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.
Abraham Polonsky was born in New York City, the eldest son of Russian Jewish immigrants,[3] Henry and Rebecca (née Rosoff).
"[4] He attended DeWitt Clinton High School with classmates that included future film composer Bernard Herrmann.
As a young lawyer, Polonsky participated in union politics and also established and edited a left-wing newspaper, The Home Front, for the CIO.
"[17] 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'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 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.
"[22] 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.
"[23] 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.
"[16] Before he could be pressed for an answer to 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.
"[16] 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."
After his early efforts The Goose Is Cooked (1940) and The Enemy Sea (1943), he wrote his most ambitious novel, and personal favorite, The World Above in 1951.
[8] Adhering somewhat to the Bildungsroman convention, the book covers the formative years and maturation of Dr. Carl Meyers, a Freudian-trained psychiatrist who seeks to add scientific rigor to the field of psychology and, in his struggles to do so, becomes a politically radical thinker.
[30] The World Above garnered a few favorable reviews at the time,[31][32] but was generally ignored until it received a second look in 1999 when the University of Illinois Press reissued it as part of "The Radical Novel Reconsidered" series.
In a glowing New York Times review of the film, Roger Greenspun characterized Polonsky's long absence since Force of Evil as "perhaps the most wasteful injustice of the late 1940's Hollywood blacklisting".
[36] To supplement his income, Polonsky taught a two-year production class in San Francisco State University's Film Department from 1980 to 1982.
[15] He publicly objected when director Irwin Winkler rewrote his script for Guilty by Suspicion (1991), a film about the Hollywood blacklist era.
Winkler converted Polonsky's lead character David Merrill (played by Robert De Niro) from a Communist into a wrongly accused liberal.
[38] Although Polonsky had resigned his CPUSA membership in the 1950s after rejecting Stalinism,[39] he remained committed to Marxist political theory, stating in a 1999 interview: "I was a Communist because I thought Marxism offered the best analysis of history, and I still believe that.
"[41] In 1998, Polonsky was a co-winner (along with Casablanca screenwriter Julius Epstein) of the Career Achievement Award presented by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.