Abraham Polonsky
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Abraham Lincoln Polonsky (December 5, 1910 - October 26, 1999) was an American screenwriter and former Communist blacklisted by Hollywood movie studios in the 1950s.
Abraham Polonsky was born in New York City, the eldest son of Russian-American Jewish immigrants. In 1928 he entered City College of New York and following graduation, earned his law degree in 1935 at Columbia Law School. After several years of practice, mixed with teaching, he decided to devote himself to writing. Polonsky wrote essays, radio scripts and several novels before beginning his career in Hollywood. His first novel,"'The Goose is Cooked" , written with Mitchell A. Wilson under the singular pseudonym of Emmett Grogan, was published in 1940.
A committed Marxist, in the late 1930s Polonsky also joined the American Communist Party. He participated in union politics and established and edited a leftwing newspaper, The Home Front.
Polonsky signed a screenwriter's contract with Paramount before leaving the US to serve in Europe in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II (from 1943 to 1945). After the war he returned to Hollywood writing for Paramount Pictures. After a brief stint at Paramount, he wrote the screenplay for Robert Rossen´s independent production Body and Soul, (1947) starring John Garfield and Lilli Palmer. Body and Soul has a famous Polonsky-scripted scene, in which Polonsky's boxer, after his life is threatened after refusing to throw the fight, retorts: "What can you do, kill me? Everybody dies." The screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award. After the success of Body and Soul, Polonsky became a Hollywood film director.
Polonsky's first film as a director, Force of Evil (1948), is considered by some to be the most overtly political of all the crime films of the 1940s. Garfield plays a corrupt lawyer who faces a moral crisis over a Fourth of July weekend. Force of Evil was not successful when released in the United States but it was hailed as a masterpiece by film critics in England. The film was based on Tucker's People by Ira Wolfert.
Polonsky's career as a director and credited writer came to an abrupt halt after he refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1951. Illinois congressman Harold Velde called the director a "very dangerous citizen" at the hearings. While blacklisted, Polonsky continued to write film scripts under various pseudonyms that have never been revealed. It is known that Polonsky, along with Harry Belafonte and Robert Wise co-wrote Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), in which Polonsky's name was initially dropped from the film credits. Polonsky was not given public credit for the screenplay until 1997, when the Writers' Guild of America officially restored his name to the film as a credited screenwriter.
In 1968, Polonsky was the screenwriter for Madigan, a police thriller, and Polonsky used his own name in the credits. The film was directed by Don Siegel, starring Richard Widmark and Henry Fonda.
After a prolonged absence, Polonsky returned to directing in 1970 with the Western film Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, a tale of a fugitive Native American pursued by a posse, which Polonsky converted into an allegory about racism, genocide, and persecution. The film was interpreted by many as a metaphorical reference to the political persecution suffered by Polonsky and others during the McCarthy era. Critical opinion is divided on the film. Some consider it an anachronism, a liberal 50's style western in the style of Run of the Arrow or Apache, and increasingly irrelevant in the visceral era of Leone and Peckinpah. Others regard Willie Boy as a minor classic.
In the early 1980s, Polonsky was an uncredited scriptwriter for Mommie Dearest, based on Christina Crawford's memoirs of her mother Joan Crawford, and The Man Who Lived at the Ritz (1981), based a novel by A.E. Hotchner. An unrepentant Marxist until his death, Polonsky publicly objected when director Irwin Winkler sanitized his script for 1991's Guilty by Suspicion a film about the Hollywood blacklist era, by revising the lead character played by Robert De Niro into a liberal, rather than a Communist.
He received the Career Achievement Award of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association in 1999. Until 1999, Polonsky taught a philosophy class at USC School of Cinema-Television called "Consciousness and Content". While no longer a member of the Communist Party, he remained committed to Marxist political theory, stating "I thought Marxism offered the best analysis of history, and I still believe that."
Until his death, Polonsky was a virulent critic of director Elia Kazan, who had testified before HUAC and provided names to the Committee. In 1999, he was enraged when Kazan was honored by the Hollywood Film Academy for lifetime achievement, stating that he hoped Kazan would be shot onstage.[1]
Polonsky died on October 26, 1999, in Beverly Hills, Ca.
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[edit] Quote
"First of all, directing is an idea that you have of a total flow of images that are going on, which are incidentally actors, words, and objects in space. It's an idea you have of yourself, like the idea you have of your own personality which finds its best representation in the world in terms of specific flows of imaginary images. That's what directing is." (Polonsky quoted in the book Directing the Film by Ed Sherman, 1976)
[edit] Films as screenwriter
Selected films as screenwriter:
- Golden Earring (1947) (co-screenwriter)
- Body and Soul (1947) - remade in 1981 and for TV in 1998.
- I Can Get It Wholesale (1951)
- Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) (uncredited, novel by William P. McGivern)
- Madigan (1968)
- Avalanche Express (1979)
- Monsignor (1982)
- Mommie Dearest (1981) (uncredited)
- Guilty By Suspicion (1991)
[edit] As director-screenwriter
- Force of Evil (1948) (based on Ira Wolfert's novel Tucker's People)
- Tell them Willie Boy is Here (1970) (based on Harry Lawton's novel)
- Romance of a Horsethief (1971)
[edit] Novels and essays
- The Goose is Cooked (1940) (with Mitchell A Wilson - pseudonym Emmett Hogarth)
- How the Blacklist Worked in Hollywood (1970)(essay)
- Making Movies (1971) (essay)
- Zenia's Way (1980) (novel)
- Children of Eden (1982) (unfinished novel)
- To Illuminate Our Time: The Blacklisted Teleplays of Abraham Polonsky (1993)
[edit] External links
- "Some Rude to Kazan"
- Abraham Polonsky at the Internet Movie Database
- Senses of Cinema: Great Directors Critical Database
- Archive of American Television Video Interview with Abraham Polonsky [1]
