He ran all the way and the Hollywood Blacklist
by Jake Hinkson
He was born Jacob Julius Garfinkle,
a poor Jewish kid from the Lower East Side of New York City. He spent some time
in street gangs and ended up in a Bronx school for troubled youth. After
winning a state debating contest, he attended drama school and hit the stage as
a member of the Group Theater. It wasn’t long before Hollywood came courting
and cast him in Michael Curtiz’s smash hit Four Daughters in 1938. Overnight he
became a movie star. The legend of John Garfield was born.
Thirteen years later, it ended
with a thud. Accused of being a Communist and hounded by the House Un-American
Activities Committee, Garfield died of a heart attack, a frightened, broken man.
It was a terrible way to go, but he’d already amassed an impressive body of
work that would outlive him.
He had made a special mark in the
dark underworld of film noir, lusting after Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings
Twice (1946), boxing his way to redemption in Body and Soul (1947), and losing everything in Force of
Evil (1948). Cinematically, he came to his bitter end face down in a gutter in
He Ran All the Way (1951).
He Ran All the Way has an
impressive pedigree.
It was directed by John Berry and
photographed by James Wong Howe. In addition to Garfield and Winters, it stars
Wallace Ford, Selena Royle, Norman Lloyd, and Gladys George. The screenplay,
credited
to Guy Endore and Hugo Butler,
was mostly written by the great Dalton Trumbo. It’s an impressive group of
people collaborating on a taut, dark crime picture.
Trumbo was banned from working in
Hollywood at the time, he used a front on the project, novelist and screenwriter
Guy Endore (Tomorrow Is Another Day).
Director John Berry had started out
in the leftist theater world in New York. An early disciple of Orson Welles (he
once called Welles “my spiritual father”), he thought theater a progressive
medium and far superior to the crass commercialism of film. Soon though, he was
tempted out to Hollywood where he was assigned to study Billy Wilder on the set
of Double Indemnity. In 1949, he turned in a gem
with Tension, starring femme
fatale Audrey Totter at her sexiest and meanest. It was a suspenseful piece of
work, one that should have led to bigger projects, but his next film had a far
greater
impact on his career—and his
life. The Hollywood Ten (1950) was a fifteen-minute documentary defending
Trumbo and the rest of the Hollywood writers and directors who had stood up to
the original congressional investigation into Hollywood’s politics in 1947.
Even while he was making He Ran All The Way, Berry knew that things were
going to get tough. Then on April 25, 1951 one of the Hollywood Ten, director
Edward Dmytryk, flipped and turned informer. One of the first names he gave the
Committee: John Berry. When the FBI showed up at his door to serve him with a
subpoena, Berry climbed out his back window and fled the country. He relocated
to France and started making films, including the impressive Ca va barder and
Je suis un sentimental. He even did an adaptation of He Ran All The Way for French television. By his own
admission, though, he never recovered his career’s momentum.
The list of blacklisted He Ran
All The Way collaborators goes on:
—Associate producer Paul Trivers
saw his career evaporate overnight.
—Actor Norman Lloyd, who plays
Garfield’s accomplice in the payroll heist, was out of work for years after
being blacklisted until Alfred Hitchcock threw him a lifeline in the late
fifties and hired him to help produce Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
—Selena Royle, who plays
Winters’s mother, had worked steadily for years as an admired supporting
actress, but when her name appeared in a list of “Red Fascists” in the
right-wing publication Red
Channels, she was ordered to
testify before HUAC. When she refused, her career was finished. She moved to
Mexico, like many blacklist refugees, where she would live out the rest of her
life writing travel guides and assembling cookbooks with titles like Pheasants
For Peasants and A Gringa’s Guide To Mexican Cooking.
—While cinematographer James Wong
Howe wasn’t blacklisted, HUAC considered him suspicious, and that whiff of
controversy alone complicated the early fifties for the legendary DP.
—Shelley Winters also avoided a
direct confrontation with the Committee, but during the hearings she quit
Hollywood in disgust. As she told the San Francisco Film Festival years later,
“It was all because of the Communist scare…I couldn’t stand what was
happening.”
These people were all small fish,
though. What the Committee really wanted was someone big. That meant a bona
fide movie star, and almost from the beginning they had their eye on John
Garfield. He was dragged before the Committee where he denied knowing anything
about Communism. He denied having ever met a single Communist. These were
blatant lies (his wife Robbie had been a party member), but Garfield had never
been a party member, and he had no desire to put the finger on any of his
friends just to save his career. The Committee asked him about John Berry and
Hugo Butler, both of whom had fled the country. Garfield said nothing. They
asked him who wrote He Ran All The Way, and he didn’t mention Trumbo. Still,
the Committee hounded him, kept after him about an issue of The Daily Worker
that he admitted to once having read, pressed him on the difference between
being a liberal and being a pink-o. Mostly, though, they wanted names. It was
all the Committee ever seemed to want: just give us the names of some of your
friends, and we’ll let you go. When Garfield refused to turn rat, HUAC gave his
testimony to the FBI and asked them to build a perjury case. The studios
stopped hiring him. One of the biggest movie stars of the 1940s—a man with two Oscar
nominations and millions of fans—was done in Hollywood. The FBI started tailing
him, eventually compiling a thousand-page file on the comings and goings of an
out-of-work actor. Panicked, Garfield
wrote an article for Look magazine called “I Was A Sucker For A Left Hook” in which
he denounced Communism and said he’d been duped into supporting various leftist
causes. It read like a pathetic plea for absolution, and the magazine refused
to publish it. “I’ll act anywhere,” he told a columnist in late 1951. But his
career was over. In May of 1952, he died suddenly of a heart attack. Asked
about Garfield’s death, John Berry mused later, “The tension was enormous. The
temptation to play ball must have crossed his mind. This may sound romantic,
but I think what happened was, faced with this option, Julius Garfinkle of the
Bronx said to John Garfield of Hollywood, ‘You can’t do this to me.’ And John
Garfield packed his bags and died. The only way to clear himself was to rat,
and he couldn’t do that.”
Yet John Garfield continues to
live on, one of the great doomed men of film noir, and one of his best
performances appears in He Ran
All The Way, which was to be his final film. Berry later told interviewer
Patrick McGilligan that the cast
and crew were under a great deal of strain at the time the movie was made. “[The
movie is] about doom,” he said. “That’s not coincidental.”
The film shows the director at
his best. Because of Howe’s exquisite deep focus photography, Berry is able to
utilize the front of the image to great, jarring effect—often foregrounding an
actor’s face in a tight close-up while allowing another plane of action to unfold
behind him. And while the script has lapses (neither Shelley Winters nor her
parents seem to notice that she’s brought home an anxious, stuttering mess of a
man until he pulls out a gun), it still crackles with great lines: when
Garfield’s booze-swilling mother tells him, “If you were a man, you’d be out lookin’
for a job,” he snaps back, “And if you were a man, I’d kick your teeth in.” The
cast is uniformly good. Winters played needy, self-deluded women better than
anyone, and Gladys George, sucking down Pabst Blue Ribbon for breakfast, steals
every scene she’s in.
Ultimately, however, the film
belongs to its doomed star. Though Garfield looks pale and punchy, he’s still
absolutely riveting. A natural earthiness emanates from those stock shoulders,
that big sweaty forehead, and that unmistakable New York voice. His eyes—dark
and soulful—always appear to be shadowboxing with his thoughts. Garfield’s face
had always seemed to project worry, and in the way he combined every guy
authenticity with a bubbling neurosis, he presaged the Method actors like
Brando and Dean who would follow him. In a way, he had outgrown this kind of
role. Films like Polonsky’s Force of Evil and Curtiz’s The Breaking Point had
showed that he could play a smart guy with moral complications as well as dumb
palookas and lusty dimwits.
Still, what he does here, in his
last film, he did as well as anybody. The film’s final image, of Garfield face down
in a gutter, is a remarkable noir visual, a fitting end to a tragic career.