Maybe it's because the character he introduced on the screen, a non-Irish ethnic New Yorker with a street accent (in his case, Jewish), has been interpreted and reinterpreted with such ferocious realism by so many others that his successors have partly succeeded in erasing his memory. Despite his influence, the star, whose career was stunted by the anti-Communist witch hunts (he died in 1952 at the age of 39), remains one of the most underappreciated screen actors of his era. Hollywood's original forlorn rebel, born Jacob Julius Garfinkle on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1913, Garfield preceded Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando and James Dean in Hollywood's pantheon of sexy, emotionally wounded antiheroes. This sensitive tough guy, an urban sharpie who has doggedly pulled himself up from poverty while somehow retaining a tarnished soulfulness, is the archetypal John Garfield character. Once he settles this dirty business, if it ever gets settled, he tells himself, there is a woman waiting and maybe even a fresh start far away from the grimy streets where he grew up poor and scuffling and learned early that you could never stop looking over your shoulder. A sad little smile begins to curl around the corners of his sensual lips, and you sense a lurking vulnerability beneath the hard-boiled shell. Squinting through his fatigue into the blue-gray smoke, his eyes are hard and hypervigilant, glittering with a fateful sense of his own destiny. Stopping for a moment, he bends under a street lamp, cupping his hands to light a cigarette, his hat tilted down over one eyebrow, the collar of his overcoat turned up against the late-November chill.Īs the match flares, its light etches a face that is puffy and smudged with weariness but still strikingly handsome.

A composite movie image of John Garfield, the most modern of 1940's Hollywood actors, finds him hurrying furtively through a shabby Manhattan neighborhood late at night to keep an assignation with some shady characters in a desolate Edward Hopper cafe.

He Ran All the Way by Robert Nott