Abraham Polonsky, 88, Dies; Director Damaged by Blacklist (original) (raw)
Movies|Abraham Polonsky, 88, Dies; Director Damaged by Blacklist
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- Oct. 29, 1999
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October 29, 1999
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Section B, Page
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Abraham Polonsky, a director and screenwriter who was an early Hollywood master of film noir and who worked under many disguises after being blacklisted in the McCarthy era, died on Tuesday at his home in Beverly Hills. He was 88.
His movies included ''Force of Evil,'' a 1948 film about racketeering in which he directed the actor John Garfield. In 1996 Stephen Holden, the New York Times film critic, describing that performance and others, wrote that ''you can still feel the dangerous urban-realist kick'' although the work came from ''a time when Hollywood films still aspired to a genteel, upper-middle-class sense of values.''
The previous year, Mr. Polonsky had won an Oscar nomination for writing the screenplay for ''Body and Soul,'' in which Garfield played a money-mad boxer.
In the early 1950's, Mr. Polonsky refused to testify about his Communist Party affiliations or name party members. His refusal prompted 20th Century Fox to fire him.
He was then unable to find work under his own name for nearly two decades; he had only nine films to his credit.
''If you said you were sorry you were a radical and had seen the errors of your ways, you were let off,'' Mr. Polonsky said in an interview in 1968.
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