Abraham Lincoln Polonsky (December 5, 1910 – October 26, 1999) was an American film director, screenwriter, essayist and novelist. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Body and Soul (1947). The following year, he wrote and directed Force of Evil (1948), which was later hailed by Martin Scorsese and others as one of the finest achievements of American film noir. However, it was to be Polonsky's last credited film for more than twenty years. In April 1951, he refused to cooperate or "name names" to the House Un-American Activities Committee and was blacklisted by the movie studios.
Abraham Polonsky was born in New York City, the eldest son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Henry and Rebecca (née Rosoff). Polonsky would later say, "I'm the son of a pharmacist, il dottore, from a Sicilian neighborhood on the East Side where we lived after the Bronx." He attended DeWitt Clinton High School with classmates that included future film composer Bernard Herrmann.
In 1928, he entered City College of New York (CCNY). While there, he became entranced with the writings of Marcel Proust. Polonsky's initial literary efforts show the influence of the French author. Among Polonsky's close college friends were Paul Goodman and Leonard Boudin. After graduating, Polonsky earned his law degree in 1935 at Columbia Law School. He had paid his way by teaching night classes at CCNY in English literature and writing. A committed Marxist, Polonsky joined the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) in 1936. The following year he married his longtime sweetheart, Sylvia Marrow. They had two children.
As a young lawyer, Polonsky participated in union politics and also established and edited a left-wing newspaper, The Home Front, for the CIO. After a few years of law practice, mixed with teaching at CCNY, he decided to devote himself to writing. He wrote essays, radio scripts, novels and an occasional play. His first novel, The Goose is Cooked, written with Mitchell A. Wilson under the singular pseudonym of Emmett Hogarth, was published in 1940. His next novel, The Enemy Sea (1943), was serialized in Collier's magazine and was noticed by Paramount Pictures.
Meanwhile, the U.S. had entered World War II, and Polonsky wanted to enlist. However, as "a man over thirty with thick glasses", he had difficulty getting accepted by any military branch. Finally, based on a tip from his brother, he joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) (forerunner of the CIA). Shortly before being sent overseas, he signed a five-year contract with Paramount, starting at $250 a week. Because his family needed the money, he asked General "Wild Bill" Donovan of the OSS how he could keep the Paramount job. Donovan said, "[G]reat, it'll make a good cover story. So he gave me a letter instructing Paramount to say I'd been hired to do a documentary on the bombing of England."
Polonsky served in Europe with the OSS from 1943 to 1945, mainly working as a liaison with the French Resistance, and sometimes operating behind enemy lines. He wrote and directed radio programs on clandestine OSS stations. His programs intermixed American jazz, which German soldiers tuned in to, with U.S.-supplied information. Polonsky recalled: "When a German sub went down the Germans never admitted it. But we knew who was on the sub, who went down, his name, address, and all the rest. We broadcast all that to their families as they listened to the jazz. A lot of people listened." Among his other OSS assignments was interviewing Nazi defector Rudolf Hess, and participating in the D-Day landing while posing in his intelligence capacity as an army major.
Polonsky returned to the movie industry after the war. He helped launch the academic film journal Hollywood Quarterly (now titled Film Quarterly), and contributed several essays. His first screenplay credit for Paramount Pictures was Golden Earrings (1947), directed by Mitchell Leisen. His next project would change the trajectory of his career. He was loaned out by Paramount to Enterprise Studios to write a boxing story for John Garfield. Polonsky's original screenplay for the Robert Rossen-directed Body and Soul (1947), also starring Lilli Palmer, became an enormous critical and box-office success. The screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award. Body and Soul gave Polonsky leverage to direct his own film. As he recalled in a 1997 interview, "there's nothing like having a hit."
For his initial directorial effort, Polonsky chose to adapt Ira Wolfert's 1943 novel, Tucker's People. The story centers on a moral conflict between two brothers: one is a crooked lawyer who has grown rich in the numbers racket, and the other is a struggling small-time operator who still wants to maintain his integrity and decency. Unlike Body and Soul, Force of Evil was not a commercial success when released in the U.S. But after a while it came to be praised by film critics in France and England, and since then its reputation has continued to soar. It is now recognized as a high point of American film noir. Andrew Sarris would later call Force of Evil "one of the great films of modern American cinema." Polonsky's biographers noted that when Martin Scorsese sponsored the re-release of the movie on videotape in 1996, he introduced it on-screen as "the gem of neglected 1940s art cinema and a major influence on his own work." In 1994, Force of Evil was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant".
Polonsky's career as a director and a credited screenwriter was abruptly halted when the Second Red Scare gripped the film industry. In April 1951, he was named as a Communist to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) by Richard J. Collins, Sterling Hayden, and Meta Rosenberg. Later that month, on April 25, 1951, Polonsky was summoned before the committee. He refused to answer questions, instead invoking the Fifth Amendment's shield against self-incrimination. He also refused to answer whether his wife Sylvia had been a CPUSA member.
Only once during his testimony did Polonsky offer a response. He was asked for the names of the men he worked with in the OSS. He replied, "It's none of your business." Before he could be pressed to answer a follow-up question about whether he signed an OSS loyalty oath, a dark-suited man hurried up to the dais and whispered in HUAC Chairman John Wood's ear. Polonsky later said, "He told them to stop right away. The guy in the suit was an intelligence operative, and even he knew I shouldn't answer that question. All those guys I'd been with in the OSS were now in the CIA." At that point in the proceedings, Congressman Harold Velde (R-IL) recognized that Polonsky possessed a unique set of qualities: successful Hollywood filmmaker, suspected Communist, and former intelligence agent. Velde stated, "in refusing to answer whether or not you signed a loyalty oath when you went into the OSS, you leave me with the impression that you are a very dangerous citizen." The "very dangerous citizen" label instantly became a headline in The Hollywood Reporter and ensured Polonsky would be blacklisted. The phrase was later used as the title of a Polonsky biography.
From 1953 to 1955, Polonsky wrote 24 episodes (including the premiere episode, "The Landing of the Hindenburg", directed by Sidney Lumet) of the popular TV series, You Are There. Hosted by Walter Cronkite, the 30-minute educational show reenacted famous days in history. Polonsky crafted the tag line that Cronkite closed with: "What kind of a day was it? A day like all days, filled with those events that alter and illuminate our time...and YOU WERE THERE!" Polonsky's work was uncredited, as was the work of his frequent writing partners and fellow blacklistees, Walter Bernstein and Arnold Manoff. The three blacklisted writers met regularly in a New York City restaurant to discuss, and offer assistance with, the scripts they were working on. Their ability to still sell scripts while blacklisted relied on finding "fronts" – individuals who would agree to put their name on the blacklistee's script and pose as the screenwriter in conferences with the show's producer. The restaurant meetings between Bernstein, Manoff, and Polonsky were later dramatized by Bernstein in the 1976 film, The Front. In 1955, William Dozier, executive producer of You Are There, informed the network of the true identities of the three writers and they were immediately fired.