FORCE OF EVIL (1948)

John Garfield (born Jacob Julius Garfinkle), dead at 39 of heart failure, was one of America’s truly great stage and film actors. He's especially good in this highly literate exposé of the New York City numbers racket written and directed by Abraham Polonsky. Joe Morse (Garfield) is a Mob lawyer working for a crime boss hell-bent on consolidating the city's numbers rackets into one large "legal" lottery. Defying the big boss’s wishes is Joe's older brother Leo (Thomas Gomez), an "honest" small-time, independent bookie who cares more about his employees than profits and refuses to sell out to the Mob. What follows are tragic events that force Joe, a man with a buried conscience, to realize just how low he's fallen. It's noir as good as it gets. (Trivia notes: Be sure to check out the wonderful performances of Garfield in in BETWEEN TWO WORDS, GENTLEMAN'S AGREEMENT, and BODY AND SOUL.)