Abraham Polonsky will be interviewed by Nora Sayre, author of “Running Time: Films of the Cold War,” following the film.

Following the success of his screenplay for Body and Soul (1947), scripwriter Abraham Polonsky was asked to direct the next project of that film's producer (Bob Robertson) and star (John Garfield). Shortly after its release, Polonsky was blacklisted; it was to be some 21 years before he directed his second film, Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here. Two years earlier he had been able to use his real name on the screenplay for Madigan, but during the blacklist period, he wrote at least 15 screenplays and several television scripts anonymously.
Force of Evil continues to be recognized for the unique literacy of Polonsky's script and the realism of George Barnes' photography. Higham and Greenberg write in “Hollywood in the Forties”:
“Based on a thick and complicated novel (‘Tucker's People') dealing with the numbers racket, the film remains a masterpiece--poetic, terse, beautifully exact, a re-creation in highly personal terms of the American underworld. The dialogue, with its Joycean repetitions and elaborate unpunctuated paragraphing, is unique in the American cinema, and at times achieves a quality of Greek drama, a poetry of the modern city. Played with great feeling by John Garfield and Beatrice Pearson (an odd, diminutive girl who appeared in only one other film), Force of Evil is dominated by the acting of Thomas Gomez, tyrannically forceful and hysterical as a fat man caught up in the racket.”