Force of Evil

“If a man’s life could be lived so long, and come out this way, like rubbish, then something was horrible.” Fans of the gangster films of New Hollywood, like those of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorcese, may notice an aesthetic through-line leading back to Abraham Polonsky’s Force of Evil, which contains similar operatic moments of high art mixed with brutality and fraternal strife (Scorcese reportedly admired this film in his youth). Shady corporate attorney Joe Morse (John Garfield) wants his estranged brother Leo (Thomas Gomez), a bookmaker, to join him and his gangster bosses in forming a much larger numbers racket to dominate the city. When Leo balks, Joe calls in a raid on his operation to force his hand. As the brothers become more immersed in the criminal underground, resentment flares up and betrayals mount, leading to a tragic crescendo and a splash in the East River. Marie Windsor and Beatrice Pearson play romantic interests, and Howland Chamberlain plays the meek, small-time bookkeeper Freddie Bauer who’s forced to lie and cheat for his own survival. The film’s cynicism is omnipresent: two brothers trying to make life work in a postwar moral wasteland, beautifully illustrated by cinematographer Alberto Fusi’s location shooting of Garfield on vacated New York streets, landmarks like the Brooklyn Bridge, Trinity Church, and the New York Stock Exchange towering over a gray, soulless city without another human being in sight. Force of Evil is perhaps the film noir most associated with McCarthyism and the Hollywood blacklist as director Polonsky, leading man Garfield, and even the novelist Wolfert whose work the film is based on were all ultimately deemed communists by the House Un-American Activities Committee, while the film itself was widely interpreted as a warning about capitalism.