Alienation in 1920’s Berlin to 1940’s Hollywood: A Force of Evil

Paper by Mary Anne Weiss.

Visual art movements that resonate with universal experiences carry over from one genre to another, and from one generation to another. The desire to visualize our fears and examine our fallibility is a common human condition. German Expressionism in painting and film at the start of the 20th century informed American filmmaking and painting of the 1940’s and 50’s. Its particular visual style and subject matter are clearly to be seen in the 1948 film, Force of Evil, co-written and directed by the American-born artist, Abraham Polonsky.

German Expressionism was a multi-disciplinary art movement based in Berlin beginning in the 1910’s and gaining prominence in the 1920’s. It spanned the genres of drawing, painting, poetry, and the dramatic arts. The movement dealt primarily with the expression of the darker side of human emotion, the alienation and anxiety of the individual in urban environments, and the rejection of realism. Particularly in painting and woodcuts, it accomplished these aims through certain visual stylistic conventions, including angular shapes, distortion of figures and landscapes, unnatural colors, high-contrast, and broad brushstrokes or rough carvings.

The artistic movement arose as a rejection of realism and impressionism, moving away from the beauty of the outdoors to the interior spaces of the human mind. Rampant petty and organized crime, urban poverty, and unemployment were everyday realities for Berliners post World War I, and many soldiers returned to the city shell-shocked, injured, and traumatized. Painters like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Kathe Kollwtiz responded with paintings depicting Berlin and its people as distorted, grotesque, dark, and isolated. German filmmakers like F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang created nightmarish and otherworldly scenes in their films, Nosferatu (1922) and Metropolis (1927). They rejected the realism of representational films for those that were more like the paintings of Kirchner and other expressionists, using high-contrast lighting, off-kilter angles, focusing on the psychological, and filled with emotional intensity and dread. It even is argued that Murnau used Kirchner’s paintings in designing the sets for his film. The influence of one artistic discipline on the other is a common thread in the visual arts.

German Expressionism traveled directly to Hollywood when thousands of German and Austrian refugees arrived in the 30’s and 40’s. Accomplished artists and intellectuals of German and Jewish descent transplanted their artistic vision in the film world, and influenced many other non-emigres working in film. In addition, hundreds of European Jews worked as tailors, prop designers, crew, and in other roles in the film industry during this time period, as they made a new home for themselves and their families in the US.

What’s more, Los Angeles had much in common with Berlin at the time expressionism took hold: it was rife with crime, both organized and indiscriminate; economic anxiety, inflation, and unemployment was on the rise; a growing population in Los Angeles exploded urban sprawl; and as the war ended, men returned with broken bodies and hearts to a changed society. While the painters in Los Angeles quickly turned to expressionist ideas in the abstract, films combined the original German expressionist styles with Italian Realism, most especially in the genre of Film Noir.

A perfect example of German Expressionism in American Film Noir of the classic period is Abraham Polonsky’s Force of Evil, made by Enterprise Productions, Inc., and distributed by MGM in 1948. The mise-en-scene throughout the picture relies on the German Expressionist visual conventions of chiaroscuro, geometric and angular lines, camera angles from on high or low causing distortion or exaggeration, overwrought emotional character portrayals, shadows which double the characters, and the corrupt city as its backdrop. In designing the film, Polonsky had exact ideas about its mise-en-scene. Reportedly, after a few days of filming in New York, Polonsky was unhappy and took his cinematographer, George Barnes, to view an art exhibit by Edward Hopper, saying “that’s what I want this picture to look like.” see French, below. The painter Hopper was known to have loved the movies, and film noir especially. He translated the loneliness and isolation he saw in film to his own paintings of American life. The theme of Force of Evil reflects this visual style too, as it presents the alienation of the common man and his doomed struggle to reach the American Dream in an urban setting that will grind him down. Typical of film noir, the story is off and on narrated in the past tense by the protagonist, providing emotional and poetic language to describe our “hero’s” fatalistic path. Polonsky was a passionate critic of capitalism, and displayed the criminal gang in his film as just another Wall Street Bank, corrupt as the whole American enterprise, and the ordinary folks as its victims.

The plot of Force of Evil revolves around two brothers, Joe and Leo Morse, and their attempts to make a living in a corrupt New York City. Joe Morse, played by John Garfield, is our noir protagonist, a lawyer working on Wall Street. He has law-abiding clients but also gangster clients. Early in the film, he has decided to go beyond ethical representation and get involved directly in the numbers racket of his client, Tucker, seeing it as his way to get ahead and to live “in the clouds.” His legal representation will bring him into conflict with his brother Leo, a small-time crook running his own numbers bank, who cares for his employees and his family, and who lives by his own ethical code. The conflict eventually results in Leo’s death and Joe’s break from Tucker’s grasp. But Joe ends the film as a broken and defeated man, even as he turns the criminal gang over to the police.

In the final sequence of the film, Joe learns that Tucker is responsible for Leo’s death. In a tense scene in Joe’s office, Joe betrays Tucker by enabling the police to hear Tucker’s confession over a tapped phone line. There is a shootout and Tucker is killed, as the Production Codes of the time probably would have required. What follows next is an incredible series of shots of Joe (and Doris, his “moral compass” played by Beatrice Pearson) as he stumbles from the shooting down to the riverside in search of Leo. Joe narrates, “I wanted to find Leo, see him one last time. It was dawn and naturally, I felt terrible there. I kept going down, more and more, as if descending to the bottom of a well … to find my brother.”

During the narration, we see a series of shots that start in a dark stairway. The shots unfold one after another in quick succession showing Joe moving down through the city. Some shots show a deep focus with Doris in the background. The shots are either facing up towards Joe as he makes his way, or from above onto Joe’s back as he gets farther away from his American Dream in the towers of Wall Street. The scenes are in daylight, bright light on Joe’s face now as he has chosen his family over his greed, but it is too late. High contrasts are evident in the shots, and even a symbolic lighthouse as Joe finally finds his way.

The cinematography is truly breathtaking in this scene. It catches the essence of expressionism in its light and dark film work as well the characteristic psychological torment portrayed by Joe. More than anything, the shots capture Joe’s isolation and alienation, just as Ernst Ludwig Kircher portrayed in his paintings made thirty years before in a country far away.

Though German Expressionism came to an end as a distinct movement by the early 1930’s, its stylistic influence on subsequent filmmaking has been profound…. [I]ts unique array of techniques are now simply considered part of the expressive resources of cinema in general.” Younger, p. 186. The styles developed in the art world of Berlin in the 1910’s and 20’s are clearly visible in Polonsky’s 1948 New York tale of American capitalist corruption, Force of Evil, from the chiaroscuro lighting, angular camera angles, high-contrast shots, and urban landscapes to the focus on psychology, alienation, and dread. German expressionism has had a lasting impact on film, perhaps in part because it sprang from our universal desire to understand human nature and in part because its visual language was uniquely suited to storytelling through film. The need to explore our dark side in visual arts will continue, and some vestiges of the expressionist movement will remain, even as artists explore other methods for revealing the human condition.

Works Cited

Artsy, Avishay. “How Jewish Émigrés Impacted the Birth of Film Noir.” KCRW, 22 Oct. 2014, https://www.kcrw.com/culture/articles/how-jewish-emigres-impacted-the-birth-of-film-noir.
Dickos, Andrew. Sheet With No Name: A History of the Classic American Film Noir. University Press of Kentucky, 2002.
Force of Evil. Directed by Abraham Polonsky, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1948.
French, Philip. “From Nighthawks to the Shadows of Film Noir.” The Observer, 24 Apr. 2004. Accessed 13 Mar. 2025.
Muller, Eddie. Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir. Running Press, 2021.
Peck, William. What Is Film Noir? Bucknell University Press, 2011.
Younger, Prakash. “Film in Art.” The Routledge Companion to Film History, edited by William Guyan, Routledge, 2010.