"A man alone ain't got no chance." — John Garfield as Harry Morgan in The Breaking Point (1950)
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Garfield reenacted Hemingway's hero in The Breaking Point, affirming: "I think it's the best I've done since Body & Soul. Better than that". His chemistry with Patricia Neal is immensurable, although during the shooting Garfield reminded her offhandedly she played a whore in the picture.
Reading He Ran All The Way: The Life of John Garfield (2004), a biography penned by Robert Nott with a special emphasis in Garfield's filmography and the '50s witchhunt that would seal his fate abruptly, we come to understand the normalcy and humanity behind a film icon when separated from his Hollywood proscenium.
Organized in 20 chapters, Nott's book is a passionate journey through Golden Hollywood's sieves and simultaneously a cautionary tale.
John Garfield (1913–1952), son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, was born Jacob Julius Garfinkle on the Lower East Side of New York City. He started working for the Group Theater (where he'd establish a lasting friendship with playwright Clifford Odets) before gaining a contract with Warner Bros. "I suppose it was a fifty-fifty chance -Sing Sing or Hollywood", Garfield once boasted. "He wasn't that tough. He was a really nice kid. A loner," recalled classmate Michael J. Coppola. All of his close friends always called Garfield "Julie."
His subdued acting style and expressive eyes turned him into a noir icon who merged romantic gloom and sensuality in his doomed, ingenuous persona. Robert Sklar described Humphrey Bogart and John Garfield as the major “city boy” actors of the Golden era.
Garfield played falsely accused outsiders in They Made Me a Criminal (1939) and Dust Be My Destiny (1939), callous gangsters in Castle on the Hudson (1940), East of the River (1940), and Out of the Fog (1941), and emotionally scarred veterans in The Fallen Sparrow (1943) and Nobody Lives Forever (1946).
His most celebrated role was Frank Chambers, the drifter in classic noir The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), who embodied the rootless Depression-era hobo, impelled by his attraction to Cora (Lana Turner) into murdering her new American husband. As Mark T. Conrad wrote of Tay Garnett's film adaptation of James M. Cain's novel: “It has the feeling of disorientation, pessimism, and the rejection of traditional ideas about morality”. Other important Garfield's films included The Sea Wolf, Tortilla Flat, Destination Tokyo, Humoresque, Pride of the Marines, and Gentleman's Agreement.
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