running all the way: the films of john garfield

august 9 - 29, 1996

Including a special tribute to writer/director Abraham Polonsky (FORCE OF EVIL, BODY AND SOUL, ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW). Mr. Polonsky will introduce several screenings of his films (noted below).

He was a New York streetboy who became an actor to escape a delinquent's life. He was the Depression's James Dean, who stunned Hollywood in FOUR DAUGHTERS (1938) and won an Oscar nomination for his first screen role. After World War II, he was the biggest star called before the anti-Communist witch hunters. When he died in 1952, at 39 years old, under scandalous circumstances in a woman friend's apartment, his funeral drew the largest crowds in New York since Valentino's. Yet John Garfield is today among the least known of Hollywood's studio-era stars. The Film Society's retrospective of Garfield films from August 9 through August 29 provides an opportunity to rediscover a major figure, the precursor of a later generation's rebel heroes, Brando, Clift and Dean.

Born in 1913 on the Lower East Side, Jacob Julius Garfinkle, the son of a Jewish clothes presser, became Jules and then John Garfield on his path through the ideological 1930s from the Group Theatre to Hollywood. Warner Bros. thought it had signed up a younger James Cagney, a more punkish than puckish tough guy, but Garfield's performance in FOUR DAUGHTERS won him a supporting actor Oscar nomination and the adulation of female teenagers. Warners nevertheless wanted him for its gritty headline dramas, and the actor frequently fought the studio throughout his long-term contract. Garfield's best work came in loanouts to other studios in films such as THE FALLEN SPARROW (RKO, 1943) and THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE (MGM, 1946).

After the war, Garfield became one of the first performers to set up his own production company. Gathering creative talent from the Hollywood left, his company made two of the key progressive films of the era, BODY AND SOUL (1947), for which Garfield won a best actor nomination, and FORCE OF EVIL (1948), written and directed by Abraham Polonsky. The House Un-American Activities Committee, however, had begun its purge of Hollywood's Communists and liberals. Film work became harder to find, and Garfield's last film, HE RAN ALL THE WAY (1951), directed by John Berry, was also produced by his own company.

Garfield was never a member of the Communist Party, although he worked with many artists who were. He was called to testify in April 1951 and tried to avoid the two options the committee offered its witnesses, to "name names" or assert a Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Angered, the committee sought to indict him for perjury. Garfield was under intense political and legal pressure at the time of his death from a heart attack in May 1952. The Film Society's series offers a chance once again to see on screen the young New York actor who became Hollywood's tough and sentimental streetboy. -- Robert Sklar, author of City Boys: Cagney, Bogart, Garfield Abraham Polonsky special events

HONORING ABRAHAM POLONSKY Within a few years of scripting BODY AND SOUL and directing FORCE OF EVIL, this powerful chronicler of corruption--social and economic--was blacklisted by HUAC, and Polonsky did not work under his own name until he directed TELL THEM WILLIE BOY IS HERE in 1969, almost two decades later. "There are greater tragedies in the world," acidly writes David Thomson, "but if you ever feel comfortable, search out Force of Evil and recollect how thoroughly its director was excluded from filmmaking." Mr. Polonsky now teaches at the University of Southern California, where the Abraham Polonsky Screenwriting Award is bestowed annually. Abraham Polonsky introduces both screenings of FORCE OF EVIL as well as the screenings of ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW and TELL THEM WILLIE BOY IS HERE, and joins us for Q&A following these films.

FREE SPECIAL EVENT Meet writer/director Abraham Polonsky and film scholar John Schultheis for film clips, discussion and ticket raffle. Mr. Polonsky will also be available to sign his new book "Force of Evil, The Critical Edition." Tuesday, August 13, 7:30 pm Barnes & Noble, Broadway at 66th Street program notes and times, part I

FOUR DAUGHTERS
Michael Curtiz, 1938; 90 minutes
Academy Award nominations for best picture, script, for director Curtiz and for Garfield, in his very first role Based on Fanny Hurst's Sister Act, this beautifully acted and utterly endearing story follows the small-town lives and loves of four gifted sisters (Priscilla Lane, Rosemary Lane, Lola Lane, Gale Page), daughters of a music professor (Claude Rains). As Mickey Borden, a rather world-weary suitor, Garfield caused such a sensation that another movie--Daughters Courageous--had to be made to showcase his character again.
Friday, August 9: 2 and 8:30 pm
Saturday, August 10: 6:30 and 10 pm

THEY MADE ME A CRIMINAL
Busby Berkeley, 1939; 92 minutes
Garfield plays a champion prizefighter who, believing he's killed a man in a drunken melee, flees to Arizona to find redemption on a ranch with May Robson, Ann Sheridan, and the Dead End Kids. With Claude Rains as the detective on the framed Garfield's trail. Out of his usual league, director Berkeley turns Criminal into a top-notch sin-and-salvation saga. Critics raved about Garfield's tough vulnerability, his natural style, and his streetwise authenticity.
Friday, August 9: 4 and 10 pm
Saturday, August 10: 8:15 pm

Abraham Polonsky, 1948; 78 minutes
Separate Admission
Garfield enabled screenwriter Polonsky (Body and Soul) to make his directing debut with this pungent film noir, a moving study of two brothers--lawyer-on-the-make Garfield and neighborhood banker Thomas Gomez--caught up in the numbers racket. The sets are as dynamic and persuasive as the New York locations, the dialogue--in blank verse yet!--is some of the most memorable ever heard on the American screen, and Garfield's performance is at once his most ferocious and forlorn.
Friday, August 9: 6 pm (Q&A with Abraham Polonsky)
Saturday, August 10: 4 pm (Q&A with Abraham Polonsky)

BODY AND SOUL
Robert Rossen, 1947; 104 minutes
Breaking away from Warner Bros. at last, Garfield helped establish a new studio, Enterprise, to produce intelligent, offbeat films with a strong core of social reality. The first, Body and Soul, was a triumph on all counts, winning great popularity and critical acclaim, an Academy Award nomination as Best Actor for Garfield, and the Oscar for Best Film Editing . Garfield is Charlie Davis, a boxer who gets into the ring to help pay off his family's debts, swiftly becomes a major contender, and all but loses himself among the myriad temptations that success brings. James Wong Howe shot the unprece-dentedly dynamic boxing sequences on rollerskates, using a hand-held camera! The excellent supporting cast includes Lilli Palmer, Anne Revere, Canada Lee, Lloyd Gough, and William Conrad.
Sunday, August 11: 4 pm (Introduced by Abraham Polonsky)
Monday, August 12:2 and 5:30 pm

FLOWING GOLD
Alfred E. Green, 1940; 82 minutes
On the lam from a murder committed in self-defense, Johnny Blake (Garfield) gets a job working in the oil fields. Laying low gets complicated by his falling hard for Linda Chalmers, the lovely girlfriend (Frances Farmer) of his boss and best friend Hap O'Connor (Pat O'Brien). An oilwell fire heats up this triangle, as well as Blake's status as a fugitive from the law. (The talented, doomed Farmer had just returned from a stint in New York's Group Theater, where she had starred with Garfield in Golden Boy.)
Sunday, August 11: 6:15 pm
Monday, August 12: 4 pm

ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW
Robert Wise, 1959; 96 minutes
Separate Admission
Marking the acknowledgment of Abraham Polonsky as screenwriter (with Nelson Gidding)
A last-of-the-noirs caper film laced with gritty social commentary: A trio made up of an ex-con (Robert Ryan), an ex-cop (Ed Begley), and a black singer (Harry Belafonte) team up to rob a bank in upstate New York. Everything goes wrong, exacerbated by killing racial antagonism. Visually true to the rich blacks of noir nights and venetian-blind-slashed shadowy interiors, with a terrific jazz score and a superb cast, including Shelley Winters and Gloria Grahame. Sun, Aug 11: 8 pm (Q&A with Abraham Polonsky)

TELL THEM WILLIE BOY IS HERE
Abraham Polonsky, 1969; 96 minutes
Separate Admission
Allegory and specific dramatic incident illustrating the death of some vital part of the American Dream: A Paiute Indian (Robert Blake, aiming for latterday Garfield) flees murder in self-defense with the girl he loves (Katherine Ross), and is tracked by men hankering for the old Indian-killing days and Coop, a Hemingwayesque sheriff who has more in common with his prey than with his posse. Award-winning performances, with Susan Clark outstanding as a Boston teacher who righteously "corrupts" the Indians in her care. Mon, Aug 12: 7:45 pm (Q&A with Abraham Polonsky)

GENTLEMAN'S AGREEMENT
Elia Kazan, 1947; 118 minutes
Numerous awards, including the Academy and New York Film Critics nods for Best Picture, went to this adaptation of the Laura Z. Hobson novel about a writer (Gregory Peck) who pretends to be Jewish in order to develop a first hand account of anti-Semitism in post-WWII America. Third-billed Garfield, nČ Jules Garfinkle, takes the comparatively small but crucial role of Dave Goldman, Peck's longtime friend and an Army officer still in uniform. His quiet-spoken account of the last minutes of a fellow Jew on a European battlefield is one of the angriest and most eloquent moments in the annals of screen acting.
Tuesday, August 13: 2 pm
Wednesday, August 14: 3:45 and 7:45 pm

DUST BE MY DESTINY
Lewis Seiler, 1939; 88 minutes
Garfield plays an alienated drifter who finds himself in jail, under the thumb of a sadistic prison guard (Alan Hale)--who happens to have the kind of beautiful stepdaughter (Priscilla Lane) who can save a man's soul. Robert Rossen, product of the Lower East Side, card-carrying Communist, and later, director of Body and Soul, wrote this strong "message" picture: note, for instance, Garfield's impassioned plea for the "nobodies" of America, addressed directly to the camera in a single take.
Tuesday, August 13: 4:15 pm
Wednesday, August 14: 2 and 6 pm

PRIDE OF THE MARINES
Delmer Daves, 1945; 120 minutes
This sorely neglected film, made near the end of WWII and based on a true story, displays a rare feeling for the textures of ordinary American life and the kinds of aspiration and courage it can entail. Garfield plays Al Schmid, a brash working-class fellow from Philly who signs up to be a Marine more or less as a lark and loses his eyesight in a horrific night battle on Guadalcanal. A sworn bachelor who had fallen in love shortly before signing up, he is loath to write his sweetheart (Eleanor Parker) about what has happened. Everything about the film is remarkably fine: the semidocumentary style, the Philadelphia locations of the early reels, the tenderly comic, reluctant courtship, the truly unsettling battle scene, and the brave, unsentimental treatment of Schmid's responses to his personal tragedy. One of Garfield's very best.
Thursday, August 15: 2 and 9 pm
Friday, August 16: 3:40 and 7:40 pm

CASTLE ON THE HUDSON
Anatole Litvak, 1940; 77 minutes
Spencer Tracy starred in the original version, 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, but Warner Bros. was testing Garfield's potential as a second Jimmy Cagney when they cast him in one of their tried-and-true genres, the prison picture. Ann Sheridan plays tough gal to Garfield's tough guy, Pat O'Brien covers the morality beat, Jerome Cowan provides expert sleaze, and Burgess Meredith is a colorfully doomed con.
Thursday, August 15: 4:15 pm
Friday, August 16: 2, 6 and 10 pm

THE BREAKING POINT
Michael Curtiz, 1950; 97 minutes
The most faithful among several screen versions of Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not, this tale of a charter-boat skipper reluctantly involved in smuggling brought Garfield back to Warner Bros. for one last--successful--outing. Curtiz gave Garfield a rare chance to play a credibly flawed character against realistic backgrounds far from the contrived world of the studio, and he responded with one of his trimmest performances. With Patricia Neal, Phyllis Thaxter, and Juano Hernandez.
Saturday, August 17: 4 and 8:30 pm
(both screenings introduced by Robert Nott, author of a forthcoming Garfield biography)
Monday, August 19: 4:30 and 9 pm

HUMORESQUE
Jean Negulesco, 1946; 125 minutes
Fresh from her triumphant comeback as Mildred Pierce, Joan Crawford dug her nails deep into the darkly glamorous (gowns by Adrian) role of an aging rich-bitch obsessed with Garfield's young violinist, who in turn loves his instrument above all else. Fannie Hurst's original novel showcased the musical prodigy's all-suffering mother, but Clifford Odets' script makes Crawford's fatally attracted patroness the superb centerpiece of this lushly melodramatic slant-rhyme to A Star Is Born. With Oscar Levant, J. Carrol Naish, Ruth Nelson, et al., and Isaac Stern on the soundtrack.
Saturday, August 17: 6 pm
Monday, August 19: 2 and 6:30 pm

THE SEA WOLF
Michael Curtiz, 1941; 99 minutes
(A rare archival print, containing 9 additional minutes)
Jack London's classic tale of seafaring and hubris gave Garfield a plum role opposite Edward G. Robinson's sadistic ship's captain Wolf Larsen, who takes his credo from Milton's Satan: "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven." Script by Robert Rossen; with Alexander Knox as the intellectual who conducts a running debate with Larsen, Ida Lupino as a fugitive who enlists the shanghaied Garfield's aid, and Barry Fitzgerald as an irreverent ship's cook who gets a fearsome comeuppance.
Sunday, August 18: 4 and 8:15 pm
Wednesday, August 21: 8:45 pm

TORTILLA FLAT
Victor Fleming, 1942; 105 minutes
John Steinbeck's salty novel about Monterey, California, ne'er-do-wells on the wrong side of the tracks comes to the screen with a cast that won't stop: Spencer Tracy and Garfield as best buddies, struggling to make a killing any which way they can; Hedy Lamarr, simply splendid as the girl they both love; Frank Morgan, so good as the rich dog-lover the bad boys try to con, he earned an Oscar nomination; and a slew of other colorful folk: Akim Tamiroff, Sheldon Leonard, John Qualen, and Donald Meek.
Sunday, August 18: 6 pm
Wednesday, August 21: 4:30 pm

AIR FORCE
Howard Hawks, 1943; 124 minutes
Death is always a brutal constant in Howard Hawks' movies, so for his misfit heroes and heroines, world war--the first or the second--is only a formalized version of everyday reality. This WWII morale-booster was made by special request, but it manages to turn one of the director's typically anarchic communities into "democracy in microcosm": in the air as Pearl Harbor is hit, the crew of the Mary-Ann literally lands on island after island just minutes after devastating attacks by the Japanese. The crew's a cross section of America--with "diverse and authentic speech," in James Agee's words--and John Garfield's Winocki is the outsider who must be adopted into a team that ultimately acts out accumulated frustration--the fliers, and the viewer's--in stunning aerial battle. (With Harry Carey, Gig Young, Arthur Kennedy--and William Faulkner providing dialogue.)
Wednesday, August 21: 2 and 6:15 pm

UNDER MY SKIN
Jean Negulesco, 1950; 86 minutes
Loosely adapted from Ernest Hemingway's unforgiving short story "My Old Man," Under My Skin has a tainted steeplechase jockey (Garfield) on the run from a racetrack "fixer" (Luther Adler) he's double-crossed. Banned from American tracks, Garfield works the European circuit, accompanied by his son (Orley Lindgren), who refuses to see his old man as anything less than a hero, though the rest of the world has counted him out as a loser. With Micheline Presle as Gallic love interest.
Wednesday, August 21: 4:30 and 8:30 pm

OUT OF THE FOG
Anatole Litvak, 1941; 93 minutes
In a part for which he beat out Humphrey Bogart, Garfield snarls and intimidates with the best of the bad guys (he was originally groomed to be a Jimmy Cagney clone) as a racketeer bent on terrorizing Brooklyn fishermen John Qualen and Thomas Mitchell. It's the latter's daughter, tough but good Ida Lupino, who breaches Garfield's armor (it was Lupino's vote that turned the tide for Garfield over Bogart). Adapted from Irwin Shaw's The Gentle People, co-scripted by Robert Rossen, with cinematography by the great James Wong Howe.
Thursday, August 22: 2 and 6:15 pm

DAUGHTERS COURAGEOUS
Michael Curtiz, 1939; 107 minutes
The cast of the wildly successful Four Daughters--Garfield's first movie--was reassembled for a second, equally endearing take on family life in Smalltown, USA. Claude Rains plays a father who returns to the daughters he abandoned some 20 years ago, and Garfield--an American-born son of a Portuguese fisherman--courts and charms one of the prodigal's offspring (Priscilla Lane). Thursday, August 22: 4 and 8:15 pm


THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE
Tay Garnett, 1946; 113 minutes
Adapted from the novel by James M. Cain, Postman translates the brutal violence and sexuality of Cain's noir fiction into one of the toughest screen versions of his work. Dark, tough-guy handsome, disillusioned to his proletariat bones, Garfield is a perfect match for Lana Turner's purring, all-platinum femme fatale in this steamy film noir. From his first lustful look at the unlikely wife--a beautiful spider in white turban, halter, and shorts--of a roadside diner's proprietor, drifter Garfield's a goner, and so's Lana's inconvenient husband (Cecil Kellaway). Classic noir, played out in bleached sunlight and black-velvet nights.
Friday, August 23: 2 and 6:15 pm
Saturday, August 24: 4 and 8 pm

THE FALLEN SPARROW
Richard Wallace, 1943; 94 minutes
One of the rare Hollywood movies even to refer to the Spanish Civil War, this suspenseful RKO thriller features Garfield (himself a Loyalist supporter in the 30s) as a Lincoln Brigade veteran haunted by fragmented memories of torture at the hands of the Gestapo. It seems that only he knew the location of a flag captured from an elite Nazi regiment, and even now, back in the theoretical safety of the U.S., someone is still after the secret, and him. With Maureen O'Hara and Walter Slezak.
Friday, August 23: 4:15 and 8:15 pm
Saturday, August 24: 6 and 10 pm

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
Edward A. Blatt, 1944; 112 minutes
A remake of Outward Bound (1930), itself an adaptation of a hit 20s play, Between Two Worlds features a gaggle of passengers on board a luxury cruise ship--air-raid casualties and a couple of lovers who have committed suicide. Question is, is this boat headed for heaven or hell? Terrific performances by all of these Warner Brothers stars and stock players--Garfield, Eleanor Parker, Paul Henreid, Sara Allgood, George Tobias, Faye Emerson, George Coulouris--but especially outstanding turns by Edmund Gwenn and Sydney Greenstreet.
Sunday, August 25: 4 and 8:15 pm
Tuesday, August 27: 2 pm
(both screenings introduced by Robert Nott, author of a forthcoming Garfield biography)


SATURDAY'S CHILDREN
Vincent Sherman, 1940; 101 minutes
Based on a Maxwell Anderson play (in which Bogart had starred on Broadway), Saturday's Children follows the fortunes of two young people--a hardworking girl with her feet firmly planted on the ground (Anne Shirley) and Garfield's dreamy inventor--who fall in love and marry only to find themselves under-equipped to handle life with too little money and an abundance of hard realities, especially parenthood. Claude Rains is unforgettable as Shirley's self-sacrificing father. More impeccable cinematography from James Wong Howe.
Sunday, August 25: 6:15 pm
Tuesday, August 27: 4:15 pm

NOBODY LIVES FOREVER
Jean Negulesco, 1946; 100 minutes
A New York gangster (Garfield), just medi-cally discharged from the army, comes home to find that his wife has been unfaithful and bilked him of all his cash. After re-lining his pockets, he heads for a California beach-house to rest and recuperate. There, he gets involved with some L.A. hoods in the conning of a wealthy young widow (Geraldine Fitzgerald), another one of those Warners women in the business of saving bad guys with hearts of gold.
Monday, August 26: 2 and 7 pm

THANK YOUR LUCKY STARS
David Butler, 1943; 124 minutes
In this Warners' all-star musical designed to boost wartime morale, Eddie Cantor (who plays himself and a cabbie) and a few of his friends work to put together a patriotic show. The movie's socko guest list includes Garfield, Edward Everett Horton, Humphrey Bogart, Jack Carson, Bette Davis (singing "They're Either Too Young or Too Old"), Olivia de Havilland, Errol Flynn (belting out "That's What You Jolly Well Get"), Ida Lupino, Ann Sheridan, Dinah Shore, Spike Jones and his City Slickers, Hattie McDaniel, et al. The film kids Garfield's tough-guy image, with Dinah Shore testifying that he's "the sweetest, mildest, gentlest boy you'd ever want to meet in the whole world," even as, offstage, he is seen roughing up poor Eddie Cantor.
Monday, August 26: 4:30 and 9:30 pm

WE WERE STRANGERS
John Huston, 1949; 106 minutes
(Brand-new 35mm print, courtesy of Columbia Repertory)
Fellow Warners alumni Garfield and the recently Oscared Huston (for Treasure of the Sierra Madre) joined forces for this Columbia-Horizon Pictures production about a Cuban-born American who returns to his homeland in 1933 to help topple the corrupt regime--specifically, by digging a tunnel to plant a bomb under the heads of the police state as they attend a colleague's funeral. The script is redolent of Hemingway and French existentialism (Huston had recently staged the first U.S. production of No Exit), and the horrific ironies of the revolutionaries' actions give full play to the director's absurdist vision: the movie ended up being denounced by both the Right and the Left. With Jennifer Jones, Gilbert Roland, Pedro Armendáriz.
Wednesday, August 28: 2, 6 and 9:30 pm
Thursday, August 29: 4 and 6:30 pm

HE RAN ALL THE WAY
John Berry, 1951; 77 minutes
In the growing shadow of the blacklist, Garfield revived his independent production company and made a film about a hunted criminal who takes refuge in the apartment of a lower-middle-class family and sweats out his last hours. Hard not to read this as an allegory of the star and his cohorts' own situation: by the time the movie was ready for release, the names of director John Berry and screenwriter Hugo Butler would have to be omitted from the publicity materials, and Garfield himself was on his way to grilling by the House Un- American Activities Committee. He never made another film, dying of a heart attack, at age 39, the following year. He Ran All the Way makes for a noble monument. Berry's direction and the vividly realistic, close-in camerawork by the great James Wong Howe sustain extraordinary tension, and Garfield's performance is palpably haunted. With Shelley Winters, Wallace Ford, Selena Royle, Norman Lloyd.
Wednesday, August 28: 4:15 and 8 pm
Thursday, August 29: 2 and 9 pm
(9 pm screening introduced by Robert Nott, author of a forthcoming Garfield biography)