A great film noir that use poetic dialogue to the best, it can. Force of Evil, based on the novel, Tucker's People is directed by Abraham Polonsky in his directing debut. Sadly, Polonsky would be blacklist in the 1950's Red Scare and rarely made any more films. The film tells the story of a lawyer, Joe Morse (Garfield), working for a powerful gangster, Tucker, who wishes to consolidate and control the number racket in New York when everybody around him wants to quit it before it gets violent. Joe Morse to be the very best, has to step on a few familiar faces to take control. One of which is a smaller number racket by Morse's older brother Leo Morse. He's willing to snitch on his friends and family if it takes him to the top. The movie is full of messages about the different between good and bad, and also have frequent biblical allusions ranging from Abel & Cain, Juda's betrayal and stigmata. It's a great poetic, literary speech that Abraham Polonsky & Ira Wolfert wrote in Force of Evil. The dialogue is rich and ornate that it resembles a modern urban verse play.The lines are catchy. Most of the speeches is lush, incantatory in its repetitive rhythms, and plays like a soliloquy. He wrote with a fatalistic moral vision, a view of a world filled with kaleidoscopically complex nuances & ironies. The story arc is almost allegorical, interpretation keeps intruding on the tougher elements of the plot. This factor adds no distinction and only makes the going tougher. Garfield, as to be expected, comes through with a performance that gets everything out of the material furnished. Unburdening himself of conflicted feelings about his own corruption, Joe Morse plays a syndicate lawyer, but secretly brutal. With each bad intention, he intellectual reexamining the premises of his life more and more. A great film noir that uses the numbers racket as a metaphor for the pervasive corruption in life. Polonsky makes elaborate form of dialogue that plays in a way, that it's sounds like confessional meditation on morality. What's great in Force of Evil is just the fact that not all gangsters talk like a thug. Also to note in this terse, melodramatic thriller is the realist location photography. The New York locale shots give authenticity. Great use of shadows, and classical music. Check it out if a huge fan of film noir. It's one of the better ones.
Review of Force of Evil
