That Body and Soul is a seminal film is indisputable. The trouble with it as a seminal film is that it has disappeared into its accrued significance (its germinology?), a film of more context than content. First, there are the lists that can be spun out of it, the eight future directors, no less, at work here under Rossen: from the significant (Robert Aldrich, Abraham Polonsky) to the so-so (Robert Parrish) to the rest (Francis D. Lyon, Nathan Juran, William Conrad, Joseph Pevney, dialogue director Don Weiss), and even veteran cinematographer James Wong Howe with Go, Man, Go in 1953. Then there is its production history, the fact that it was the first venture of the independent Enterprise Studios, formed to give filmmakers greater control over their work (Robert Aldrich: ‘They had a very populist concept about how pictures should be made … It was a marvellous place to work but the pictures were terrible! … only one was moderately successful, Body and Soul, with John Garfield. And that cost too much because Rossen was afraid of Jimmy Wong Howe and the picture took too long’).
Principally, of course, it is a seminal film about boxing as one of the ‘rackets’, and as a statement of the populist ideology of men like Rossen and Polonsky, political writers with affiliations with 30s Communism behind them and the blacklist ahead of them, tilting at windmills like big business, the manipulation of the masses, and the economic exploitation of the dreams of honest men. Honesty and corruption are the bywords here: the economic arguments come laden with such moral dread, the study of the evils of capitalism is so individualistically focused, that it is no wonder the scenarios take off into the realms of sin and perdition, temptation and redemption (among the temptations in Body and Soul is not just filthy lucre but the slinky torch singer parodied in the ‘archetypal’ boxing story in Movie Movie). In Rossen’s terms, it’s not hard to jump from the solemn battle of good and evil for the soul of John Garfield to the question teasingly put to Warren Beatty by the mental patient called ‘Dostoevsky’ in Lilith: ‘Do you believe that if there is no god that there can be no such thing as virtue?’ (Is Rossen the ‘Dostoevsky of the Cinema’? The Australian publication Film Index has made so bold.)
Body and Soul is constantly talking about money, but its thinking is persistently existential. In a way, this also exemplifies the plight of the ‘political’ writer in pre-war Hollywood, who felt the need to present his social criticism as something else. In interview (Film Quarterly, Spring 1962), Polonsky has even referred to this as a kind of self-censorship, and claimed that filmmakers like Ford and Capra, conservatives unself-conscious about their political attitudes, could more openly introduce ‘progressive’ material. Polonsky’s dialogue for Body and Soul crisply and pungently works the divide between economics and metaphysics, giving most of its best lines to Roberts, the crooked fight promoter who represents the System and whose talk, to borrow F. Scott Fitzgerald’s phrase, is full of money: ‘Everything is addition and subtraction, the rest is conversation’; ‘Take the money – it ain’t like people, it got no memory, it don’t think.’ As would be even more evident in Polonsky’s own subsequent directorial debut for Enterprise, Force of Evil, language in Body and Soul works another divide between heightened vernacular and buried metaphor.
Rossen’s direction follows suit, a combination of conventional naturalism (shading into documentary ‘fights’ coverage, as in the famous climactic bout which Wong Howe shot on roller skates) and some noir stylisation, the exaggerated angles and camera movements of the framing sequences in which Charley sweats out his moral crisis on the night of the big fight. The combination is in itself a Hollywood convention, and it is largely a matter of predilection whether one emphasises the element of noir or reportage in those 30s Warners films, ‘torn from the headlines of today’, on which Rossen worked as a writer. The history of his development as a director is also the trace of those two tendencies (he later expressed an admiration for neorealism, and shot All the King’s Men as far as possible on location and in natural light).
On the one hand, this makes him rather hard to describe stylistically (realist, expressionist, documentarist … ), and on the other is his distinguishing feature, because Rossen continues, beyond the 30s and 40s, to work over the moral, ideological and political problems that went with the style – through the desert of the 50s (Alexander the Great, They Came to Cordura) to the 60s, when the discussion of moral problems becomes a picture of soul states (The Hustler, Lilith). To the extent that Body and Soul is ambivalent about its terms – it’s all there in the title; the film wants to talk about capitalism and the soul – there are already intimations of this. The moral contest also has an aspect of dream (in which begin responsibilities), mainly evident in the strangely convoluted structure: Charley wakes from a nightmare on the night of his big fight, rushes home to an unsuccessful reunion with mother and sweetheart, and then proceeds to his dressing-room, where the rest of the film then unfolds in flashback. It’s an aspect also of such story elements as Charley’s relationship with Peg, who is his salvation in that she is doubly removed from his world (with a foreign background and artistic aspirations), and even of the persona of John Garfield, both pugnacious and soft, or as one commentator has put it, ‘a combination of tough cynicism and urban dreaminess.’
Richard Combs, Monthly Film Bulletin, January 1986
Body and Soul
Directed by: Robert Rossen
©: Roberts Productions
Presented by: Enterprise Studios
Produced by: Bob Roberts
Executive Production Manager: Joseph C. Gilpin
Assistant Director: Robert Aldrich
Original Screenplay by: Abraham Polonsky
Director of Photography: James Wong Howe
Supervising Editor: Francis D. Lyon
Film Editor: Robert Parrish
Montages Directed by: Gunther V. Fritsch
Art Direction: Nathan Juran
Set Decorations: Edward J. Boyle
Wardrobe Designed by: Marion Herwood Keyes
Make-up Supervision: Gustaf M. Norin
Music Composed by: Hugo Friedhofer
The Song ‘Body and Soul’ Music by: Johnny Green
The Song ‘Body and Soul’ Lyrics by: Edward Heyman, Robert Sour, Frank Eyton
Musical Director: Rudolph Polk
Conducted by: Emil Newman
Sound Recording by: Sound Services Inc.
Sound System: Western Electric
Sound Engineer: Frank Webster
Cast
John Garfield (Charley Davis)
Lilli Palmer (Peg Born)
Hazel Brooks (Alice)
Anne Revere (Anna Davis)
William Conrad (Quinn)
Joseph Pevney (Shorty Polaski)
Lloyd Goff (Roberts)
Canada Lee (Ben Chaplin)
Art Smith (David Davis) *
James Burke (Arnold) *
Virginia Gregg (Irma) *
Peter Virgo (drummer) *
Joe Devlin (Prince) *
Shimen Ruskin (grocer) *
Mary Currier (Miss Tedder) *
Milton Kibbee (Dan) *
Tim Ryan (Shelton) *
Artie Dorrell (Jack Marlowe) *
Cyril Ring (Victor) *
Glen Lee (Marino) *
John Indrisano (referee) *
Dan Tobey (fight announcer) *
USA 1947
106 mins
35mm
A BFI National Archive print
*Uncredited
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
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