John
Garfield. He was the immediate precursor
to Brando and Monty Clift and James Dean, pretty much the first Method actor in
Hollywood pictures – or at least the first star.
His movie career only lasted thirteen years, and a recent New Yorker profile calls him
“half-forgotten,” but I don’t buy it.
Garfield was
nominated for an Oscar in his first picture, Four Daughters, and then again for Body and Soul. It’s fair to
say, though, that the second half of his output is more interesting than the
first. Not that he’s ever less than
compelling – Air Force, for example,
is a pretty lame effort for a Howard Hawks, even if Garfield is good – but the
later pictures are more invested. The same year as Air Force, he made The Fallen
Sparrow. Based on the Dorothy Hughes
novel (Hughes wrote In a Lonely Place
and Ride the Pink Horse), Fallen Sparrow sets up the compromised
hero Garfield fully embodies in Force of
Evil and The Breaking Point. Postman
is of course about a guy who only thinks with his dick, but a more conflicted
and ambiguous Garfield
shows his colors in the final five years.
Body and Soul and Gentleman’s Agreement in 1947, Force of Evil in 1948, We Were Strangers in 1949, The Breaking Point in 1950. Garfield
hits his stride.
He’s muscular
and assured, but transparent. His
emotions wash across his face like water, even when he’s ostensibly playing a
mug or a tough Joe: you can read
him. He has the quality to appear
natural, as if his character is only now inventing himself. Force
of Evil is masterfully written and fluidly shot, but it’s an actor’s movie,
Garfield,
Thomas Gomez, and the incomparable Marie Windsor, a B-movie queen in an A-list
part. Garfield plays a mob lawyer, and as the iron
hand of his own doom closes on him, he rises to something like redemption, and
makes it seem inevitable.
We Were Strangers is a
political thriller, set in 1930’s Cuba, written (in part) and
directed by John Huston. The picture got
tarred with a Red brush, which is of more than passing interest. Garfield
was about to get caught up in the Red Scare.
In the meantime, the movie tanked at the box office. It was probably too subtle, and
psychological, and it rationalized freelance assassination.
Warners
released The Breaking Point the
following year, in spite of Garfield’s
supposed political sympathies and the studio’s hard line against Communist
influence, and the picture got good reviews.
[I wrote about it in a previous post, August 2019.] But the handwriting was on the wall. Garfield
testified in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951,
denied he was a Communist, denied he knew any fellow travelers in the movie
industry, and refused to name names. It
got him blacklisted. He was disowned by Hollywood.
He
went back to New York,
and opened in a revival of Golden Boy. He died in May, 1952, of heart failure. He was 39.
Knowing
this, his death foretold, Garfield
might seem a haunted presence, but in life,
not. He was a kinetic force, his energy not
so much performance, as inhabited, from the inside out. Whatever suit of clothes he might put on, you
can imagine no one else wearing them.
The Criterion Channel is hosting a Garfield festival.
