John Garfield retrospective, Paul Newman

The Criterion Channel is hosting a November retrospective of films featuring the late John Garfield, a superstar of the nineteen-forties whose body of work has long gone under-recognized. In the course of a career that stretched from the height of the studio system to the depths of the Red Scare, Garfield pioneered a new, naturalistic approach to acting for the camera, one rooted in the same techniques that would soon be called the Method. Garfield died in 1952, his performances overshadowed by the actors who followed him—particularly Marlon Brando, who rose to fame playing Stanley Kowalski in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” a role that Garfield had turned down in fear of being eclipsed by Vivien Leigh. It’s tempting to see Garfield, who worked as the doorman for the first session of the Actors Studio, in 1947, as also holding the anti-hero's door open for Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Paul Newman, and others to walk through. 

He was far better than his contemporaries at solving the puzzle of how to take the new acting techniques coming out of the New York theatre during the thirties and forties and adapt them for the screen. His best performances have a timeless brilliance; they feel classical and contemporary at once. John Garfield never wanted to be a movie star. He was a creature of the Great Depression whose early life included familial neglect and riding the rails reciting “The Raven” for his supper. In the mid-nineteen-thirties, he acted with the Group Theatre, a company responding to the Depression with a utopian, left-wing vision of the American character. The Group included many of the future stewards of acting instruction in America—Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner—as well as the directors Elia Kazan and Harold Clurman. It was the most exciting theatre company in America, but it rarely found financial success. Garfield left the company to better support his family and because he felt cheated out of a role that had been promised to him. He moved to Los Angeles, making his film début, in 1938, in “Four Daughters,” for which he received an Oscar nomination. "He never lived long enough to become an icon like Humphrey Bogart", said David Heeley, one of the producers of "The John Garfield Story" on TCM.

One of the best examples of Garfield’s combination of deep feeling and minimalist restraint can be found in “Dust Be My Destiny” (1939), the earliest film in the Criterion series. In it, he plays Joe Bell, a defiant drifter who is wrongfully accused of murder, running from the law with his wife, Mabel, who’s played by Priscilla Lane. His performance is a perfect mixture of sweetness and rebellion; it reveals both the exoskeleton his character has grown to protect himself from the deprivations of the Great Depression and the good kid hiding underneath it. In 1945, John Garfield gave a lecture to the Actors’ Laboratory Theatre, a Stanislavski-based school and playhouse run by alumni of the Group. “I would much rather talk about the theatre because I think the movies are not an actor’s medium,” he said. “Movies are a writer’s and director’s medium.” At the time, Garfield was nearing the end of his contract with Warner Bros., and growing increasingly discontented. While his films had mostly succeeded at the box office, he was personally proud of only a few of them. 

“My problem in movies has been to find the truth,” he told the Actors’ Lab. “When I don’t, I fail miserably.” In the next few years, he turned down several projects—including future noir classics such as “Out of the Past” and “Nightmare Alley”—to work with Enterprise, an upstart independent production company that promised artists near-complete freedom. After making “Body and Soul,” Enterprise’s lone profitable film, he moved back to New York City to return to his first love, theatre, starring in “Skipper Next to God,” which was directed by his old mentor Lee Strasberg. His career, with its emphasis on versatility, seriousness, artistry, and political commitment, provided a template that generations of male movie stars to come, from Marlon Brando to Paul Newman to Robert De Niro, would follow. 

"He was shy, vibrant and very intelligent. And so ahead of his time. He had terrific magnetism. I wish we had him back," said John Garfield's 'The Postman Always Rings Twice' co-star Lana Turner during a 1973 film homage for her at New York City's Town Hall. "The only co-star I know that he had an affair with, actually, was Lana Turner," Vincent Sherman (director of Saturday's Children, The Young Philadelphians, etc.) remembered. In 1950, Warner Bros. quietly released “The Breaking Point” and pulled it from theatres shortly after its release; it's probably Garfield’s greatest film. An adaptation of Hemingway’s “To Have and Have Not,” the movie stars Garfield as Harry Morgan, a down-on-his-luck ship captain who runs into financial trouble in Mexico and takes a job smuggling Chinese migrants to the United States. The job goes wrong, and Morgan ends up under investigation and in dire financial straits. Later Garfield said of the film, "I think it's the best I've done since 'Body and Soul'. Better than that." 

In "Movieland: Hollywood and the Great American Dream Culture" (1996), Jerome Charyn writes: "In The Hustler Robert Rossen tried to grapple with the texture of failure and success, all the peculiar twists of talent, and the kind of vulturous deadness that attaches itself to talent—eating it alive. This is a different Newman, not an acting mask. He's lithe, possessed. He's not a beautiful sleepwalker like in Hud. He reeks of promise and vulnerability. Perhaps it's Fast Eddie's own deep flaw, his need to wound himself, that touched Paul Newman, and opened up his own wounds. It's certainly the best performance that Newman gave in the 1960s. 'The Hustler' was almost a companion film for 'Body & Soul' and has the courage to investigate those dark corners of the psyche where few American directors had gone before. It's a film about human dirt". Source: www.newyorker.com