Force of Evil (1948)

Force of Evil (1948) is a classic New York numbers racket conflicted brothers pre-HUAC and voiced-over film noir with many biblical allusions (Cain and Abel, Judas's betrayal, stigmata) which pits a rising Wall Street lawyer against the modernising principles of post-war capitalism and the fascinating blue-collar practise of playing the numbers game.

Film noir is darkness, film noir is crime and film noir is human folly . . . writ large and personal, as a force of evil.  Film noir renders a cinema of weakness, deceit, lust-inspired crime, greed and mid-century urban survival.  

In the film noir city disasters are acted out in bars, cars and street corners, or in cheerless apartments, suggestive of a kind of homelessness.

The high contrast lighting is central, as is the downward plot spiral which so many noir characters take. 

Force of Evil (1948) has it all. What's impressive about Force of Evil is the education one receives about the numbers game in New York in the 1940s.

The racket adds a layer of complexity that makes Force of Evil seem way more sophisticated than it is — and this is a great trick.

In essence Force of Evil is a story of two brothers, played by John Garfield and Thomas Gomez.The elder one, played by Gomez, has effectively ruined himself bringing up the younger prodigal brother, but Garfield has been seduced by crime, Wall Street, flash living and everything else the urban jungle has to offer at the top end of its vices.

Wall Street is what we see first in film noir Force of Evil (1948)

The numbers racket is nowhere better portrayed than in Force of Evil. It's an education, this movie. The voiceover in Force of Evil (1948) may seem certainly trivial but it is kind of essential at the same time, for explaining this system of so-called 'banks' across NYC.

John Garfield in Force of Evil (1948)

Abraham Polonsky's 1948 feature Force of Evil remains one of the few films to articulate the American Dream as a waking nightmare. At once austere and baroque, the film presents an excoriating critique of post-war capitalism while cloaking itself in the noir idiom: rain-slick streets, moral ambivalence, chiaroscuro lighting, and voices laden with a poetic anguish. Here is a work not merely content to tell a story, but determined to reconfigure its audience’s perception of their society. 

It is no coincidence that the film appeared in 1948, a year of mounting Cold War tension, a tightening Hollywood blacklist, and an emergent American prosperity that cloaked, with increasing sophistication, its own contradictions. Into this fraught climate Polonsky, a committed Marxist and first-time director, launched a cinematic essay masquerading as a crime drama.

John Garfield, himself politically embattled and later blacklisted, gives one of his most sophisticated performances as Joe Morse, a corporate lawyer whose task is to assist the consolidation of New York City's numbers racket into a single, streamlined criminal empire. Joe’s smooth cynicism, however, is fissured by familial loyalty: his older brother Leo, played with thunderous sorrow by Thomas Gomez, is a small-time operator doomed to be crushed by the very system Joe is midwifing. 

Their fraternal antagonism, drawn with the rigor of a classical tragedy, allows Polonsky to yoke the narrative of Cain and Abel to a fevered portrait of America in the grip of capital.

Inside the 'numbers bank' with Thomas Gomez, John Garfield and Beatrice Pearson in classic film noir Force of Evil (1948)

It is tempting to read Force of Evil as an allegory, but allegory implies simplification. Polonsky's film is more ambiguous, more feverish. Joe is no villain, only a man who has made peace with the idea that "money's money" and wishes to rescue his brother from the ignominy of poverty through absorption into a system he knows to be corrupt. Leo, for his part, is no saint. He is petty, proud, and stubborn—an honest man only insofar as honesty remains an illusion he clings to like a talisman.

 

Both men are ensnared, and the tragedy is that one cannot save the other without condemning them both.

The visual style of Force of Evil, photographed by George Barnes, is both expressionist and documentary. The towering slabs of Manhattan architecture are rendered monumental, oppressive. Interiors are spare, austere, defined by vertical lines and deep shadows. 

The exterior sequences, especially the bridge and the descent to the river at the film's close, have a grandeur born of desolation. 

One thinks of Eisenstein not only in the montage sequences—notably the editing of the phone call that triggers the collapse of the small banks—but in the deliberate political use of image and rhythm. Art Seid's editing, often frenetic, reveals the formal influence of Soviet montage theory even as it serves the American crime genre.

Howard Chamberlain in Force of Evil (1948)

The screenplay, written by Polonsky and Ira Wolfert (adapting his own novel Tucker's People), is richly stylized, pushing the boundaries of genre dialogue into an idiom nearer to Shakespearean blank verse. Garfield delivers his voiceover narration as though reciting from some criminal Psalter, his cadences veering between fatalism and revelation. 

That Polonsky, a former novelist and union activist, would embrace such stylization is telling. The film is meant to jolt the audience not with realism, but with a surreal lucidity, a heightened awareness of the metaphysics of corruption.

The thematic armature of the film is built on contradiction: freedom and entrapment, love and betrayal, ethics and profit. Joe's arc is a gradual climb toward damnation under the guise of redemption. It is a biblical structure in the absence of divinity, a morality tale haunted by the absence of moral certainty. As the July Fourth date approaches—a day of ostensible national celebration—Joe seeks to engineer the ruin of the city's small-time bankers, including his own brother, by orchestrating a fixed number that will bankrupt them all. 

That this plan coincides with Independence Day is no coincidence. Polonsky stages this national celebration as a grotesque farce, a moment when personal and national illusions collapse together. The numbers racket becomes the economy in microcosm, the banker a gangster in a tailored suit, and vice versa. The State Lottery, the film implies, is simply a legalized version of the same corrupt scheme.

Within this framework, Force of Evil offers a searing vision of American modernity as inherently criminal. The system, not the individuals, is what Polonsky indicts. Characters are trapped in their roles—not out of moral failing, but structural compulsion. As Leo says, "You can’t be honest in this world." It is a statement of existential exhaustion, and in the mouth of Thomas Gomez it becomes almost sacred.

To understand the historical context of 1948 is to grasp the desperation and urgency of Polonsky's critique. That year, President Truman issued Executive Order 9835, institutionalizing the loyalty program that would fuel the blacklist. The Marshall Plan was launched, expanding American capital into Europe. The Cold War solidified, and domestic paranoia was on the rise. 

Polonsky, like many of his generation, had hoped that the defeat of fascism in World War II would inaugurate a more just society. Instead, he saw the consolidation of corporate power, the marginalization of labor, and the ascent of a cultural consensus that equated capitalism with liberty. Force of Evil is a howl against that consensus.

Among its many radical gestures, the film's depiction of its female characters demands attention. Beatrice Pearson, as Doris Lowry, embodies a kind of moral intelligence not present in the male characters. She is not a femme fatale in the traditional noir sense, nor is she the good girl awaiting rescue. 

Howard Chamberlain and Stanley Prager in Force of Evil (1948)

Rather, she exists in a liminal space, yes, wounded by experience but retaining a capacity for love, judgment, and action. Her relationship with Joe is never reduced to romantic banality; she interrogates him, challenges his assumptions, and sees clearly the cost of his compromises. In a genre that often instrumentalizes women as either temptresses or victims, Pearson's Doris is a startling presence: a woman who survives by choosing not to participate. The film's final moments, in which she accompanies Joe to the site of Leo's death, affirm her as both witness and conscience.

Stanley Prager in Force of Evil (1948)

Marie Windsor, often cast as a calculating femme fatale in other noirs (The Narrow Margin, The Killing), appears here in a muted role as Edna Tucker, wife of Joe’s gangster employer. Her presence, though brief, adds another layer of ambiguity to the film’s moral universe. She is neither loyal nor treacherous, merely practical—and it is that pragmatism, so often coded masculine, that gives her power. 

That Polonsky gives screen time to such women, even in an overwhelmingly male narrative, is part of the film's subversion of genre norms.

Howard Chamberlain in Force of Evil (1948)

The film noir influence is more than stylistic in Force of Evil; it is philosophical. Noir is not merely a genre of shadow and sin, but a cultural condition—a recognition that the promises of American democracy are haunted by systemic betrayal. The visual grammar of noir—reflected light, vertical compositions, off-kilter framing—finds its apotheosis here not in the service of suspense but of condemnation. Joe's descent to the riverbank, literal and spiritual, is the very trajectory of noir: a fall from illusion into a clarity so absolute it can only be called tragic.

Garfield’s performance, shaded with fatigue and fury, is among his finest. A former member of the Group Theatre and a proponent of method realism, Garfield brings a twitchy vulnerability to Joe Morse that makes his eventual disintegration feel inevitable. 

His scenes with Gomez vibrate with fraternal anguish, while his late interactions with Doris crackle with a tenderness alien to his former self. 

This is a man awakened too late, a man for whom revelation brings neither salvation nor release, only knowledge. That Garfield would die prematurely at 39, hounded by HUAC and abandoned by a craven industry, adds a bitter postscript to the film’s legacy.

Force of Evil is a landmark in the history of American cinema not because of its notoriety or its initial reception—it was dismissed or ignored by many contemporaneous critics—but because it refuses to comfort. It does not traffic in heroism or justice. It offers no moral equilibrium. Its characters do not transcend their world, they are consumed by it. 

In this, the film anticipates a later generation of American cinema: Scorsese's Mean Streets, Lumet's Serpico, Coppola's The Godfather, all owe something to Polonsky's bleak realism and operatic intensity. Scorsese himself has acknowledged the debt, citing Force of Evil as formative in his understanding of cinema as both personal expression and political weapon.

As a work of American social commentary, Force of Evil is singular in its rage and precision. It sees America not as a land of opportunity, but as a system of interlocking betrayals. It recognizes the myth of the self-made man as a fantasy erected on the bones of the expendable. And it dares to imagine that salvation might lie not in victory, but in refusal—in turning away, finally, from the very world that made one complicit.

In the broader history of the United States, the film reveals the dark undercurrents of the post-war boom: the conflation of legality with morality, the privatization of public ethics, the substitution of consumption for community. Polonsky dares to suggest that American capitalism is not merely flawed but diseased, and that those who serve it, even unwittingly, carry its contagion. It is a vision as radical now as it was then.

That Force of Evil survives, preserved by the National Film Registry and championed by later generations of cinephiles, is a testament to its durability. It remains an aesthetic triumph, a political indictment, a moral reckoning. It is, finally, an act of defiance: a film that speaks truth to power, in poetry and shadow, in blood and brass.

Can’t say if it’s an accurate portrayal, for sure, but we see inside the small ‘banks’ that collect the small change with which huge amounts of the population bet on which lucky number will come up in the newspaper that day — and I find these so memorable that they simply must have an element of truth to them.

It’s one of John Garfield’s many great film noir appearances, and he’s perfect for noir — slightly diminutive, gutsy and with a sharp attitude.

At school Garfield was something of a tearaway and he started acting and boxing, and he signed with Warner Brothers and was Oscar nominated for his debut, Four Daughters (1938).

A benign and hopeful film in so many ways. Benign music plays in the opening credit, for the secondary goodness that emerges in the relationship between the two brothers, and various others.

HUAC — which comes up all the time in noir — got Garfield however — another crime for which they shall never be forgiven.

Although Garfield wasn’t a political animal at all, he had in his past had associations with left wing theatre, and that was sufficient for the craven bloodhounds of McCarthy’s pack.  The talented John Garfield was officially blacklisted in 1951 for refusing to ‘name names’ and the stress of this certainly contributed to his heart attack and death, aged just 39.

Speaking of heart attack and death, playing Garfield’s brother Leo is Thomas Gomez, and he is perfect.  Gomez plays ‘heart condition’ to a tee, with his collar undone, always slightly out of breath and anxious — under pressure from money and his own body, so much so that Force of Evil is as much his as it is Garfield’s.

When we first see Thomas Gomez, counting pennies in his apartment-based rackets bank, we get the complete measure of his character — which is interestingly both angry, criminal and yet good to the core.

Gomez’s never ending care of his employees is touching, but his real tour de force is a description he gives of what it is like to die of a heart attack.  In a restaurant, shortly before his miserable end, he talks through the bodily sensations he feels — it’s just perfect.

As an aside, this restaurant scene in which the bank’s book-keeper sets up a kidnap and murder, is highly reminiscent of the restaurant murder central to the first Godfather film.

That should be the other way round — the Godfather is reminiscent of Force of Evil — and I find it hard to believe that Coppola wasn’t thinking of this scene when he set up his own brutal restaurant murder.

In its day, Force of Evil was somewhat lost at the box office, first because Enterprise went bust while it was in post-production and it had to be sold to MGM, and maybe partly because it was released on 25th December 1948.

It has to be said that Force of Evil is one of the least festive movies out there.  ‘It is not the sort of picture that one would chose for Yuletide cheer,’ wrote Bosley Crowther in The New York Times on 27th December 1948. 

Force of Evil did better in Great Britain, where it was paired in a double-bill with Act of Violence (Fred Zineman, 1948) and critics found it the more palatable of the two.

‘I find the second, less-advertised film in the programme superior; in fact despite a theme which I do not profess to understand, Force of Evil never for a moment lets the spectator escape its grip.’

And —

‘The passages of fast action are brilliantly done, and the kidnapping with the death of the informer, takes us back to the best days of the gangster cycle in the thirties.’  (Dilys Powell, Sunday Times, April 1949)

The voiceover is discussed above, but this really may be the best voiceover in all of olde noire.

The Wall Street Crash was only 20 years hence.

After the war, lighter camera equipment and the influence of Italian neo-realism (Rome, Open City, 1945 and of course you crazed souls, get into The Bicycle Thief, 1948) meant that location work was much more popular — although often not with studio bosses, who found it harder to control productions that weren’t on the same lot as they were.

A great early example was Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943) which featured great photography of Santa Rosa.  Indeed, rather than using extras in Shadow of a Doubt, Hitchcock let members of the public wander through the shots, which gave Shadow a feel of its own.

A lot of Force of Evil was shot in New York — slightly unusual for noir, much of which is California-based — and there is a constant city feel which is lacking in so many other films, like New York Confidential and The Maltese Falcon, both of which try hard to describe the city but spend too long indoors to succeed.

Unlike many noirs which adopt a ‘random fatalist’ approach to storytelling, Force of Evil is a pretty straight up crime film, and there are no unexpected events or amazing coincidences which are very common to other noirs.

There is no action as such, other than a quick shoot-out at the end, but Force of Evil has such compelling characters that it doesn’t really need it.  Instead, there is a chilling message.

Because in 1940s America, many gangsters sought to become legitimate by either dressing up their operations or moving them within a hair’s breadth of the law, Force of Evil seems to suggest that the gangsters represent right wing America — capitalist America too — and is suggestive of left-wing sentiment.

Leo, played by Thomas Gomez, feels that he has been running his illegal racket ‘fairly’ — but he comes to learn that of course that is a contradiction.

The first shot of the film — like the first words spoken by its central character — is ‘Wall Street’ — and the crooked lawyer who works there is certainly suggestive a type that is coming to dominate the next half of the century.

This left wing take didn’t ultimately do anybody involved any favours.  Director Abraham Polonsky was one of the greatest casualties of the HUAC, which incidentally seemed to be linked to noir more than any other genre.

Perhaps this was because of the large amount of European émigrés who ended up directing noir thrillers — Lang, Ulmer,

Polonsky however, had always been involved in left wing causes and unions, and was into the war effort and worked in so-called ‘Black Radio’ broadcasting misinformation to Germany and interrogating captured German officers including Rudolf Hess).

But still in 1951 Polonsky was labelled ‘the most dangerous man in America’ and blacklisted.

But also, the ultra-aggressive attacks of Joseph McCarthy and the HUAC bunch may have contributed to the general idea of noir’s hounded heroes, who dashed suspiciously through the shadows for over a decade, generally thrust between criminals and a rather ineffective police force.

Also note that many psychoanalysts from Europe settled in California in the 1930s, and even their influence can be felt in the voiceovers, dream sequences (Stranger on the Third Floor — Murder, My Sweet) that go to form the noir canon.  Even Phantom Lady is virtually explicit in its erotic ‘rape by jazz’ masturbation scene, showing a much more sexually motivated cinema.

Finally, there are of course the traditional noir shadows to be found in Force of Evil.  Although some of the earlier office scenes are lit normally — and it has to be said rather poorly — there are great moments of light and dark to be had, and there is a clear taste of Edward Hopper through the middle of the film at least — Hopper’s most famous painting, Nighthawks, has a definite noir feel to it.

At the end of Force of Evil, John Garfield goes ‘down and down’ the steps beneath the Brooklyn Bridge.  His narration is deadpan, masterfully delivered, and perfectly in tone.  ‘It was like going down to the bottom of the world, to find my brother,’ he says.

Perhaps the city itself is the force of evil?  It could be.  The city is a place of traps, cons and sentimental lures which lead to dead ends, and finally the bottom of the world.

From there, maybe the only way is up — or over the bridge to a brighter life.  Not so for John Garfield and Abraham Polonsky, both of whom were investigated by the HUAC and blacklisted and stopped from working on Hollywood movies altogether.

Think how you might feel if that happened to you in your job, especially if you are as good at it as Polonsky and Garfield were at theirs.

‘Because if a man’s life can be lived so long, and come out this way, like rubbish, then something was horrible, and had to be ended, one way or another, and I decided to help.’

Abraham Polonsky's 1948 directorial debut, Force of Evil, unfolds as a ferociously stylized denunciation of capitalism disguised in the garb of film noir. It is a film of shadows, poetic fatalism, and corrupted ideals, filtered through the lens of a Wall Street lawyer who conspires to consolidate New York's numbers racket under the iron grip of organized crime. Set during a single searing week culminating on the Fourth of July, the picture simmers with tension, betrayal, and metaphysical dread. Polonsky, working from a novel by Ira Wolfert, converts the sordid mechanics of small-time policy banks into a stark moral allegory where every character is already implicated, already damned.

John Garfield plays Joe Morse with an eerie combination of weariness and bravado, his performance an incantation of defeat spoken in the language of money and legal finesse. The camera stalks him through a ghostly Manhattan, where even daylight feels bruised. 

Barry Kelley and Howard Chamberlain in Force of Evil (1948)

Joe's descent is inexorable: a lawyer who has helped engineer a rigged lottery draw to bankrupt small competitors, including the modest policy operation run by his own brother Leo. Garfield's face, haunted and tired, becomes a roadmap of compromise. He moves not like a man but a cipher who has begun to sense, too late, that he traded his soul for a ledger entry.

Leo, played with spasmodic melancholy by Thomas Gomez, is no less compromised, yet insists on a fragile dignity. He has paid his debts to his brother, raised him up, given him the illusion of moral legitimacy. But Leo now runs a numbers game with a kind of impoverished nobility. He hires broken men and frightened women, including Doris Lowry (Beatrice Pearson), who flits through the film like a tremulous flame. Leo, unlike Joe, cannot afford self-deception. The world he clings to is crumbling, but he refuses to hand it over to the Combine, the larger syndicate that Joe serves.

That refusal condemns him. The 776 fix goes off like a bomb on Independence Day. The number is too heavily played, and the small outfits can't pay. They fall. They vanish. The irony is too pungent to be unintentional: freedom and collapse, celebration and ruin, all on the day Americans venerate their autonomy. 1948, the year of the film's release, was no less a crucible. The Marshall Plan was being implemented, and America was becoming a global hegemon. At home, the Cold War ideology was solidifying; the House Un-American Activities Committee held sway, and the blacklist hovered over Hollywood like a guillotine. Garfield and Polonsky would both suffer under it. Force of Evil is not merely a critique; it is a prophecy whispered beneath its breath.

Dialogue in the film acquires an oratorical grandeur. Wolfert and Polonsky wrote not speech but speech distilled. Phrases come sheathed in metaphor, like knives in silk. At times, the movie verges on modernist verse drama, recalling not Chandler or Hammett but Auden or Eliot. This literariness heightens its artificiality but also its power. The effect is not naturalism but stylized doom. Joe is not simply guilty; he is damned by language itself.

Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 131 drifts into one of the film’s most astonishing sequences, its somber Adagio adapted for string orchestra. It underscores a scene of intense quietude and sudden violence in a basement restaurant. Freddie Bauer, the terrified accountant, awaits his fate with a glass of water and jittery hands. One killer eats across the room. Gomez appears. 

A conversation begins, feints toward reason, then erupts into blood. Beethoven floats above the carnage like smoke. It is an inspired, macabre choice—not composed for the scene but seeming to have prefigured it. The quartet, often considered among the most mournful in all of Western music, evokes not sentiment but the inevitability of annihilation.

Barry Kelley and Thomas Gomez in Force of Evil (1948)

Bauer's face, in that moment, trembles with exhaustion. His is not a betrayal born of ideology but of frailty. He breaks, and in his breakage we see the structure of the whole edifice. His betrayal precipitates Leo’s abduction. He is not Judas; he is Job, crushed under a machinery he cannot comprehend. There is a realism in his deterioration that matches the stylistic affectations elsewhere. Force of Evil (1948) balances stylization with disintegration, grace with collapse.

In its evocation of noir, the film reaffirms the genre's conventions while subverting its eroticism. Joe resists the advances of Marie Windsor’s gangster moll, a woman fashioned from smoke and moral ambiguity. He is drawn instead to Doris, whose naïveté is not untouched by self-interest. The film's true femme fatale is not a woman at all, but the very structure of profit. The noir tradition often indulged in misogyny, blaming women for male weakness. Polonsky inverts this. The female characters are not the catalysts of downfall but its collateral damage.

Doris Lowry offers a fleeting glimpse of alternative life. She is moral not in an absolute sense, but in contrast to the wreckage surrounding her. Her initial recoil from criminality gives way to romantic intrigue, and the film makes no apologies for her vacillation. 

In a world so saturated with duplicity, purity cannot remain untainted. Yet Doris retains a shimmer of integrity. Her compassion, her hope, her willingness to believe in Joe even as he stumbles through moral fog—these things lend the film its only warmth. Her role is not to redeem but to remind that some other life was possible.

The morality of the film is not Catholic but tragic. Joe’s arc ends not in absolution but recognition. The final scene, with Joe descending under the George Washington Bridge, evokes Orpheus more than any gangster trope. He climbs down toward the rocks, toward Leo’s broken body, and toward whatever vestiges of conscience he might still possess. In that moment, he is not triumphant. He is not even penitent. He is human.

Polonsky was not allowed to direct another film for twenty-one years. Garfield died in 1952, worn down by the political machinery that had branded him suspect. 

The fates of both men are inscribed in every shot of Force of Evil. It is a film steeped in betrayal—of ideals, of kin, of self. The numbers racket is not an isolated criminal enterprise but a metaphor for capitalism itself: a system that thrives on ruin, that feeds on small hopes and crushes small men.

As American cinema reckoned with its noir phase in the postwar years, Force of Evil emerged as one of the most singular entries in the canon. Unlike the existential fables of Out of the Past or Double Indemnity, Polonsky’s film is tethered to politics, to historical consequence, to a Marxist moral imagination. It is noir not as a style but as an indictment. The shadows here do not conceal secrets. They are the natural condition of a world where every transaction carries the stench of complicity.

The place of Force of Evil in the history of the United States is necessarily tragic. It reveals the jagged fault lines between law and crime, family and capital, survival and ethics. It exposes the architecture of inequality with the clarity of Greek drama. 

It is not concerned with redemption but with revelation: to show the mechanisms by which ordinary men become instruments of destruction. The nation it depicts is not one of lofty ideals, but of predatory impulses sanctified by law.

As a film noir, it stretches the genre toward abstraction. The chiaroscuro lighting, the decaying urban landscapes, the paranoia, the laconic male protagonist: all are present. Yet the tropes are elevated beyond crime fiction. The film’s noir sensibility is not simply aesthetic, but philosophical. The characters drift through the city like phantoms in a moral purgatory. They speak not to each other but to the void.

Force of Evil is not only a great film noir; it is among the most disquieting portraits of American capitalism ever committed to celluloid. Its poeticism does not soften its critique but sharpens it. It does not moralize; it accuses. And beneath its stylized surfaces, it bears the scars of its own creation—a film made by those who believed in a better world, and who were exiled for daring to speak it aloud.