Force of Evil (1948)

Director:

Abraham Polonsky

Writers:

Abraham Polonsky (screenplay) and
Ira Wolfert (screenplay) ...

Release Date:

25 December 1948 (USA)

Genre:

Crime | Film-Noir | Drama

Plot:

Lawyer Joe Morse wants to consolidate all the small-time numbers racket operators into one big powerful operation...

Plot Keywords:

Cain And Abel | Syndicate | Love Affair | Lower East Side | Law Office

Awards:

1 win

Cast

John Garfield	...	Joe Morse
Thomas Gomez	...	Leo Morse
Marie Windsor	...	Edna Tucker
Howland Chamberlain	...	Freddie Bauer (as Howland Chamberlin)
Roy Roberts	...	Ben Tucker
Paul Fix	...	Bill Ficco
Stanley Prager	...	Wally
Barry Kelley	...	Det. Egan
Paul McVey	...	Hobe Wheelock
Beatrice Pearson	...	Doris Lowry

Also Known As:

Tucker's People (USA) (working title)

Runtime:

78 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (Western Electric Recording)

Certification:

UK:PG | UK:A (original rating) | Finland:K-16 | Sweden:15 | USA:PG

Filming Locations:

New York City, New York, USA

Company:

Enterprise Productions

Trivia:

This film was selected to the National Film Registry, Library of Congress, in 1994.

Goofs:

Continuity: During a climactic montage set at an East Coast racetrack on the Fourth of July, people in the stock footage crowd scenes are dressed in winter garments nobody would wear in the middle of summer.

Quotes:

Leo Morse: The money I made in this rotten business is no good for me, Joe. I don't want it back. And Tucker's money is no good either.
Joe Morse: The money has no moral opinions.
Leo Morse: I find I have, Joe. I find I have.

Movie Connections:

Featured in A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995) (TV)

Top Marx!

McCarthy blacklist victim Abraham Polonsky's angry and poetic film noir is perhaps the most candidly subversive picture ever made in a commercial genre, almost explicitly equating capitalism with crime in the metaphor of the numbers racket. It belongs on the face of it to the post-war-disillusionment school of American thrillers (eg The Blue Dahlia, Key Largo), in which the evils that ordinary Joes spent the war fighting turn out to be business as usual when they get back home. But what makes it so unusual is its insistence, contrary to the message of other social-comment crime thrillers of the 1940s, that it's a bad system, rather than bad people, that's to blame for the woes of the world. The fate of Mob lawyer John Garfield's decent, kind-hearted brother Thomas Gomez, a small-time policy banker, shows us what happens to good people who try to play straight in a crooked game. If the bad guys in the film turned good, Polonsky implies, they'd only get the same. Polonsky described the source novel, Tucker's People, as "an autopsy on capitalism".

Sermon over: none of the above gets in the way of a raging, doom-laden crime melo that, like a snowball, gets faster and weightier as it barrels along. Superb New York location photography, a vitriolic script, and committed, sincere performances lock our attention to every second of its 81 New York minutes. If it weren't for Gun Crazy (scripted under a front name by another dangerous pinko, Dalton Trumbo), Force of Evil would be the best film noir ever made.