Rick Burin’s review published on Letterboxd:
What's the best boxing movie ever? No, it's this.
Body and Soul is the archetypal Rossen rise-and-fall story, and exceptional in every way: the grubbily poetic Abraham Polonsky script that indicts capitalism, anti-Semitism and ruthless individualism, career-best performances from Palmer, Canada Lee and the great John Garfield, and a climax of shimmering, ferocious catharsis, shot by James Wong Howe on rollerskates (33 years before Scorsese won plaudits for doing the exact same thing).
It's a superb character study and a stunning sports movie, but it's also a bruising, uncompromising polemic, even by late-'40s standards, and with it came a terrible cost, as 10 of the cast and crew – including the writer, director and star – were subsequently targeted by the HUAC for alleged subversion.
Rossen could have learnt a lesson from his own film, but instead named names at the second attempt to save his career. Polonsky, by 1951 a hot new filmmaker, refused, as did Garfield and Lee. By the following year, he would be four years into a 21-year absence from the director's chair, and Garfield and Lee would be dead.
This film is a testament and monument to their idealism, stoicism and creative brilliance.
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