Catalogue of Films – The Life and Times of John Garfield

The 59th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival honors actor John Garfield with a retrospective dedicated to this star of 1940s American cinema. Of the ten chosen films, nearly all will be screened in the form of a 35mm print.

A pioneer of what in his time was an unusually realistic approach to acting, John Garfield’s exceptional but unjustly forgotten career played out on the stages of Broadway and in the studios of Hollywood. He was one of the first to captivate film and theater audiences with the acting style later known as method acting. Although he never became an icon like Marlon Brando, James Dean, Paul Newman, or Jack Nicholson, he influenced them and dozens of others as an innovative co-creator of the techniques championed by the legendary Actor’s Studio.

If we accept the simplified definition of method acting as a technique founded on emotional memory and the search for a character’s inner truth by exploring defining experiences from his or her past, then Garfield’s life truly shaped his own personality. Julius (“Julie”) Jacob Garfinkle was born on 4 March 1913 in a sparsely furnished two-room flat on Rivington Street in New York’s Lower East Side. His parents, David and Hannah Garfinkle, had left Russia for America in 1909 in order to escape anti-Jewish pogroms. Hannah died in 1920, and David – unable to look after Julie and his younger brother – essentially ceased to be a part of the young boys’ lives. Julie grew up on the streets, amidst the gangs of New York, and he frequently drew on this experience in his later acting career.

As a “problematic” adolescent, Julie was sent to a school in the Bronx known for the unorthodox approach of its principal Angelo Patri. Instead of punishing his pupils for disciplinary infractions, the Italian immigrant Patri preferred a non-violent and empathetic approach, guiding students towards their natural talents, with an emphasis on the inclusion of artistic disciplines in the school’s curriculum. Julie found his calling in the school’s acting classes, where he developed his natural ability to captivate those around him so much that they became his audience.

The nearly quarter-century-long acting career of this underappreciated acting legend, which was abruptly ended by a heart attack in May 1952, was strongly influenced by the political situation in the United States at the time. Julie first appeared on stage literally on the eve of Black Thursday and the subsequent crash of the New York Stock Exchange in October 1929. He subsequently changed his surname to Garfield. His powerful portrayal of the characters he played both in theater (American Laboratory Theatre, Group Theatre) and later in film grew from his strong social feelings and intense personal experience of life on the margins of society. In the 1930s, it was not uncommon for members of artistic circles to sympathize with socialist and communist ideas, and it is on the arts that the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) later focused its attention.

Tales of Garfield’s uncommon talent quickly traveled west, and Hollywood soon came calling with offers. In the end, the powerful Warner Bros. studio signed him to a seven-year contract; the charismatic young actor was a good fit alongside the studio’s remarkable list of acting talent (Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Bette Davis). Having changed his first name to John, he was an immediate hit, and his debut performance as the bitter and nihilistic Mickey Borden in Michael Curtiz’s Four Daughters (1938) earned Garfield an Oscar nomination.

Garfield’s contractual obligations to appear in two to five films a year caused him to be typecast as a gangster or as a “rebel with a cause.” Nevertheless, thanks to a sophisticated screenplay or excellent directing, even this assembly-line approach to filmmaking in Hollywood’s dream factory occasionally produced intelligent and captivating films that earned critical praise. Examples in Garfield’s filmography include They Made Me a Criminal and Dust Be My Destiny (both 1939). In crime films with a socially conscious subplot about young people’s painful search for their place in Depression-era society, Garfield fully developed his natural ability to express an uncommon level of authenticity and truthfulness in any activity.

In late 1941, the United States entered World War II, and the twenty-eight-year-old Garfield tried to enlist but was rejected because of a weak heart. He nevertheless expressed his patriotism by regularly visiting army bases, where his fame and comic gifts provided the soldiers with a welcome distraction. In the summer of 1945, he appeared in the remarkable wartime drama Pride of the Marines. One of Garfield’s most important films, though also one of his lesser known titles, it is an empathetic and dignified take on the timeless tale of an injured soldier’s return home and his attempt at adjusting to everyday life.

Garfield was an actor known for his wide range, capable of a disarming naturalness and a capacity for carefully nuanced gestures. He could portray charming and elegant characters possessing both hardness and vulnerability, who mixed charm and a sense of humor with bitterness and (self-)destructive rage. Thanks to his ability to truthfully portray any situation, directors and screenwriters were not afraid to confront Garfield’s characters with extreme situations, as in the film noir classic The Postman Always Rings Twice or the romantic melodrama about a talented violinist Humoresque (both 1946).

The end of his seven-year contract with Warner gave Garfield the chance to break free of the suffocating machinery of Hollywood and the limits it placed on creativity. Seeking greater creative control, he founded his own production company, Roberts Productions. Working with the independent Enterprise Productions, he shot two of the most important films of his career and of the film noir genre. His second Oscar nomination came for the gripping drama Body and Soul (1947), which to this day is considered one of the best films about boxing, with a clear influence on cult films such as Rocky and Pulp Fiction. Screenwriter Abraham Polonsky left the job of directing the film to Robert Rossen (both were eventually blacklisted as a result of their refusal to cooperate with the HUAC), but for the legendary Force of Evil (1948) he took the reins himself and created a timeless monument to his disarming idealism, which viewed capitalism as corrupting men’s morals.

The late forties and early fifties witnessed one of the most infamous periods in American history. After the war, what had begun a decade earlier as a congressional investigation into Nazi and far-right elements evolved into an institution determined to find communist influence in free-thinking Hollywood. “The trouble is liberalism is unpopular today and anybody who is for the underdog gets labeled a red,” remarked Garfield. His career quickly took a downturn when his name appeared in Red Channels, a pamphlet identifying communists in the entertainment industry. The accusations had a fatal impact on attendance of one of his final films, The Breaking Point (1950), an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s adventure novel To Have and Have Not, which the author himself considered the best film adaptation of any of his books.

In April 1951, Garfield was called to testify before Congress. Unlike others who collaborated with the authorities and denounced their colleagues in order to protect their jobs, the mentally exhausted Garfield, already suffering poor health, did not “name names.” The dark noir thriller He Ran All the Way (1951) would be the final entry in the filmography of an actor for whom it was as important to sacrifice everything for the work he loved, including much of his privacy, as it was to unflinchingly express his political convictions and humanist ideals. Denied the chance to do either, John Garfield died of a heart attack in May 1952 at the age of thirty-nine.

Karel Och