Force of Evil (1950)
Directed by Abraham Polonsky
Lawyer Joe Morse wants to consolidate all the small-time numbers racket operators into one big powerful operation. But his elder brother Leo is one of these small-time operators who wants to stay that way, preferring not to deal with the gangsters who dominate the big-time.
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What critics compared Force of Evil to
If the title Force Of Evil hadn’t already been taken by Abraham Polonsky’s great 1948 tale of brothers hung up in the numbers racket, it would apply to Claire Denis’ noir-inflected Bastards, though the pluralization pointedly spreads the blame around.
Suffice it to say, then, that the film triumphs as a character study, as a stunning visual recreation of a bygone era, and as one of the most devastating attacks on greed and capitalism to come out of Hollywood since 1948’s “Force of Evil.”
El contable se acerca a una figura paradigmática dentro de la historia de las organizaciones criminales (mafias, cárteles, ciertas corporaciones): la del hombre de las finanzas, aquella que ofreció días de gloria a la realidad (Al Capone, en la memoria) y al cine (acérquense a Force of evil, de Abraham Polonsky, de 1948).
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Of course, “real” people don’t talk like the characters in Abraham Polonsky’s Force of Evil (1948), Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan (1990), or Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster (2015), to pluck but three examples of stylized screenwriting out of the ether, and you could argue that the artifice of Sorrentino’s dialogue is encouraged by the fact that he’s dealing with show people and artists, and that the world of this hotel is a stage for once-and-current performers of one type or another (“Men, artists, animals, plants . . .