Download or read book Abraham Polonsky written by Andrew Dickos and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abraham Polonsky (1910–1999), screenwriter and filmmaker of the mid-twentieth-century Left, recognized his writerly mission to reveal the aspirations of his characters in a material society structured to undermine their hopes. In the process, he ennobled their struggle. His auspicious beginning in Hollywood reached a zenith with his Oscar-nominated screenplay for Robert Rossen's boxing noir film, Body and Soul (1947), and his inaugural film as writer and director, Force of Evil (1948), before he was blacklisted during the McCarthy witch hunt. Polonsky envisioned cinema as a modern artist. His aesthetic appreciation for each technical component of the screen aroused him to create voiceovers of urban cadences—poetic monologues spoken by the city's everyman, embodied by the actor who played his heroes best, John Garfield. His use of David Raksin's score in Force of Evil, against the backdrop of the grandeur of New York City's landscape and the conflict between the brothers Joe and Leo Morse, elevated film noir into classical family tragedy. Like Garfield, Polonsky faced persecution and an aborted career during the blacklist. But unlike Garfield, Polonsky survived to resume his career in Hollywood during the ferment of the late sixties. Then his vision of a changing society found allegorical expression in Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, his impressive anti-Western showing the destruction of the Paiute rebel outsider, Willie Boy, and cementing Polonsky as a moral voice in cinema.
Download or read book A Very Dangerous Citizen written by Paul Buhle and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2001-06-05 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When he was summoned before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1951, Abraham Lincoln Polonsky (1911-1999) was labeled "a very dangerous citizen" by Harold Velde, a congressman from Illinois. Lawyer, educator, novelist, labor organizer, radio and television scriptwriter, film director and screenwriter, wartime intelligence operative, and full-time radical romantic, Polonsky was blacklisted in Hollywood for refusing to be an informer. The New York Times called his blacklisting the single greatest loss to American film during the McCarthy era, and his expressed admirers include Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Sidney Lumet, Warren Beatty, and Harry Belafonte. In this first critical and cultural biography of Abraham Polonsky, Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner present both an accomplished consideration of a remarkable survivor of America's cultural cold war and a superb study of the Hollywood left. The Bronx-born son of immigrant parents, Polonsky—in the few years after the end of World War II and just before the blacklist—had one of the most distinguished careers in Hollywood. He wrote two films that established John Garfield's postwar persona, Body and Soul (1947), still the standard for boxing films and the model for such movies as Raging Bull and Pulp Fiction; and Force of Evil (1948), the great noir drama that he also directed. Once blacklisted, Polonsky quit working under his own name, yet he proved to be one of television's most talented writers. Later in life he became the most acerbic critic of the Hollywood blacklist's legacy while writing and directing films such as Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1970). A Very Dangerous Citizen goes beyond biography to help us understand the relationship between art and politics in American culture and to uncover the effects of U.S. anticommunism and anti-Semitism. Rich in anecdote and in analysis, it provides an informative and entertaining portrait of one of the most intriguing personalities of twentieth-century American culture.
Download or read book A Season of Fear written by Abraham Polonsky and published by . This book was released on 1960 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book You are There Teleplays written by Abraham Polonsky and published by Center for Telecommunication. This book was released on 1997 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You Are There, a classic of television's Golden Age, was produced from 1953 to 1955. Each episode, 'reported' by such journalists as Mike Wallace, Walter Cronkite, and Bill Leonard, investigated a historical event as if it were current breaking news. The series starred such luminaries as James Dean, Paul Newman, Rod Steiger, John Cassevetes, and Lorne Greene. Not able to officially work on the programme, they submitted their scripts through 'fronts'. (This volume re-establishes screen credit for ten of Polonsky's episodes.) Polonsky was blacklisted until 1968. In this volume: Cortez Conquers Mexico; The Crisis of Galileo; The Fate of Nathan Hale; The Secret of Sigmund Freud; The Recognition of Michelangelo; The Vindication of Savonarola; Mallory's Tragedy on Mt Everest; The Emergence of Jazz; The Torment of Beethoven; The Tragedy of John Milton.
Download or read book The Gladiators vs Spartacus Volume 2 written by Abraham Polonsky and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-12-21 with total page 595 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This publication of Abraham Polonsky’s unproduced screenplay for The Gladiators is a tribute to one of Hollywood’s premiere post-WW II directors and writers whose career was severely impacted by the blacklist. His script for The Gladiators survives to remind us that he could, and did, transform a difficult and complex novel of an ancient slave rebellion into a screenplay worthy of Arthur Koestler’s bold fictional vision. Through a combination of the ambivalence of its executive producer and star, plus bad timing, it never went before the cameras. This book is published in the hope that The Gladiators will be produced for cinema or television.
Download or read book Street with No Name written by Andrew Dickos and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2002-06-07 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the genre of film noir back to German and French roots. Describes the developent of the genre in the United States and examines its expression in modern cinema.
Download or read book Odds Against Tomorrow written by Abraham Polonsky and published by Sadanlaur Publications. This book was released on 1999 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), which stars Harry Belafonte, Robert Ryan, Ed Begley, and Gloria Grahame, is written by blacklisted screenwriter Abraham Polonsky and directed by Robert Wise. The last great film noir of the black and white era it reflects the author's strong social conscience as racial conflict is portrayed as central to the failure of a bank robbery. This publication of the complete script blends the shooting script (written before the film was shot) and the continuity script (the elements which are contained in the finished film). The critical analysis draws extensively on specially conducted interviews with Robert Wise, Harry Belafonte and Abraham Polonsky. Discussed in depth are the significance of a black protagonist within the film noir genre; the adaptation from William McGivern's novel; and the critically celebrated jazz score by John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet.
Download or read book A Cup of Tears written by Abraham Lewin and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 1988-01 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a description of daily life for Jews sealed off by the Nazis in a large section of Warsaw
Download or read book Film and Politics in America written by Brian Neve and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-08-02 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In A Social Cinema: Film-making and Politics in America, Brian Neve presents a study of the social and political nature of American film by concentrating on a generation of writers from the thirties who directed films in Hollywood in the 1940's. He discusses how they negotiated their roles in relation to the studio system, itself undergoing change, and to what extent their experience in the political and theatre movements of thirties New York was to be reflected in their later films. Focusing in particular on Orson Welles, Elia Kazan, Jules Dassin, Abraham Polonsky, Nicholas Ray, Robert Rossen and Joseph Losey, Neve relates the work of these writers and directors to the broader industrial, bureaucratic, social and political developments of the period 1935-1970. With special emphasis on the post-war decade, bringing together archive and secondary sources, Neve explores a lost tradition of social fimmaking in America.
Download or read book The Un Americans written by Joseph Litvak and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2009-11-25 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a bold rethinking of the Hollywood blacklist and McCarthyite America, Joseph Litvak reveals a political regime that did not end with the 1950s or even with the Cold War: a regime of compulsory sycophancy, in which the good citizen is an informer, ready to denounce anyone who will not play the part of the earnest, patriotic American. While many scholars have noted the anti-Semitism underlying the House Un-American Activities Committee’s (HUAC’s) anti-Communism, Litvak draws on the work of Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Alain Badiou, and Max Horkheimer to show how the committee conflated Jewishness with what he calls “comic cosmopolitanism,” an intolerably seductive happiness, centered in Hollywood and New York, in show business and intellectual circles. He maintains that HUAC took the comic irreverence of the “uncooperative” witnesses as a crime against an American identity based on self-repudiation and the willingness to “name names.” Litvak proposes that sycophancy was (and continues to be) the price exacted for assimilation into mainstream American culture, not just for Jews, but also for homosexuals, immigrants, and other groups deemed threatening to American rectitude. Litvak traces the outlines of comic cosmopolitanism in a series of performances in film and theater and before HUAC, performances by Jewish artists and intellectuals such as Zero Mostel, Judy Holliday, and Abraham Polonsky. At the same time, through an uncompromising analysis of work by informers including Jerome Robbins, Elia Kazan, and Budd Schulberg, he explains the triumph of a stoolpigeon culture that still thrives in the America of the early twenty-first century.
Download or read book Body and Soul written by Tony Williams and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Body and Soul explores the work of Robert Aldrich, a producer and director responsible for several notable films, including The Flight of the Phoenix, The Dirty Dozen, Too Late the Hero, The Longest Yard and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Author Tony Williams examines the relationship of Aldrich's films to the Cultural Front movement of the 1930s as well as to the blacklist of the 1950s. He also delineates Aldrich's attempts to follow the progressive ideals of such mentors as Jean Renoir, Lewis Milestone, and Charlie Chaplin. From the noir classic Kiss Me Deadly to the controversial thriller Twilight's Last Gleaming, Body and Soul focuses on the dilemmas--both personal and political--that affect individuals in all of Aldrich's films.
Download or read book Hide In Plain Sight written by Marta Perry and published by Steeple Hill. This book was released on 2007-08-01 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: She couldn't turn her back on her family in their time of need. So when her sister was injured, financial expert Andrea Hampton traded the big city for Amish country to help turn her grandmother's house into an inn. But life with the Plain People took a treacherous turn when a string of accidents and pranks threatened her family. Someone didn't want the secrets the old house harbored to come to light. Trusting anyone— even the handsome carpenter who seemed so genuine—was a battle for Andrea, but her life depended on her ability to find the truth.
Download or read book Congressional Theatre written by Brenda Murphy and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses plays, films, and teleplays responding to the House Committee on Un-American Activities hearings.
Download or read book Childhood s End written by Arthur C. Clarke and published by RosettaBooks. This book was released on 2012-11-30 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Retro Hugo Award–nominated novel that inspired the Syfy miniseries, alien invaders bring peace to Earth—at a grave price: “A first-rate tour de force” (The New York Times). In the near future, enormous silver spaceships appear without warning over mankind’s largest cities. They belong to the Overlords, an alien race far superior to humanity in technological development. Their purpose is to dominate Earth. Their demands, however, are surprisingly benevolent: end war, poverty, and cruelty. Their presence, rather than signaling the end of humanity, ushers in a golden age . . . or so it seems. Without conflict, human culture and progress stagnate. As the years pass, it becomes clear that the Overlords have a hidden agenda for the evolution of the human race that may not be as benevolent as it seems. “Frighteningly logical, believable, and grimly prophetic . . . Clarke is a master.” —Los Angeles Times
Download or read book Religious Zionism of Rav Kook written by Pinchas Polonsky and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2012-08-22 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brief introduction into zionist ideas of rav Kook - chief rabbi of Israel.
Download or read book From the Lower East Side to Hollywood written by Paul Buhle and published by Verso. This book was released on 2004-06-17 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively, extensively illustrated history of the widespread influence of Jews on American popular culture through the twentieth century.
Download or read book The Gladiators Vs Spartacus Volume 1 written by Henry MacAdam and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-10 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using previously unpublished correspondence and personal journal entries from screenwriter Abraham Polonsky, neglected notices in Variety and other Hollywood trade publications, and a variety of published sources, this narrative backstory of rival movie productions of The Gladiators vs Spartacus documents that intense competition with greater precision and clarity than any other existing account. The key role that this little-known chapter of Hollywood's blacklist history played, in connection with Dalton Trumbo's successful effort to win screen credit for Spartacus, is now for the first time available to film historians and lay readers. A companion study, Volume 2, is devoted to Abraham Polonsky's rediscovered screenplay.
