Force of Evil (1948)
The Root of Evil
Corruption and Betrayal in Abraham Polonsky directing debut
To the North-West, Wall Street ends at Broadway where Trinity Church is dwarfed by the surrounding skyscrapers. The camera pans down. A voice announces, “This is Wall Street, and today was important, because tomorrow, July 4th, I intended to make my first million dollars—an exciting day in any man’s life.” The camera stops to present a bird’s-eye-view of the intersection where Broad Street becomes Nassau. The voice continues, “Temporarily the enterprise was slightly illegal. You see I was a lawyer for the numbers racket.”
The voice belongs to Joe Morse (John Garfield). In the lobby of his office building, Joe goes to the news stand, where today’s winning numbers are being discussed. One man comments that every Fourth of July many punters pick 776—“the old Liberty number.”
Joe is legal advisor to numbers racketeer Ben Tucker (Roy Roberts). There are twenty or thirty independent policy banks—they are called policy banks “because people put their nickels on numbers instead of paying their weekly insurance premiums.” Tucker and Joe aim to take over the biggest banks. Their plan is to fix the numbers at 776 on the Fourth of July. If the fix succeeds, there will be so many winners that the policy banks will be unable to pay. Then, Morse and Tucker will bail out the banks they want to take over—the others will go bankrupt.
One piece of the plan is not in place. Joe’s brother, Leo (Thomas Gomez), runs a small policy bank. And Joe owes him—he got Joe out of the slums and put him through law school. Joe wants to bring Leo into Tucker’s organization. But, Leo does not approve of Tucker and refuses.
Joe arranges a tip-off to the police. They raid Leo’s bank and take him and his staff to jail. In this way, Joe hopes he can make Leo close down on the Fourth of July.
Every character in director Abraham Polonsky’s Force of Evil (1948) is involved in the numbers racket. There are policy bankers, the people that work for them, and the people that bet with them. There are politicians who are being bribed by Tucker. There are the police who bust policy banks. And there are gangsters, like Tucker’s rival Ficco (Paul Fix), who are trying to force their way into the racket.
Polonsky gets fine performances from his cast, which includes Marie Windsor, as Tucker’s wife who is more interested in Joe than her husband, and Howard Chamberlain, as bookkeeper Bauer, who is so scared when Leo’s bank is busted that he wants to quit the business, and becomes an informant.
Gomez is wonderful as the deluded Leo who, in Joe’s words, runs his policy bank “the way another man runs a restaurant or a bar.” And there is a poignant performance by stage actress Beatrice Pearson. She plays Doris Lowry who works for Leo and who, when she hears Joe trying to talk Leo into joining Tucker’s organization, decides she wants to leave the bank. Pearson captures the struggles of a young woman who may look innocent and demure but, after being attracted to Joe, is prepared to walk out on him. Finally, there is Garfield, who has great intensity as the anti-hero who is proud to state, “I didn’t have enough strength to resist corruption, but I was strong enough to fight for a piece of it.”
Force of Evil was Polonsky’s directing debut—he was blacklisted in 1951, and did not direct another movie for twenty years. His rhythmic streetwise dialogue is striking, and his powerful, corrosive view of the numbers racket shows his aborted career was a great loss.
—John Bloomfield (August, 2005)
Corruption and Betrayal in Abraham Polonsky directing debut
To the North-West, Wall Street ends at Broadway where Trinity Church is dwarfed by the surrounding skyscrapers. The camera pans down. A voice announces, “This is Wall Street, and today was important, because tomorrow, July 4th, I intended to make my first million dollars—an exciting day in any man’s life.” The camera stops to present a bird’s-eye-view of the intersection where Broad Street becomes Nassau. The voice continues, “Temporarily the enterprise was slightly illegal. You see I was a lawyer for the numbers racket.”
The voice belongs to Joe Morse (John Garfield). In the lobby of his office building, Joe goes to the news stand, where today’s winning numbers are being discussed. One man comments that every Fourth of July many punters pick 776—“the old Liberty number.”
Joe is legal advisor to numbers racketeer Ben Tucker (Roy Roberts). There are twenty or thirty independent policy banks—they are called policy banks “because people put their nickels on numbers instead of paying their weekly insurance premiums.” Tucker and Joe aim to take over the biggest banks. Their plan is to fix the numbers at 776 on the Fourth of July. If the fix succeeds, there will be so many winners that the policy banks will be unable to pay. Then, Morse and Tucker will bail out the banks they want to take over—the others will go bankrupt.
One piece of the plan is not in place. Joe’s brother, Leo (Thomas Gomez), runs a small policy bank. And Joe owes him—he got Joe out of the slums and put him through law school. Joe wants to bring Leo into Tucker’s organization. But, Leo does not approve of Tucker and refuses.
Joe arranges a tip-off to the police. They raid Leo’s bank and take him and his staff to jail. In this way, Joe hopes he can make Leo close down on the Fourth of July.
Every character in director Abraham Polonsky’s Force of Evil (1948) is involved in the numbers racket. There are policy bankers, the people that work for them, and the people that bet with them. There are politicians who are being bribed by Tucker. There are the police who bust policy banks. And there are gangsters, like Tucker’s rival Ficco (Paul Fix), who are trying to force their way into the racket.
Polonsky gets fine performances from his cast, which includes Marie Windsor, as Tucker’s wife who is more interested in Joe than her husband, and Howard Chamberlain, as bookkeeper Bauer, who is so scared when Leo’s bank is busted that he wants to quit the business, and becomes an informant.
Gomez is wonderful as the deluded Leo who, in Joe’s words, runs his policy bank “the way another man runs a restaurant or a bar.” And there is a poignant performance by stage actress Beatrice Pearson. She plays Doris Lowry who works for Leo and who, when she hears Joe trying to talk Leo into joining Tucker’s organization, decides she wants to leave the bank. Pearson captures the struggles of a young woman who may look innocent and demure but, after being attracted to Joe, is prepared to walk out on him. Finally, there is Garfield, who has great intensity as the anti-hero who is proud to state, “I didn’t have enough strength to resist corruption, but I was strong enough to fight for a piece of it.”
Force of Evil was Polonsky’s directing debut—he was blacklisted in 1951, and did not direct another movie for twenty years. His rhythmic streetwise dialogue is striking, and his powerful, corrosive view of the numbers racket shows his aborted career was a great loss.
—John Bloomfield (August, 2005)
posted by John Bloomfield at 9:20 PM
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