
Force of Evil
Abraham Polonsky’s 1948 Force of Evil follows lawyer Joe Morse as he helps gangster Ben Tucker rig the numbers racket in New York, only to confront the human cost when his brother Leo is drawn in. Shot by George Barnes and scored by David Raksin, it is a tightly wound, linguistically dense crime film that treats corruption as arithmetic and kinship as collateral. Preserved in the US National Film Registry, it remains a benchmark of film noir’s intellectual rigour.
