| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 54

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, A Very Dangerous Citizen, Abraham Lincoln Polonsky and the Hollywood Left (Berkeley: University of California Press 2001)

A LIFE AS INTERESTING as that of Abraham Polonsky, the American writer and sometime film director, is revealing of an entire historical landscape, radiating shafts of light into the shifting political fortunes of the Left over decades, the place of Jews in America, the role of the media in shaping popular assumptions and thinking, the state of union organization and above all the shameful repression and huge cultural loss which the McCarthyite witch hunts of the late 1940s and early 1950s brought. Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner's biography is a rich, historically contextualized account of the times which shaped Polonsky, who was born around 1910 (the exact date appears to be unavailable) and died in 1999.

Biographies are somewhat marginalized as an academic resource in film studies programmes and this is to be regretted. Film studies often show a relative indifference or hostility to questions of authorship. The late 1960s and 1970s saw attempts to critique the romantic bourgeois view of artists transcending their social and historical context and producing seamlessly unified texts. After a brief attempt to marry authorship with structuralism, the question of cultural labour and creative agency working within institutional and cultural determinants has largely dropped off the agenda of film theory. The difficulty is compounded by a battery of sophisticated reading strategies that work to link the text to a wider culture, often forgetting the active and conscious cultural labour that mediates the relationship between text and context. Buhle and Wagner's biography necessarily reminds us that authorship matters, especially when a cultural worker is as articulate, reflexive, and politically informed as Polonsky was.

Polonsky spent his early years growing up in the Bronx, New York. His father was a struggling pharmacist from a secular Jewish/Yiddish culture that effectively dislocated the Polonsky family, as with most Jews, from the dominant American culture. This combination of an educated family living in close proximity to the working class and never themselves particularly financially secure sowed the seeds of a later political radicalism that would flower in the collective struggles of the 1930s. Polonsky's family spoke Yiddish as well as English. Buhle and Wagner note that Yiddish is the vernacular hybrid language of the Jewish working class: it is musical, ironic, and skilled in storytelling.

Polonsky studied at New York College in the early 1930s where he mixed in left-wing circles. He later taught English literature night classes there to help pay his way at Columbia Law School. During the 1930s Polonsky was working in a law firm with show business connections that included the radio producer, writer, and star Gertrude Berg. Polonsky ended up writing scripts for her radio shows and had a first trip to Hollywood on a screenwriting project for Berg in 1937.

In 1935 the Soviet Comintern that fixed policy for Communist Parties around the world delivered a volte face. Where previously social democracy and fascism had been seen as virtually the same thing, both to be swept away by the coming revolution, the new policy formulated the Popular Front. Now social democracy was to be protected against fascism and alliances between the Left and progressive liberals and even bourgeois political forces, were to be encouraged. In the context of F.D. Roosevelt's New Deal, this gave a tremendous opportunity for the American Left to increase their political and cultural reach. Polonsky joined the Communist Party in 1936 and married Sylvia Marrow, a militant fellow Communist, in 1937.

Polonsky began writing pulp fiction in the early 1940s. His book, The Enemy Sea (1942), was serialized in a magazine. A wartime adventure story, it has the usual Polonsky proto-feminist female lead and a three-dimensional black proletarian character who heroically aids the white detective/journalist lead protagonist. When America joined the World War in late 1941, Polonsky, then in his thirties, enlisted in the OSS (forerunner to the CIA) and was sent to London where he later joined the D-Day invasion force. After the war he returned to Hollywood to pick up his career. The period from 1945 to the late 1940s provided a moment pregnant with possibilities, but also a moment when the forces of reaction were beginning to consolidate themselves, readying to go on the attack. The Cold War gave them the opportunity to attack progressive forces inside America.

The significance of Polonsky's contribution to film culture for the authors is that he developed a new form of film, drawn from popular generic material but given artistic expressiveness and grounded in political critique. This made Polonsky an anticipatory figure in the 1940s for a new form of political filmmaking that would flower, in an American context, in the 1960s and early 1970s. Polonsky contributed essays to Hollywood Quarterly, America's first serious film journal. He wrote a detailed analysis of William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), considered by many as a breakthrough in cinematic realism. Polonsky argued that the film "indicates for every director and writer that the struggle for content, for social reality, no matter how limited the point of view, is a necessary atmosphere for growth in the American film." (105) Polonsky argued that Wyler's film "smashes the stereotypes, around the edges," (105) but that it is also ultimately unable to deal with class or show the limits of merely individual solutions to collective problems.

Polonsky's next major contribution to the growth in American film was as screenwriter for Body and Soul (1947) starring John Garfield and directed by Robert Rossen with whom Polonsky worked closely. It was produced by Enterprise, one of the small independent production companies that were beginning to emerge in the wake of growing anti-trust action against the big studios. The film was a proletarian boxing movie that targeted the capitalist fetishism of money and its corruption of personal and class ties. Buhle and Wagner map out the basic template of a Polonsky narrative: "The broad...arc of the Polonsky story encompasses anyone who has left behind a family (or a lover who holds out the promise of a family), or co workers, neighbours, political colleagues, or even a class or tribe — in short his community of human beings — to pursue a goal that alienates him from them and makes him yearn for a reunion." (112)

The success of Body and Soul allowed Polonsky to direct Force of Evil (1948), again starring John Garfield, a film that Martin Scorcese was later to describe as a significant influence on him as a young filmmaker. Buhle and Wagner identify the film's steely thematic and ideological innovations, as well as the self-censorship institutionalized by the studio system: "In one sense or another, everyone in Force of Evil is a cheap hood. Here is a world unlike anything ever seen in Hollywood. No colourful, redemptive poor people hold out hope for humanity with swelling speeches, no grandfatherly voices resound with reassuring clichés. Only illusion and disillusion exist for a gaunt population.... This hopelessness, which emphatically includes the world of law enforcement, destined Force of Evil's production for interference. The Breen office literally rejected the original script, and Polonsky had to rewrite the ending and add some dialogue before shooting could begin." (119)

But the McCarthyite witch-hunts were now to sweep through Hollywood (as elsewhere) and bring Polonsky's promising career to an end. Other Left screenwriters such as Walter Bernstein, Dalton Trumbo, Lillian Helman, Carl Foreman, and Waldo Salt suffered a similar fate. However, despite the closure on aesthetic and ideological progressiveness which the Red-baiting years brought, McCarthyism could not achieve a total closure on the progressive pedagogic influence of the Left in popular culture. Thus Polonsky, with fellow blacklistee Walter Bernstein, worked in the new medium of television in the 1950s. They did this by getting non-blacklisted writers to put their names to the scripts they wrote ("fronts" as they were called). Bernstein and Polonsky wrote for a television history programme that brought modern televisual techniques to the representation of history. Starring Walter Cronkite, You Are There was a landmark innovation in televisual historiography.

Polonsky returned to screenwriting for films in 1959, writing the script for Odds Against Tomorrow pseudonymously. Directed by Robert Wise and starring Harry Belafonte (who produced it), Ed Begley and Robert Ryan, this little B-movie is a hard-as-diamond heist movie and a brilliant antidote to the kind of liberal films about black and white relations starring Sidney Poitier of the same period. The film ends apocalyptically with Belafonte and Ryan blowing themselves up on top of gas storage tanks. The Watts riots and the rise of the Black Panthers were only a few years away.

Polonsky returned to film directing in 1969 with his revisionist contemporary western, Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, starring Robert Redford as the white sheriff and Robert Blake as a Piute Indian. This film, with its critical stance on the values and assumptions of white America, fit very well with this period in American cinema which, in the context of the Vietnam War and the crisis in the Hollywood studios, saw some of the finest critical interrogations of genre cinema that American filmmakers have ever been allowed to produce. Ill health cut short Polonsky's second bite of the cherry in terms of film directing, but he remained a lucid and witty raconteur on his life and times right up until his death. On making films he once noted: "Nothing is better; perhaps revolution, but there you have to succeed and be right, dangers which never attach themselves to making movies, and dreaming." (212) Buhle and Wagner have also succeeded in bringing Polonksy's history back to life: both he and the book deserve the attention.


Mike Wayne Brunel University, UK

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