Still Dangerous: Abraham Polonsky, his Legacy and the Question of Hollywood Radicalism in the 20th and 21st Century
Billy Stanton
Abstract
Abraham Polonsky was blacklisted in Hollywood after the release of Force of Evil (Polonsky, 1948), in the aftermath of the House of UnAmerican Activities Committee hearings. Today he holds a contradictory standing as a hugely influential director on figures such as Martin Scorsese, while being under-studied by much of academia and the critical establishment, and ignored in mainstream Hollywood histories. As critics accuse recent Hollywood works such as The Dark Knight (Nolan, 2008) of a status-quo supporting position it is worth analysing the continuing influence of the blacklist and general ‘Red Scare’ on modern Hollywood cinema and its politics, and the legacy and understanding of past radical voices such as Abraham Polonsky.
Key Words
Radicalism, Marxism, Legacy, Status-Quo, Establishment, Communism, Auteur, Obscure, Dichotomy, Rebel
Introduction
Abraham Polonsky, an admitted Marxist, can be placed as an auteur based upon conventional scholarship based upon the Sarris model, and a ‘radical’ as a result of his political beliefs, as demonstrated by the anti-capitalism of Body and Soul (Rossen, 1947) and Force of Evil (Polonsky, 1948) and the anti-American imperialism and anti-racism of Tell Them Willie Boy is Here (Polonsky, 1968), his directorial return after the blacklist era. The dichotomy, however, places Polonsky as having a “high-standing in and considerable influence on the rest of the left-of-centre film community” (2001: 231-232) and also as Caryn James put it, being an “obscure director” (1996, cited in Buhle and Wagner, 2001).
Polonsky’s anticipation of the future
In discussing this dichotomy of reputation, and with Polonsky posited as a highly moral and ‘radical’ auteur, it is worth starting on as purely cinematic grounds as possible with Buhle and Wagner’s comment that the “…great majority of Hollywood’s moody rebellion films in the second half of the century” featured an “inner emptiness” that adopted “a radical verbalism which accepts the status quo”. (2001: 107) Buhle and Wagner state that “Force of Evil, in particular, in particular has fairly come to stand for that class of films that had used the already highly stylized conventions of crime stories, westerns, and other familiar American film genres to create critical social messages”. (2001: 125) This echoes the genre deconstructionism/playfulness of, in particular, Christopher Nolan and the Coen Brothers, as outlined below.
Politics of Contemporary Hollywood Auteurs
While Christopher Nolan and the Coen Brothers would meet the Sarris model of authorship/auteurism for the consistency and skill of their technique, style and the rich, continuing interior message of their films they are not particularly ‘radical’ in political or thematic message while still “adopting a radical verbalism” (2001:107), of sorts, in their film-making style, aesthetics and narrative and genre construction. The work of Nolan that has received the most critical attention, and analysis on a political level, is his Dark Knight trilogy, consisting of Batman Begins (Nolan, 2005), The Dark Knight (Nolan, 2008) and The Dark Knight Rises (Nolan, 2012).
A contemporary review by Mike Davies of The Birmingham Post, entitled “Dark Knight rules the super- hero genre” is fairly typical of many of the mainstream contemporary responses to Nolan’s film(s), stating that film is “the most thematically sophisticated, most philosophically profound, most narratively complex and most viscerally thrilling super-hero movie of all. It transcends the genre.” (2008). This bears some similarity to the comments on Polonsky and genre from Buhle and Wagner, but the shift away from radicalism towards the status-quo in Nolan’s film is emphasised by the famous essay by Andrew Klavan, published in the Wall Street Journal and entitled ““What Bush and Batman Have in Common”.
Klavan, in particular, draws on the film’s apparent metaphorical support of the surveillance state, and the use of torture to extract information from ‘official enemies’, both methods of tracking and defeating the film’s antagonist the ‘Joker’ as employed by Batman, the protagonist. According to Klavan the film supports the official line on the War on Terror that was emerging from the American government.
Jonathan Rosenbaum states The Hudsucker Proxy (Coen, 1994) and Fargo (Coen, 1996) is often read as deriving from “the comedies of Preston Sturges and Frank Capra” (1994). He questions this film’s connections to the aesthetics and themes of these comedies however, and criticises what Buhle and Wagner might term the film’s “inner emptiness”. Rosenbaum also draws comparison between a more radical Hollywood era that Polonsky was a major part of in, comparing the central families of the film adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath (Ford, 1940) and Fargo (Coen, 1996). He states:
“if the Joads in 1940 stood for some sort of populist triumph over social injustice and adversity, the salt-of-the-earth Gundersons become expendable as soon as they serve their prescribed function — which is to validate our amused tolerance for good-hearted folks with funny accents and down-home truths surviving in an absurd universe. But the world they inhabit is devoid of other meaning, too grim to make their survival count for much more than first place in the Coens’ hit parade of favorite hicks.” (1996)
This populist triumph, as defined by Rosenbaum, can be compared to that of the lead character in Body and Soul and as such Rosenabum’s comparison can be widened to suggest a broader turn from a political and moral certainty and radicalism to something approach a neutralism or status quo support, which is also reflected for Rosenbaum in how closely Fargo skews to the conventions and traditions of mainstream television comedy.
The Reasons For Contemporary Hollywood’s Politics
Buhle and Wagner tell that Polonsky, in an interview with Screen in 1970,stated that “the studios only permitted liberals and conservatives the self-confidence to make strong political films” (1970, cited in Buhle and Wagner, 2001). This seems to be what Buhle and Wagner suggest also, with the period of the Red Scare and the blacklist succeeding in removing much of the radical or subversive film-makers and collaborators in Hollywood (including Polonsky’s star, John Garfield) and creating a new Hollywood in which the confidence of both the pre-war and post-war left was gone and any leftist figure “was carefully watched and knew it”. (2001: 124).
Buhle and Wagner also state that since “conservatives seem to have ignored Polonsky after destroying his early career” the “one thing that admirers and detractors have in common… their reflexive liberalism” has served to “mischaracterize and misunderstand his work” (2001: 204). For Buhle and Wagner, the shifts to more moderate political positions in Hollywood, especially those that seemingly support much of the status quo, are a result of a post-blacklist shift away from forms of political radicalism and ‘extremism’ that has resulted in almost a consensus when judging the work of Polonsky (and perhaps in a broader understanding and reading of cinema by a more general film community) that responds either in something approaching shock and disgust, as in the case of liberal critic Pauline Kael, who Buhle and Wagner quote as writing off the film for it’s “schematic Marxism” (1969, cited in Buhle and Wagner, 2001). According to Buhle and Wagner, her negative “capsule review of the film [Tell Them Willie Boy is Here] ran in the New Yorker for months.” (2001: 2004) Indeed, Buhle and Wagner state that, in the case of Force of Evil, “a general view- even among some admirers- has been that it attracted, in Robert Sklar’s phrase, ‘a certain excess of praise.’” (1992, cited in Buhle and Wagner, 2001)
The premier piece of scholarship and critical writing on Polonsky seems to be suggesting that a post- blacklist fear or uneasiness with Marxism may be why Polonsky’s films remain inaccurately and insufficiently examined. The “left-of-centre” (2001: 232-3) community, that Buhle and Wagner previously discussed, smaller and with much less influence in the United States than it was during the pre-blacklist era, may be the only part of the critical and academic community which is capable or, perhaps more accurately, willing to fairly and accurately assess Polonsky and the quality and content of his work.
However there is still the possibility of sorts that the lack of due attention paid to Polonsky may also result from elements of that left-of-centre community. Kael associated Tell Them Willie Boy is Here with “the New-Left” (2001: 204), and much has been written on how the New Left and it’s influence on left-wing, radical politics in the twenty-first century is based on ‘identity politics’ over issues of class and economic inequality and wealth redistribution. Nancy Fraser, writing for the New-Left Review in 2000, stated that:
“Once the hegemonic grammar of political contestation, the language of distribution is less salient today. Thanks to the sustained neoliberal rhetorical assault on egalitarianism, to the absence of any credible model of ‘feasible socialism’ and to widespread doubts about the viability of state-Keynesian social democracy in the face of globalization, their role has been greatly reduced.” (2000: 108)
While Body and Soul and Force of Evil deal somewhat with identity politics, and Tell Them Willie Boy is Here is, as Kael points out, the closest Polonsky came to making a “New Left” (2001: 204) film, it’s possible that, if as Fraser suggests issues of ‘identity’ and have reduced discussions on the subject of economic inequality (and thus issues of class), then the economic Marxist elements of Polonsky’s work may make some of Polonsky’s finest films seemingly irrelevant for parts of the contemporary ‘left-of-centre’. This may further explain why Polonsky can remain relatively unlauded as a radical and as an auteur, still, somehow, a figure of ‘high standing’ and an ‘obscure director’
Conclusion
In short, it is easy to see that contemporary Hollywood productions within the studio system, emphasised by the work of Christopher Nolan, has moved towards a support of the status quo, and Abraham Polonsky’s standing, as an auteur worthy of study, has been adversely effected by this lingering influence of the blacklist, and the changes in left-wing scholarship.
Bibliography
Buhle, P and Wagner, D, A Very Dangerous Citizen, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 2001.
Davies, M. (2008). Dark Knight rules the super-hero genre . Available: http://www.birminghampost.co.uk/whats-on/film-tv/dark-knight-rules-super-hero-genre-3958051. Last accessed 12/05/15.
Fraser, N. (2000). RETHINKING RECOGNITION. New Left Review. 2 (3), 107-120.
Klavan, A . (2008). What Bush and Batman Have in Common. Available: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB121694247343482821. Last accessed 11/05/15.
Rosenbaum, J. (1994 (Orig. Publication in The Chicago Reader, April 1st, 1994)). Kids Stuff [THE HUDSUCKER PROXY]. Available: http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/1994/04/kids-stuff/. Last accessed 11/05/15. Rosenbaum, J. (1996). The Human Touch The Decalogue / Fargo. Available: http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/the-human-touch/Content?oid=890068. Last accessed 12/05/15.