He Ran All The Way 1951

 

Small tight Noir portrait of a small time crook and loser who tries to make it big and fails big time. Set in a crummy Los Angles with actual location shooting, it starred John Garfield in his last film as the small time crook who with Norman Lloyd makes a go at stealing a briefcase full of cash. He gets the loot but he also shoots dead a cop which starts a manhunt for him. Lloyd gets shot by the cop and is out of luck and out of the movie.

Garfield takes it on the lam, running all the way and winds up in a public swimming pool at an amusement park which is colorful and cool and where he gabs and grabs on to a young Shelley Winters and talks her into letting him take her home to her small crummy apartment where she lives with her parents and kid brother. Wrong becomes wronger as Garfield is forced to take the family hostage and the rest of the film is about the uneasy situation of the family being held captive by a desperate cornered Garfield.

Winters who works at a bakery is becoming more and more amore with him and agrees to help him escape much to the chagrin and anger of her parents played by the very good character actors Wallace Ford and Selena Royal. Everything in the film is tight and crummy especially the joint he shares with his floozy mom played by the wonderful Gladys George who takes no lip from John. The film is somewhat political if you can see it as that, a down and out crook takes as his hostages a poor working class family who are struggling against the system just as he is, only they do it on legal and straight terms. It would be a different film if he had taken as hostage a rich upper class family, making our feelings and support much easier to give to him.

Garfield was of course brilliant going from soft to hard, from harsh to giving and back again. One of my favorite scenes in the movie is when he sends the young kid out to get take out food and he brings back the biggest turkey I've ever seen. Garfield is happy to share this meal but the family will not eat any of it, instead having their own dinner of weak stew. What follows is a scary moment in the film. These days when we watch old movies we have so much biographical bread crumbs on the stars, not spread out in some forest but on the occasional big theater screens and more than likely on our big screen t.v.s. And when we watch these glorious star shadows we know so much about their personal lives that it adds a certain patina to their performances, and Garfield was no different. His tough guy shadows were real.

This was a very left leaning enterprise including several of the participates winding up black listed or close to it including the director John Berry, Selena Royal and the screenwriters Dalton Trumbo and Hugo Butler. Garfield testified before the House but refused to name names and this brave approach didn't help him in his career. He died shortly after in 1952. He still had what it takes it in this film, and he was only 37 when filming started in late 1950. He looked swell and handsome giving a fine tightly coiled performance in an unsympathetic role. His career in films was short, swift and sweet and all of his performances were compelling and usually startling. A native New Yorker who got his training on the tough streets of the city before joining the Group Theater. His early life story reads like one of the Warner Bros. Films that he starred in starting in 1938 with a strong supporting role in “Four Daughters” and getting an Oscar nomination to boot. He was on a roll and a ride becoming a major star who influenced many of the younger actors of the “method school” including Brando, Clift and Dean. The pounding score is by Franz Waxman and the cinematography is by the great James Wong Howe.