In 1928, he entered City College of New York and, following graduation, earned his law degree in 1935 at Columbia Law School. After several years of practice, mixed with teaching, he decided to devote himself to writing.
Career
Polonsky wrote essays, radio scripts and several novels before beginning his career in Hollywood. His first novel, The Goose is Cooked, written with Mitchell A. Wilson under the singular pseudonym of Emmett Hogarth, was published in 1940.
A committed Marxist, in the late 1930s Polonsky joined the Communist Party USA. He participated in union politics and established and edited a left-wing newspaper, The Home Front.
Polonsky signed a screenwriter's contract with Paramount Pictures before leaving the U.S. to serve in Europe with the Office of Strategic Services during World War II between 1943 and 1945. He worked with the French Resistance to write scripts and direct programs for the clandestine OSS radio stations.[3] He did not have the opportunity to write screenplays for the studio until after the end of the war.
Polonsky's first film as a director, Force of Evil (1948), was not successful when released in the United States, but it was hailed as a masterpiece by film critics in England. The film, based on the novel Tucker's People by Ira Wolfert, has since become recognized as one of the great American film noirs. In 1994, it was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant".
Hollywood blacklist
Polonsky's career as a director and credited writer came to an abrupt halt when he refused to testify before the congressional House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1951. Illinois congressman Harold Velde called the director a "very dangerous citizen" at the hearings. While blacklisted, Polonsky continued to write film scripts under various pseudonyms or fronts, most of which have never been revealed.
Polonsky was the creator, script supervisor and writer of the pilot episode of the Canadian television series Seaway shot in and around Montreal in 1965 that was distributed around the world by Lew Grade 's ITC.
Polonsky received the Career Achievement Award of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association in 1999. Prior to that, Polonsky taught a philosophy class at USC School of Cinema-Television called "Consciousness and Content". He also taught a 2-year production class to the "Core" program in San Francisco State University's Film Department from 1980 to 1982. While he had resigned his membership in the Communist Party in the 1950s after rejecting Stalinism,[5] he remained committed to Marxist political theory, stating in an interview in 1999: "I was a Communist because I thought Marxism offered the best analysis of history, and I still believe that."[6]
Until his death, Polonsky was a virulent critic of director Elia Kazan, who had testified before HUAC and provided names to the committee. In 1999, he was enraged when Kazan was honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for lifetime achievement, stating that he hoped Kazan would be shot onstage: "It would no doubt be a thrill in an otherwise dull evening."[7] Polonsky also said that his latest project was designing a movable headstone: "That way if they bury that man in the same cemetery, they can move me."[8]Thom Andersen interviewed Polonsky in the 1990s about the events of the years when the Hollywood Ten were blacklisted for his film Red Hollywood.
"'When a German sub went down the Germans never admitted it' Polanski remembers. 'But we knew who was on the sub, who went down, his name, address, and all the rest. We broadcast all that to their families as they listened to the jazz. A lot of people listened.'"
^Goldstein, Patrick (January 20, 1999). "He's Been There, Survived That" (interview with Abraham Polonsky). Los Angeles Times. p. D1, D5. Retrieved via Proquest database, 2020-05-31.
