Black sheep like to make everybody else look black. Force of Evil is directed by Abraham Polonsky, who also adapts the screenplay from the Ira Wolfert novel Tucker's People. It stars John Garfield, Thomas Gomez, Beatrice Pearson, Marie Windsor, Howard Chamberlain and Roy Roberts. Music is by David Raksin and cinematography by George Barnes. Plot finds Garfield as lawyer Joe Morse, who works for powerful gangster Ben Tucker (Roberts). Tucker has a plan to control all of the numbers rackets in New York, something that with the fix on the numbers up and coming for the 4th July, will see all of the smaller number rackets go bust. This is a problem for Morse because his big brother Leo (Gomez), is one such operator, an honest good guy who did everything he could to ensure that Joe had a proper start in life. It has come to be regarded as an influential and important movie in the film noir pantheon. Big critics, big film makers and film noir aficionados, all have queued up to salute Polonsky's film. If it's worthy of such elegant praise will always be debatable, but film does have a uniqueness about it, using stylised dialogue passages and in opening up a corrupt and socially bankrupt can of worms for the cinema loving world, Polonsky has crafted a thematically potent 1940's crime picture. The exchanges between Garfield and love interest Pearson, have an almost poetic flow to the…

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