CINEMA
All is forgiven
PENELOPE HOUSTON
Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (Odeon, St Martin's Lane, 'A')
1947 was the year in which the un-American Activities Committee discovered Hollywood, and the last Bourbons of show business found themselves piteously explaining that the pro-Russian pictures they had authorised
• during the war had been a painful patriotic duty, and reflected no Stalinist-Leninist sym- pathies on the part of Mr Mayer or Mr Warner. It was also the year in which Abraham Polonsky scripted a boxing pic- ture, Body and Soul, with a fine ring of post- Hemingway melancholy (`very bitter and discreetly leftish', noted James Agee). A year or so later, Polonsky wrote and directed Force of Evil, a picture that has acquired a stealthy but authentic reputation of the kind that hangs over works lost or doomed or never repeated—abrasive, sour, literary, one of those sharp and smoky movies from the days when the ghettoes were still white.
John Garfield, who starred in both films, died young: it was widely suggested that the strain of the McCarthyist years helped to kill him. Abraham Polonsky slipped away with the blacklist, into that displaced limbo of the occasional pseudonym (ironically, it was always names rather than works which were proscribed). He backed quietly into view a few years ago as scriptwriter of the thriller Madigan: now, with Tell Them Willie Boy is Here, he's back as a director. Tell them Polonsky is here: probably the last significant rehabilitation from those peculiarly shameful years. setting up a weird kind of record and a weirder link between the doomed romanticism and social con- science of 1940s Hollywood (a two on the run thriller like Nicholas Ray's They Live By Night) and recent jingle-jangle fatalism (two on the run as in Bonnie and Clyde).
Polonsky has chosen this sameitheme in a Western setting for resuming his preposterously interrupted career; and to me there's a distinct sense of the past about it. as though one of those ill-fated 1940s couples, orphans of that storm, had been driven back
to the reservation. The story is an actual and eccentric historical footnote: about an In- dian who in 1909 gunned down his pro- spective but unwilling father-in-law (by tri- bal custom, apparently an acceptable, if con- tentious. variation on shotgun marriage) and took to the hills with the girl. Stout Taft hap- pened to be touring nearby, and bored reporters in his train jumped on the story, converting the lone Indian into the harbinger of an armed uprising, or at least a serious threat to the presidential person. Death in the hills, in any case, is the only ending; Willie becoming more defiantly, archetypally Indian as the impatient, inexpert posse closes in.
Across the years, Polonsky picks up some threads: a feeling for ambiguities, elusive and unexplored connections, which one dimly remembers from Force of Evil. Conrad Hall's photography, bone-white desert and stylised little groups outside chunky homesteads, never betrays the essen- tial simplicity, though one sometimes feels the picture is reaching out a long way to hold on to its laconic dignity. There's the sloppy, needless rhetoric of a bar-room boaster's chat about democracy, •or Willie's pauses between ambushes to brood on the question of his colour: almost fatally, there's the casting of a very white actress, bootpolish- browned, as the Indian girl. Robert Blake, who played the more forlorn of the two killers in In Cold Blood, has a marvellous quality of vulnerable, huddled rebellion: his performance does push Willie Boy back across the frontier into Indian territory.
But I'm still left with the impression of Abraham Polonsky as a writer for the dangerous city, for the gangster dead in a gutter rather than the heroic skyline. Willie Boy's sullen inarticulacy belongs to the Western myth, and in the end the myth swallows him up. It's too easy a route to even an ambiguous significance: fatalism linked with the legendary inertia of the great outdoors.
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