Critic Christopher Palmer writes: Already Raksin's music was tending to provoke criticism from moviemakers on the grounds of its alleged complexity, abstruseness and 'modernity,' and, particularly in the score for Polonsky's Force of Evil, we can see Raksin...moving toward the kind of dislocated, elliptical phraseology, scattered textures, lean contrapuntal orientation and quasi-expressionistic use of orchestral color that were later to burst upon the screen. Following on the success of his screenplay for Body and Soul (1947), scriptwriter Abraham Polonsky was asked to direct the next project of that film's producer (Bob Robertson) and star (John Garfield). 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 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 poetry of the modern city."