Dangerous Days
"These are dangerous days/
To say what you feel is to dig your own grave.../
Remember what I told you/
If they hated me they will hate you"
-- Sinead O'Connor "Black Boys on Mopeds"
Last Friday, I had the honor of being interviewed on-camera by TCM's Noir Alley host Eddie Muller for his independent documentary on the late blacklisted filmmaker Abraham Polonsky.
I interviewed Abe in the late 1970s, along with my co-author Barbara Zheutlin, for our book on Hollywood dissidents, Creative Differences. Polonsky was one of my favorite people in my life -- wry, funny, keenly observant and whip-smart. It was a joy to learn about the Communist Party in Hollywood from him -- especially for two New Left radicals like Barbara and I, who were too quick to dismiss the experience and wisdom of our political elders.
In any case, toward the end of Eddie's interview with me, he asked whether we might endure another repressive spasm like the blacklist period -- the Cold War era when thousands of radicals and liberals were purged not just from Hollywood (with disastrous results for the quality of movies in the 1950s), but from schools and universities, government agencies, labor unions and elsewhere. In fact, the United States remains the fucked-up country it is -- with a weak progressive political bloc and labor movement -- largely because of the lingering legacy of this "scoundrel time."
I told Eddie that a new wave of repression is already sweeping across our country -- mainly from the right, but also from the left. Restrictions on voting rights, abortion bans, book censorship, the cancellation of public figures for saying controversial things.
These are dangerous times indeed -- particularly for those who have the courage of their convictions.
Abe Polonsky, who wrote the film classic Body and Soul and co-wrote and directed the even darker film on the brutal capitalist ethic, Force of Evil, could've sat out the blacklist with his family in the south of France, where was he was happily writing novels. But, after discussing it with his wife Sylvia, he came home to face his inquisitors -- he refused to name names, refused to grovel before the House Un-American Activities Committee. And he was immediately blacklisted, as expected.
A rightwing congressman called Polonsky "the most dangerous man in America." "I was," Abe told us with a twinkle in his eye. "But only to myself."
Watch Abe's movies -- including the hard-hitting film he wrote under the table during the blacklist for Harry Belafonte, Odds Against Tomorrow.
See why I say that the outcasts, troublemakers and freaks create all the real beauty in the world.
John Garfield — also a Hollywood blacklist victim — in Polonsky’s Force of Evil