Force of Evil (1948)
Director:
Abraham Polonsky
Starring:
John Garfield
Thomas Gomez
Marie Windsor
This is a film about brilliant men who come up with a sophisticated plan to take over numbers racketeering in New York. The film is notable for its dialogue, which is quite often just as interesting as the plot. John Garfield is a standout in this film, and he provides a complex character involved a complex scheme. His motivations are simple, however: greed and jealousy.
The Plot
Joe Morse is a lawyer who is plugged into the mob. Always looking for a new way to make a buck—preferably a dirty one—the mobster he’s working for, Tucker, wants to take over the entire numbers racket in New York City. The idea is one that anyone familiar with how corporations work today will understand. There’s likely a bit of intentional irony in all of it. Basically, they’re going to launch a sort of hostile takeover of all the other players in the numbers game.
The focus of their operation is the many small banks that participate in the numbers racket around town. Joe has a brother, Leo, who runs one of those banks, and is very content doing so. Though his operation is slightly shady, he considers his employees family, and he is otherwise honest. Joe is convinced enough of his own brilliance that he sees the scheme, which would kill Leo’s bank, as one that will rescue Leo and bring him up to the big leagues.
Joe’s convinced that greed and wanting to get more are the natural order of things. He thinks that people who give things away wanting nothing in return represent perversions.
Joe has it all. He’s good with the ladies. Doris, who is all sweetness and innocence, falls for him. Even she knows he’s a shady character, but she’s attracted to his refined bad-boy charm. In this film, however, it’s not a femme fatale who drives the action—or the men to ruin—it’s the men themselves.
Eventually, another mobster figures out that something’s going on and starts to muscle his way around. An investigator is also onto the fact that there’s a plot afoot and starts to investigate, tapping phones to get information.
As the drama unfolds, there are some truly distressing scenes. The dialogue in this film is really what stands out. The characters are believable. Leo’s men are good people and they just want to make a decent living. Leo is really a good guy. He’s sympatric and doesn’t want to get pulled into the scheme, but he’s on the edge of the underworld and it’s inevitable that it’s going to happen. The way the characters talk defines them. Joe’s cocky staccato, Tucker’s business-like way of speaking. and Leo’s sincerity are all apparent in how they deliver their lines.
There are deaths in this film and they are heart-wrenching. The violence is, of course, not as pronounced as it would be in a modern film, but that almost makes it harder to take at times.
In the end, this film delivers in terms of being a powerful story.
The Dialogue
This movie is full of quotable lines. “A man can spend the rest of life trying to remember what he shouldn’t have said,” is one of the better ones. The writing in this film is superb. It’s not exaggerating or being hyperbolic to say that it’s brilliant. The characters talk in a way that is sophisticated and every line in this movie drips with meaning. There are no throwaway lines in this film and, because of that, it’s worth watching more than once.
The film’s characters also introduce their inner natures through their dialogue. This is taking a longstanding rule of writing—show, don’t tell—and turning it on its head. The result is the sort of thing that few writers could ever pull off so well.
Repetition is used heavily in this film. The characters repeat things they’ve just said, driving home the importance. In a lesser film, this could have come off as comical, but it doesn’t here. It’s somehow barely noticeable, given that the plot just keeps moving forward at all times.
That, perhaps, is one of the strengths of this film that many other noir films cannot match. The numbers game was complex and dirty and, in reality, the average person was as able to understand it as they are able to understand short sales, derivatives or other stock market complexities. In this film, however, the focus of the story is how the numbers game and, more specifically, how the plot surrounding it, affects the people involved.
Joe’s narration, which details a lot of the action in the film, is also a nice surprise. In many films of this era, narrators tend to be rather wooden or sound too much like radio announcers, distancing the audience from the experience. Joe’s narration fits perfectly. He’s eloquent and to-the-point. His narration is some of the best dialogue in the film. When he finds out the awful consequences of his schemes at the end of the film, the tone is matter-of-fact, perfect for a character who sees the world in terms of winners and losers, but who has just made some critical observations: The game doesn’t turn out entirely fair, and the people who pay the worst consequences are sometimes those who didn’t want to be involved.
The Look
This film features the type of rich, dark filmmaking that makes film noir in general so memorable. Between the all-around excellent performances and the great camera work, it’s a pleasure to watch this film. It’s odd that it doesn’t get as much notice as some of the other films featured here. It is listed in the National Film Registry and, given how well it’s executed, this should come as no surprise.
The New York scenery is particularly well represented on-screen. The black and white format lends tremendous detail to the environment, making every brick stand out. Sometimes, particularly in one of the ending scenes, the endless straight lines that constitute the cityscape are dizzying. When Joe descends a long flight of stairs, the effect is almost as if he is going down the side of a cliff, given the way the camera is positioned and the height of the stairs.
This film does capture the darkness of the city and it does it very well. In that regard, it will make any film noir fan pleased. The experience of watching this film is visceral in terms of how the camera relates to the environment and communicates what it sees to the audience. Shadows and lines are used particularly well.
Where character shots are concerned, Force of Evil does not disappoint, either. There are some tremendous acting moments in this film. When Joe works through a set of numbers, lecturing a politician to take care of his end while the gangsters take care of theirs, he’s all business. He’s as cold and factual as the numbers he’s crunching. “When 776 hits,” a line you’ll hear throughout the movie, his single-mindedness comes through in spades.
Edna Tucker, slinking around in the bedroom while Joe make a call, implies that Joe makes her feel necessary. He coldly says that doing so would be a mistake on his part and goes back to his phone call.
Appreciating This Film Noir
This film noir manages to hit all the right notes for a film of this type and, at the same time, take the genre into new territory. Joe wants to help his brother and says as much many times. The two are opposites in many regards, however, principally in how they see people.
Joe is a good representation of capitalism at its coldest. He just wants to take over the numbers racket, make his fortune and be somebody. Leo, on the other hand, is the more romantic ideal. He owns a bank and he does collect his debt, but he has a heart and he allows it to guide him. When Joe insists that Leo let Joe help him, Leo asks that Joe get one of the employees at the bank a job on Wall Street. Leo might be in a shady business, but he’s not a shady person. Joe doesn’t see himself as shady, but he shows many of the signs of psychopathy so common in characters in these films.
Joe sees the entire world as somehow a reflection of himself. He’s just looking in a mirror. He tells Doris that she’s wicked and that she wants him to be wicked to her. Doris is hardly wicked. Naive and fascinated by wickedness, but she doesn’t see anything wrong with giving something and not taking anything in return. She’s immediately treated to one of Joe’s monologues about how greed is good, to use the popular expression.
This film is excellent in just about every regard and any film noir fan should take to it easily. The plot is involving and the dialogue and quality of the writing make it feel like a very grown-up film.
Of course, Joe’s plan does go through and 776 does win, but the consequences are grim. Within a half an hour of the film’s start, everything is going much darker and the repercussions of the scheme are becoming apparent. Joe has plenty of money, Leo struggles and, when Joe makes his big play and tries to tell Leo that everything’s going to work out, Leo is resentful. He didn’t want this world and his wife, Silvia, certainly didn’t want it either.
There’s a great cynicism in this movie. One brother gets exactly what he wants and the other gets what he didn’t want. For both, the end results are awful and it makes this film particularly dark. There is some foreshadow of movies to come, notably Wall Street.
An Even Sadder Ending
John Garfield lived a very short life. Some biographers suggest, this was due to him getting caught up in one of the most shameful episodes in US history, with the resulting stress aggravating an underlying heart condition.
Garfield, had some leftist leanings. Some say this film shows that. He was also Jewish and, in the paranoid environment of the Red Scare, this made him a target for the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He advocated for the opposition to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, The Committee for the First Amendment. He was called to testify before them and denied being a communist. He also, on principle, refused to name anyone else as a communist. This resulted in his getting placed on the blacklist, which ended the full potential of his career. Throughout his short life, he was the precise opposite of Joe. He was principled, courageous and even took roles where he played second fiddle to other actors because he believed in the messages of the films.
Garfield died in 1952 at the age of 39. Though his life was tragically short, he starred in one of the best, classic noir films and influenced some of the most well-known actors in following decades. Force of Evil is a fine example of an actor taking a role to its limit and beyond, and giving the audience an experience that they’ll certainly remember.
Force of Evil can be seen as a parable about the evils of capitalism without a heart, but it’s much more than that, much more than the paranoid zealots on the House Committee on Un-American Activities could likely understand. It’s a dark tale, to be sure, and one that tells of the evils of greed, but Leo is a banker in this film and he’s also a hero of sorts.
Oscar Night 