by Miguel E. Rodriguez
DIRECTOR: Abraham Polonsky
CAST: John Garfield, Beatrice Pearson, Thomas Gomez, Marie Windsor
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 100% Fresh
PLOT: A crooked lawyer working for a numbers-running “combine” nevertheless tries to get his older brother to quit the racket himself when an even bigger combine tries to move in.
On the surface, Force of Evil looks and feels like a B-movie: low production values, populated by talented bit players elevated into larger roles [John Garfield being the exception, naturally], and looking like it was shot on the fly by a television crew. Of course, reading that sentence back to myself, I realize I could also be describing Hitchcock’s Psycho [1960], but Force of Evil feels even more low rent than that. There are shadows present in brightly lit rooms that could only be caused by stage lights behind the camera. Oddly timed edits draw attention to themselves and threaten to take the viewer out of the movie. The female roles are literal representations of the so-called “Madonna-Whore” complex, limited to expressions of fluttering tension or full-on seduction. The dialogue, at least near the beginning, is filled with legal and financial jargon that had me rewinding a couple of scenes to try to digest what the characters were saying.
And yet, Force of Evil exudes a strange power through its unique use of language and the borderline-Shakespearean nature of its tragic story, involving a crooked lawyer (John Garfield) who works for a numbers racket, but nevertheless tries to convince his older brother to quit the business when a larger “combine” threatens to take over.
John Garfield, God love him, was no Brando or Bogart, but in this movie, the screenplay provides him and everyone else with dialogue that feels lifted out of a stage play that was translated into English from some foreign language. Here’s a line from Leo Morse (Thomas Gomez) to his younger brother, Joe (Garfield):
“Do you know what that is, Joe? Blackmail! That’s what it is! Blackmail! You’re crazy! You’re absolutely crazy mad!”
Another example:
“All right. I am sensible. I am calm. I’ll give you my answer calmly and sensibly. My final answer. My final answer is finally NO. The answer is no – absolutely and finally no, finally and positively no! No, no, no! N – O!”
To call that kind of language “stylized” is an understatement. The repetitive words, the broken-up clauses…tilt your head and it could almost read as poetry. In fact, in Martin Scorsese’s introduction on the Force of Evil Blu-ray, he relates a story where a critic watching a screening of the film exclaimed, “My god, it’s written in free verse!”
While I acknowledge the screenplay’s poetic form, I found an even more contemporary comparison: David Mamet. I semi-recently watched his film Homicide [1991] and wrote in my review that “…Mamet’s signature word choices…suggest an almost Shakespearean construction, as if the words are being shoehorned into a buried structure or pattern that operates subconsciously…trying to create a mood reminiscent of Greek tragedy…” Those words apply equally well to Force of Evil’s screenplay by director Abraham Polonsky and Ira Wolfert. I got a distinctly Mamet-esque vibe from the dialogue in this 1948 film, with just a dash of Aaron Sorkin, perhaps.
(Ebert once said that Pulp Fiction [1994] is a movie that he could watch with the picture turned off, just so he could listen to the crackling dialogue. Force of Evil could just as well fit that mold, in my opinion.)
There’s even a Mamet vibe to Garfield’s acting style, as he rarely cracks a smile or any other expression for the entire film; we only sense changes in tone by the volume of his voice, not by the expression on his face…much like the lead actors in Mamet’s House of Games [1987]. That stylization sets Force of Evil apart from many of its film-noir counterparts. To be sure, other noirs have their share of stylized dialogue and characters, but this movie sets some kind of stylization bar that must be heard to be believed.
The story can be summarized easily (see the top of this review), but it is powerful in its simplicity, at least when it comes to the interplay between Joe and his older brother. As for the female characters, they are sadly stuck in placeholder roles that are there either as eye candy (Marie Windsor, a film-noir regular in her first major role) or as the young woman, Doris (Beatrice Pearson), helpless before the wiles of a wicked smooth-talking man like Joe Morse. No Ida Lupones or Barbara Stanwycks or Lauren Bacalls here. However, there is an interesting conversation between Joe and Doris that gives us an interesting insight into Joe’s character, as well as hiding a discussion of moral relativism in plain sight.
Joe is doing the ‘40s film equivalent of “putting the moves” on Doris, telling her baldly that she WANTS him to be wicked to her, “because you’re wicked, really wicked…you’re squirming for me to do something wicked to you – make a pass for you, bowl you over, sweep you up, take the childishness out of you, and give you money and sin. That’s real wickedness.” In so many words, he’s telling her that she’s ASKING for it. This is not a nice man. He goes further. He tells her:
“If I put my hand in my pocket and gave you a ruby, a million-dollar ruby for nothing, because you’re beautiful and a child with advantages and because I wanted to give it to you without taking anything for myself – would that be wicked?”
In Joe’s mind, charity isn’t just for suckers, it’s downright evil. Doris mounts a good defense, telling Joe how she hasn’t been fooled by magicians or smooth-talking men since she was a little girl. Joe keeps following his path of logic, but an interesting thing happens. He incriminates himself, and at the end of the scene he seems to realize it:
“To go to great expense for something you want, that’s natural. To reach out to take it, that’s human, that’s natural. But to get your pleasure from not taking, from cheating yourself deliberately like my brother did today, from not getting, from not taking…don’t you see what a black thing that is for a man to do? How it is to hate yourself and your brother, make him feel that he’s guilty, that…that I’m guilty?”
There’s that free verse in action again, with those repetitive phrases. His own amoral code trips him up, and the camera lingers on Joe’s haunted face for a moment before we fade into the next scene. I mention this exchange because it’s so atypical of even some of the greatest noirs, which are usually full of hard-boiled dialogue about heaters and button men and glamorous dames. In Force of Evil, we’re invited to turn inwards with our anti-hero and compare our definition of evil with his, as Doris does later in the film.
The film ends with several scenes of shocking violence, including a murder that looks inspired by Battleship Potemkin [1925] and a three-way shootout in a darkened office. There is a remarkably evocative shot as Joe hurries down a staircase, and it appears as if he is making his own descent into hell. Force of Evil has recently been critically re-evaluated; after years of being dismissed as nothing more than an assembly-line noir thriller, it was recently restored by UCLA and the Film Foundation and was also selected to the National Film Registry. It’s not the greatest film noir I’ve ever seen, but if you’re a fan of the genre, you owe it to yourself to hunt down a copy and give it a look…or more appropriately, a listen.
