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WSWS : Arts Review

Three filmmakers who were silenced

By David Walsh
30 October 1999

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This article originally appeared in The International Workers Bulletin , 3 June, 1996 (written as part of coverage of the 1996 San Francisco International Film Festival).

The recent San Francisco film festival presented the work of three directors—American Abraham Polonsky, Frenchman Paul Carpita and Belgian Paul Meyer—who faced censorship or blacklisting in the postwar years as a result of their filmmaking efforts. The trio were on hand at the festival to discuss their movies and their experiences.

Polonsky, born in New York City in 1910, was permitted to make one extraordinary film, Force of Evil (1948), before the McCarthyite witch hunts halted his directing career. The film used the numbers racket, in Polonsky's words, “as a metaphor for capitalism in the US.” The film opens, on the eve of the Fourth of July, with the words, “This is Wall Street.” Crooked lawyer Joe Morse, superbly portrayed by John Garfield, tries to convince his brother to throw in his lot with the big criminals. “The money has no moral opinions,” he says at one point to his brother, who replies, “I find I have.”

Polonsky's screenplay is strong. Morse says of the man who corrupted him, “He opened his pocket and I jumped in.” The crime bosses conspire to allow the three-digit number ‘776'—which thousands bet on each July 4—to win, wiping out the local numbers ‘banks.' As one explains, “We're normal financiers.” In one of the film's most memorable scenes, Morse both repels and charms his brother's young secretary in a taxi cab: “You want me to be wicked to you?...I'll give you money and sin.” In the end, after his brother's death, Morse has a change of heart. He says in a voice-over, “Something was horrible.... I decided to help.”

In an interview I asked Polonsky how he'd developed his ideas. “I was born into Depression, into the failure of [President Herbert] Hoover to do anything. My father was a socialist. The house was full of socialists. The attitude in our family was: if you're not smart enough to be a socialist, you're not smart enough to live.”

At a joint press conference I'd asked Polonsky, Carpita and Meyer why they thought the present period of social crisis had not yet produced artistic and intellectual ferment as similar periods in the past had done. Polonsky answered in one word: “Money.” In our interview, I remarked that there was also a lack of interest in social problems on the part of many filmmakers.

“Everything always changes,” he said. I remarked that I thought the beginning of a change was taking place. “That'd be great,” he said cheerfully, “because it's awful now.” I agreed and added, “I think the black list and the anticommunist witch hunt have a great deal to do with the period we're living in now.” “Of course,” he said. I asked him: “What did the witch hunt do, in your opinion, not merely to the film industry, but to the social atmosphere as a whole?”

Polonsky said, “It made people afraid to have their own ideas. The blacklisting created self-censorship right throughout the community. Could you say something like that? Was that safe to think? It created that atmosphere and we're not over it yet. That's much worse than the damage it did to some of the blacklisted movie people.”

I asked Polonsky about his blacklisting. He explained that he'd been in France when he received a subpoena. His wife tried to convince him to stay in Europe. “‘They're not going to chase me out of my own country.' Very romantic attitude. So we went back. I got a job at 20th C