for a bank heist. The script was commissioned by co-star and producer Harry Belafonte, for whom Polonsky wrote scenes depicting the racial injustices of the '50s.

Polonsky finally came off the blacklist in 1968 when director Don Siegel and Universal Pictures hired him to co-script the police thriller Madigan (1968). The film's success brought him back to directing. Instead of making another film noir, however, he chose the revisionist western Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969). Robert Redford starred as an early 20th century sheriff leading an increasingly bloodthirsty posse on the hunt for a Native American (Robert Blake) on the run after killing the father of his fiancée (Katharine Ross). Critics greeted the film as a triumph, and it brought Redford and Ross the British Academy of Film and Television Awards for Best Actor and Actress (in conjunction with their performances in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, also 1969). Unfortunately, it did not fare as well as the box office.

After only one more directing effort -- the 1971 comedy adventure Romance of a Horsethief, which received only limited release -- Polonsky developed a heart problem that kept him from directing. Over the next 25 years, he continued writing, though he was rarely happy with the films that resulted. His last writing credit was for Monsignor (1982), in which Christopher Reeve starred as a disreputable priest. He also did uncredited work on Mommie Dearest (1981) and wrote the screenplay for Guilty by Suspicion (1991), an account of the HUAC investigations based on his own experiences. When director Irwin Winkler re-wrote the script to make the character based on Polonsky, played by Robert De Niro, a liberal rather than a Communist, Polonsky removed his name from the production.

A fighter to the end, Polonsky spent his final years teaching at the University of Southern California, where he refused to speak to fellow teacher Edward Dmytryk, a director who had named names in the '50s. When another friendly witness, director Elia Kazan, was voted a special Oscar® in 1999, Polonsky was one of the filmmakers protesting the choice, informing interviewers, "I'll be watching, hoping someone shoots him" (quoted in "Studio Briefing," www.imdb.com).

by Frank Miller