This Day in Film History (John Garfield Dies, KO’d by Blacklist)

May 21, 1952—No longer able to land a film role in Hollywood despite box-office success for the prior 13 years, back in the New York theater scene close to his heart, John Garfield died at age 39 of a heart attack.

Assigning causes of death can be difficult, and in Garfield’s case it was certainly problematic: 

*Did he die as a result of the rheumatic fever he had contracted almost 20 years before, maybe worsened by his smoking habit? 

*Had the middle-aged star absorbed more punishment than he could stand in an attempt to portray a young boxer in a revival of the Clifford Odets drama Golden Boy? 

*Had his coronary incident occurred during a romantic interlude with the female friend he was visiting at the time of his death, as some salacious gossips had it?

But there is another factor that underlies all of these theories: the stress of lingering questions about alleged Communist associations that, after nine years, had resulted in his blacklisting from Hollywood.

In perhaps his signature movie role, as an ambitious boxer struggling to win a title and maintain his integrity in Body and Soul, Garfield received his second Oscar nomination. When he was subpoenaed to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1951, he found himself in the uncomfortable position of life imitating art.

Like his character Charlie Davis, Garfield was reluctant to give up the position in his profession he had worked so intensely to achieve, including creature comforts. Like Davis, he did his share of bobbing and weaving when faced with his moral dilemma, including releasing a ghostwritten article for Look Magazine, “I Was a Sucker for a Left Hook,” claiming he had been duped by Communist ideology, in a futile try at compromising with investigators.

But in the end, again like Davis, he found one demand too many to stomach, in this case violating the moral code of the Lower East Side and the Bronx of his childhood: Don’t be a snitch. His bottom line was that he refused to name names.

It may be so hard to assess all that Garfield lost by making his stand because we have lost a sense of his place in movie history. He opened doors to others (Ben Gazzara cited him, in an interview with Lillian and Helen Ross in The Player: A Profile of an Art, "the first actor I had seen in the movies who felt close enough to my own life to be reachable"), but at the same time his reputation was so Himalayan that it could intimidate those who hoped to follow. (For the same book, Kim Hunter recalled how, in rehearsals for A Streetcar Named Desire, Marlon  Brando kept saying, "They should have got John  Garfield for Stanley, not me; Garfield was right for the part, not me.")

*He was the first film “Method Actor”. Before Brando, Clift and James Dean became famous for using this naturalistic style of portraying characters, Garfield got there first.  He learned it originally as a member of the ensemble Group Theatre in New York, then brought the style to Hollywood. As author Isaac Butler described it in an interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, Garfield made a crucial adaptation for his first film, Four Daughters in 1938: “He couldn't just do a stage performance on camera. If you've ever seen someone just give a stage-size performance on camera, it's really too much because the camera picks up so much that an audience at the theater will not see. It can really see you think or people talk about it reading your mind. ... So he really had to learn how to do much less and much less and much less, and to strip away and to learn how to perform with a new kind of ease and spontaneity that the camera would kind of pick up and enjoy.”

*He was "the first Jewish film sex symbol," according to Gil Troy's 2018 "Daily Beast" article. The actor’s given name was Jacob Julius Garfinkle, but his friends nicknamed him “Julie.” He was more than handsome; his intensity gave a palpable erotic surge to his scenes with Lana Turner, for instance, in The Postman Always Rings Twice.

*He was crucial in the development of film noir. Other actors—Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum come to mind—are more indelibly associated with the genre. But Garfield not only brought a rebellious persona, but also what TCM “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller called, in Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir, “a fiery desire to Make a Difference,” leading to “a caravan of writers, directors, and actors from the New York stage.”

*He pioneered the movement of movie stars into independent production. So chafing at the largely “B” movies to which he was relegated at Warner Brothers that he was suspended 11 times during his nine years at the studio, Garfield started his own production company, Enterprise Studios. A decade later, Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas would follow suit with their own companies.

Ironically, the creative freedom that Garfield won through this daring move also helped lead to his blacklisting, according to his daughter Julie in this YouTube clip.  Hollywood studios resented the challenge to their ironclad control that his new venture represented. When HUAC approached them, looking for a liberal Jewish star that they could make an example of, they had three men in mind: Edward G. Robinson, Danny Kaye, and Garfield. Now on his own, Garfield had the least protection.

The actor had first appeared on a list of names of Hollywood actors with suspicious associations in the early 1940s, but within a few years—especially through the attention of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover—he came under heightened scrutiny. Garfield was not and had never been a Communist, but he knew people who were: his associates at the Group Theatre and his wife Roberta Seidman.

Additionally, Garfield was vulnerable because of his habit of signing petitions and joining organizations without questioning who might be behind them. A self-described "Democratic liberal," he did it all "without giving it a second thought, almost as if he were autographing for a friend," observed Robert Nott, author of a 2003 biography of the actor, He Ran All the Way.

Eventually Garfield’s phone would be tapped and he would be subjected to surveillance—even when he went to Harlem to visit his dying friend, blacklisted actor Canada Lee. He told HUAC that he would gladly testify about himself but not his wife or his friends. Though he thought this deal had gotten him through his trouble, he learned that HUAC investigators were poring over his testimony for possible perjury charges.

At this point, he was brought into an FBI office and told that the agency already had paperwork showing his wife’s membership in the party, so all he had to do was confirm it and he would be cleared. Instead, he told them what they could do in unprintable terms and walked out.

Altogether, Garfield went 18 months without work. Under the strain of the investigation, he drank more heavily and separated from his wife.

On the day of Garfield’s death, his friend, playwright Clifford Odets, confirmed, in his own HUAC testimony, what the committee knew already: that the actor had never been a Communist.

Garfield's penultimate screen appearance was in The Breaking Point, a Warner Brothers adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not. Like a Hemingway hero, Garfield was, in the end, a proud loser, someone willing to experience grievous sacrifice--even the loss of his life--rather than break with the code by which he lived. 

You can sense something of this bloodied yet unbowed attitude in this still from Body and Soul. He didn't have a chance to make enough such classics (his early death precluded him from the chance to make On the Waterfront and The Man With the Golden Arm), but he put all of himself into his work, and film watchers discovering his less-famous films for the first time are in for a treat.

Theater Review: Clifford Odets’ ‘The Big Knife,’ From the Roundabout Theatre Co.

At the performance I caught of Clifford Odets’ 1949 drama The Big Knife, the audience broke out in applause at the wonders that set designer John Lee Beatty had performed at the American Airlines Theatre. The time might have been the late 1940s, as the Hollywood studio system felt its hegemony seriously threatened for the first time. But most of the theatergoers undoubtedly wished that the movie-star home they saw was real and that they could move in there themselves.

Before long, we learned that it was all a gilded cage. The owner of this splendid Beverly Hills home, Charlie Castle, is a prisoner in his own well-appointed fortress. All these creature comforts only make it that much harder to unfasten the chains of a multiyear contract that his studio is pressing him to sign, through every means, fair and foul, at its command.

John Garfield, then about to be caught up in his own Tinseltown tragedy as a blacklist victim, starred in the show’s initial run more than 60 years ago. Surely, the matinee idol and Odets, his onetime associate in New York’s Group Theatre, the great troupe that helped revolutionize American acting with a more naturalistic style, shared bone-deep aspirations to higher art and an all-too-human susceptibility to matters of the flesh that elevated this collaboration to moments of real power.

That sense of urgency, however, was never really communicated in the revival mounted by the Roundabout Theatre that closed this past Sunday.

Charlie’s gilded cage might be one reason why some audience members (and judging by the reviews, critics) had had a hard time warming to this production. No getting around it: this is a problem play, in more ways than one.

Like an earlier play by Clifford Odets, Golden Boy (revived in an acclaimed production late last year at Lincoln Center), The Big Knife dramatizes the way that capitalism corrupts, undermines and defeats artistic aspirations. It is much easier, however, for an audience to feel sympathy for Golden Boy’s Joe Bonaparte—fearful that the Great Depression will crush his dream of a career as a violinist, grasping at boxing as his meal-ticket out of poverty—than Castle, earning his way in an uninspired career, but gainfully employed, for all that.

The melodrama that Odets wrote, from inside the belly of the beast, mirrors in some ways the B-movie fare that Castle longs to escape. Seldom has any writer’s disgust with Hollywood been rendered so palpably. (In Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, a star might be forgotten, but not a target for blackmail or cause of a murder plot—just a perpetrator of a crazed, accidental shooting.)

From 1935 to early 1940, Odets was considered the “golden boy” of American theater, with seven plays to his credit. In 1949, after a prosperous but artistically unsatisfying time writing and directing films, he returned to the Great White Way, hoping that this vehicle—molded first to the persona of good friend Cary Grant, then, more crucially, to Garfield—would be his comeback.

It wasn’t--and, if a critical reevaluation will ever try to salvage Odets, it’s hard to see how this play will reclaim his once-prestigious perch in American theater.

By and large, the drama is about as well-cast as any recent Roundabout production. Marin Ireland makes for a deeply sympathetic Marian, Charlie’s estranged wife, whose continuing love for him is sorely tested by his unfaithfulness, his departure from his ideals as a struggling young actor, and the presence of a stalwart if dull writer who would like to marry her. Chip Zien turns Charlie’s agent Nat Danziger into an anguished father figure to Charlie and Marian, who tries to resolve the impossible: his client’s wish for artistic freedom and the studio’s mounting anger over their chief moneymaker’s defiance.

Particularly excellent are two heavies in this production: Richard Kind, who, as an at times comically tyrannical studio boss, Marcus Hoff, will remind many of Columbia Pictures’s infamous chief, Harry Cohn; and Reg Rogers as Smiley Coy, Hoff’s slimy all-purpose fixer, who, with a phone call, can make almost any problem disappear—including a drunk-driving incident from a year ago that involved Charlie, for whom a friend took the fall.

The one major actor I could point to in the cast who was problematic was, unfortunately, the lead, Bobby Cannavale. He made a fine impression on me in a fine 2005 ensemble production of David Rabe’s Hurlyburly, but he couldn’t carry the burden created by Odets.

The difficulty starts with the playwright’s quirky dialogue. Sometimes a line puts a sharp twist on what, in other hands, would sound cliched (Charlie to Marian: “Play billiards, Angel, or put the cue down,” rather than “Don’t start a conversation and then drop it”). In other instances, though, the lines come across as faux-poetic (“You go on grieving for the past, like a weeping bird”). In still other cases, the dialogue is the worst kind of speechifying, holding the play’s themes aloft in the most boldface banner (Charlie on studio bosses such as Hoff: “Don’t they murder the highest dreams and hopes of a whole great people with the movies they make? This whole movie thing is a murder of the people.”)

Perhaps only Garfield could have invested such lines with the raw believability that Odets desired. Nowhere near as heralded as he should be today as the precursor of Brando, Pacino, DeNiro, or, indeed, generations of New York actors, Garfield--whose centennial went criminally unnoticed a few months ago (including by me)--might not have been always sympathetic, but with his intelligence, sexual magnetism, and unrelenting intensity, he was compulsively watchable and fully human. It isn’t a disgrace that Cannavale doesn’t possess all these qualities, let alone in such abundance. Few other actors do.

Nevertheless, my disappointment as I left the American Airlines Theatre was keen. I had vague memories of the 1955 film adaptation of this play starring Jack Palance, Ida Lupino, Shelley Winters and Rod Steiger. I had hoped that the Roundabout would weave magic from this fascinating but neglected drama. But despite fine casting and production values, Doug Hughes’ deeply respectful direction only focused more attention on the play’s hollow core.