John Garfield, a screen and stage star whose career was tragically cut short by illness and the Hollywood blacklist, is one of film history’s too-often unrecognized talents. HE RAN ALL THE WAY, a lesser-known but nonetheless compelling Garfield feature, has just been released on DVD and Blu-ray. The film dates from 1951, and is the actor’s celluloid swan song. He was felled by a heart attack the following year, at an all-too-young age.
For one thing, Garfield is extra-special because he predates Marlon Brando, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, and Paul Newman, not to mention Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, as a Hollywood star who specialized in playing anti-heroes. However, in HE RAN ALL THE WAY, Garfield’s character is all-villain. He is Nick Robey, a third-rate, none-too-bright thief-on-the-lam who becomes involved with a lonely unattached woman, played by Shelley Winters.
What I’ve always liked about Garfield is evident in his performance as Robey. No matter whom he is playing, he seamlessly blends into his characters. He makes them his own, and it is a special treat to watch him onscreen. This was true whatever the essence of his characters: for example, the cynical, alienated musician in FOUR DAUGHTERS, released in 1938, which was Garfield’s debut feature. His eye-opening performance made him an instant star, and it served as the model for his anti-hero characterizations.
Garfield also played characters who, like Nick Robey, were clear-cut scoundrels. One example: a drifter who falls for a married woman and plots the murder of her husband in THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE. But he also played guy-next-door good guys: for example, a GI who is blinded at Guadalcanal and who must adjust to sightlessness in civilian life in PRIDE OF THE MARINES. Other favorite Garfield characters include an unethical lawyer in FORCE OF EVIL; a money-strapped charter boat captain in THE BREAKING POINT; a classical musician who rises from the Lower East Side Manhattan slums and becomes involved with a high-society dame in HUMORESQUE; and a boxer who rises from the Lower East Side Manhattan slums and is corrupted by fame in BODY AND SOUL, which arguably is Garfield’s best film.
My sense of Garfield is that, while a major personality from the late 1930s through very-early 1950s, he was, politically-speaking, a man of honor. This explains why, in 1947, despite his A-list movie star status, he gladly accepted a supporting role in GENTLEMAN’S AGREEMENT simply because of the film’s portrayal of the insidiousness of anti-Semitism.
In the late 1940s, at the advent of the civil rights movement, Hollywood began producing films that acknowledged the ill-treatment of African-Americans. This calls to mind the relationship between two of the characters in BODY AND SOUL, which tellingly was an independent production whose content reflects Garfield’s politics. The first is Charlie Davis, Garfield’s character. The second is Ben Chaplin, a black champ played by Canada Lee. The two men are, well, men who are shown to be equals. They respect each other. Their bond is genuine. At a pivotal moment, the black man even offers his white friend advice. And at a time in which black characters in Hollywood movies still were shuffling stereotypes, the character of Ben Chaplin is a revelation.
Tragically, Garfield became a victim of the time in which he lived. He was no Communist Party member, but was instead a proud New York liberal. To cut to the chase, he found himself blacklisted, as were a number of others who worked on HE RAN ALL THE WAY. These include the film’s director, John Berry, and its screenwriters, Dalton Trumbo and Hugo Butler. And Garfield was one of the blacklistees-- another was Canada Lee-- whose outsider status directly impacted his health and resulted in his too-early demise. It is sadly ironic that, on the Internet Movie Database, Garfield is quoted as observing that “No actor can really be good until he’s reached (age) 40.” At his death, John Garfield was 39 years old.
Rob Edelman teaches film history at the University at Albany. He has written several books on film and television, and is an associate editor of Leonard Maltin’s Movie and Video Guide.
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