About Me
Before Marlon Brando, before James Dean, and before Paul Newman, Robert De Niro, and Al Pacino there was John Garfield, an actor of intensity and sensitivity who embodied the rebel/antihero character. In fact, he was the first actor to consistently play such roles on screen, beginning his career over a decade before Brando. For Garfield the rebel/antihero role was more than a method of acting: he was a New York City street kid who keenly understood his characters' motivation. While no profound political thinker, he was a man of deep emotion and intense loyalty, and his progressive/left-wing contacts made him a target of the Hollywood witch-hunts of the McCarthy era. In his films Garfield represented the socially underprivileged, the common man who clashed with the system. He showed ambition and hard work; he was sensual and strong and exhibited a certain vulnerability. He portrayed a good boy who got all the wrong breaks, but whose rebellious spirit enabled him to battle back against the inequities of his society.
The authenticity of Garfield's alleged initial screen appearance, as an extra in the "Shanghai Lil" sequence of the Warner Brothers
musical Footlight Parade, is debated to this day. More significantly, in the early 1930s, the playwright Clifford Odets recommended him for membership in the newly formed Group Theater, the legendary and influential theater company/collective whose members included Elia Kazan, Lee Strasberg, and Harold Clurman. After losing the lead role in Odets's Golden Boy—a part the writer penned with Garfield in mind—to Luther Adler, Garfield left the theater for Hollywood.
He signed a seven-year Warner Brothers contract and his first role, a supporting turn in Michael Curtiz's Four Daughters, made him a star. His character, streetwise pianist/composer Mickey Borden, utters such lines as "Talking about my tough luck is the only fun I get" and "I guess when you're used to standing on the outside looking in, you can see things that other people can't." In Four Daughters, Garfield offered his definitive portrayal of the sympathetic iconoclast: a role that was to sustain him throughout his career. Another significant aspect of this film was Garfield's unique acting style, with his moody, soulful sexuality standing out among the more conventional actors of the period.
Upon the success of Four Daughters, Warner Brothers chose to recast Garfield in inferior films that recycled the Mickey Borden character. And so the actor found himself playing moody poor boys, if not outright criminals, in such generically titled features as They Made Me a Criminal, Dust Be My Destiny, and Nobody Lives Forever. Garfield's most significant films while under contract were Pride of the Marines, a fact-based drama in which he played a soldier blinded while fighting at Guadalcanal; Humoresque, cast as a poor but determined violinist; and James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice (made on loan to MGM), in the role of a drifter who falls for a married woman and plots to murder her husband.
After choosing not to renew his studio contract, Garfield formed his own production company. His first independent feature arguably is the best of his career: Body and Soul, in which he played an up-from-the-slums prizefighter who is misled by his own ego, forgetting his family and friends for material possessions and a fast lifestyle. Between 1947 and 1950 Garfield did some of his finest screen acting in some of his most interesting films. He had a small but significant part in Gentleman's Agreement, a film about anti-Semitism. In the highly regarded film noir Force of Evil, the lone film directed by Abraham Polonsky prior to being blacklisted, he played a crooked lawyer. In We Were Strangers, he was an American fighting on the side of Cuban revolutionaries. In The Breaking Point, based on Hemingway's To Have and Have Not, he was a troubled, financially strapped fishing boat captain. His final feature is He Ran All the Way, in which he played a doomed criminal who takes a working-class family hostage.
In 1951 Garfield was subpoenaed by the U.S. Congressional Committee on Un-American Activities. He answered all questions, describing himself as a Democratic Party member and political liberal. He told the committee, "I have always hated communism. It is a tyranny which threatens our country and the peace of the world. Of course, then I have never been a member of the Communist party, or a sympathizer with any of its doctrines. I will be pleased to cooperate with the committee." But he would not "name any names," as his street boy's sense of honor would not allow him to rat on his friends. The committee was unhappy with his testimony. An FBI investigation of Garfield was ordered, and the actor found himself blacklisted. In early 1952, Garfield appeared on Broadway in a revival of Golden Boy. But he was destroyed by his committee ordeal, and subsequent expulsion from Hollywood. He died of a heart attack that spring, having not reached his 40th birthday.
An actor undoubtedly ahead of his time, Garfield not only played antiheroes but thoroughly immersed himself in his characters. If he was a prizefighter, as in Body and Soul, he would train in the ring; for Tortilla Flat, he learned how to fish; for Air Force, he learned how to operate a machine gun; and for Humoresque, he learned how to play the violin. While not as famous as the actors who followed him, Garfield was the prototype of the celluloid antihero. One only can imagine the stage and screen roles he might have created had his life not been cut so tragically short.
Biography by Rob Edelman
