Film screening: “Force of Evil” (1948) is Abraham Polonsky’s searing portrait of corruption and conscience in postwar New York. John Garfield stars as a Wall Street lawyer ensnared in the city’s numbers racket, torn between moral reckoning and ruthless ambition. Shot on location in Lower Manhattan and the Bronx, “Force of Evil” portrays New York as both a glittering cathedral of commerce and a shadowed landscape of decay. Blacklisted soon after the film’s release, Polonsky infused the story with a political urgency and human complexity that feel startlingly contemporary. Paired with George Barnes’s evocative cinematography and the film’s lyrical, hard-edged dialogue, it is a modern tragedy of greed, betrayal and the corrupted promise of the American dream. Following the screening, film critics Imogen Sara Smith (“In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City”) and Geoffrey O’Brien (“Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of Noir”) will discuss the film’s artistry and enduring relevance — from its politically charged origins to its influence on later generations of filmmakers who saw noir not only as style, but as social commentary.