John Garfield: an immortal contender

"Force of Evil" (1948) directed by Abraham Polonsky (starring John Garfield, Thomas Gomez and Marie Windsor)

"In their up-from-nothing lawyer who gets himself in too deep on the moral excuse that he is doing it for his brother, Mr. Polonsky and Mr. Wolfert have some real things to show about the practical operation of the psychology of crime. They do it in startling situations and in graphic dialogue, in shattering cinematic glimpses and in great, dramatic sweeps of New York background. New to the business of directing, Mr. Polonsky here establishes himself as a man of imagination and unquestioned craftsmanship. True, he was very fortunate in having John Garfield play the young lawyer in the story, for Mr. Garfield is his tough guy to the life. Sentient underneath a steel shell, taut, articulate —he is all good men gone wrong.

Beatrice Pearson is something of a lucky feature, too. With her innocent, worldly demeanor, her shyness yet forwardness, too, and a voice that would melt a pawnbroker, she points up the pathos in the tale". Source: movies.nytimes.com

John Garfield and John Huston at the Stork Club

"John Huston had been working on the "Treasure of the Sierra Madre" script for six years, before World War II was declared and he directed his great war documentaries, 'The Battle of San Pietro' and 'Let There Be Light'. When he started writing in 1941, Warner Brothers Studio had envisioned it for their three leading tough guys, George Raft, Edward G. Robinson and John Garfield. By the time filming started, Humphrey Bogart was the studio's biggest star, and he inherited the riches. John Huston plays a bit as the American that Bogart is always pestering for the price of a meal. Ann Sheridan, in heavy make-up supposedly played a whore in the background of one of the scenes as a good luck gesture". Source: www.moviediva.com

Ann Sheridan and John Garfield as Goldie West and Johnnie Bradfield in "They Made Me a Criminal" (1939)


"They Made Me a Criminal" (1939) starring John Garfield, Claude Rains, Ann Sheridan and Gloria Dickson, directed by Busby Berkeley

John Garfield was one of those actors whose offscreen activities mirrored his on-screen persona: he was uneducated, didn't always think things out too clearly, loved women (too much, if such a thing is possible) and adhered to his own personal moral code.

In September 1942, Warner Bros announced the purchase of "Deep Valley" a novel by Dan Totheroh, for Ann Sheridan, Humphrey Bogart and John Garfield. The story would languish on the studio's shelves until 1947, when it finally reached the screen with Ida Lupino, Wayne Morris and Dane Clark.

John Garfield and daughter Katherine go riding in 1943

Also in 1942 Garfield was to court to have his name legally changed from Jacob Julius Garfinkle to John Jules Garfield. The change was done in order that daughter Katherine would have not trouble when she entered school.

"He lived for so short a time, 39 scant years, that he's barely recalled now except by film reviewers who conjure his name in critical comparisons and historians who lament his early demise and wonder, "What if?" He coulda been a contender, though in reality was much more than that -the precursor to Brando and Clift and De Niro and Keitel, a tough guy who was softer than his coarse exterior allowed.

He was such a star that when he died in May 1952, in the apartment of a lover with whom he shacked up while separated from the wife and kids, his funeral was a mob scene --a Hollywood ending treated like an opening-night premiere, with all the attendant glitz and glamour befitting a Warner Bros. golden boy who wasn't the prettiest boy in the bunch, only the best.

Hedy Lamarr and John Garfield as Dolores and Danny in "Tortilla Flat" (1942) directed by Victor Fleming

If nothing else, the wonderful Turner Classic Movies documentary "The John Garfield Story", narrated by Garfield's daughter Julie and filled with testimonials by the likes of Joanne Woodward and Harvey Keitel and Martin Scorsese and a dozen other A-listers, serves to remind us of that much: Its subject may have vanished too soon, his demise hastened by a bad ticker and the leering goons of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, but John Garfield was a real immortal. Even if no one quite remembers why anymore". Source: www.dallasobserver.com

Cecil Kellaway, John Garfield and Lana Turner in "The Postman Always Rings Twice" (1946)

James M. Cain: Oh yes, I can remember the beginning of 'The Postman Always Rings Twice". It was based on the Snyder-Gray case, which was in the papers about then. Grey and this woman Snyder killed her husband for the insurance money. The big influence in how I wrote "The Postman Always Rings Twice" was this strange guy, Vincent Lawrence, who had more effect on my writing than anyone else. He had a device which he thought was so important —the “love rack” he called it. What he meant by the “love rack” was the poetic situation whereby the audience felt the love between the characters.

INTERVIEWER: How did you react to Albert Camus's praise of your writing?

CAIN: He wrote something about me —more or less admitting that he had patterned one of his books on mine, and that he revered me as a great American writer. But I never read Camus. In some ways I'm ignorant. In other ways I'm not. At fiction I'm not. But I read very little of it. When you write fiction, the other guy's book just tortures you —you're always rewriting it for him. You don't read it just as a reader; you read it as a guy in the business. I've read a great deal of American history. I don't write whodunits. I write love stories. The dynamics of a love story are almost abstract. The better your abstraction, the more it comes to life when you do it —the excitement of the idea lurking there. Algebra. Suspense comes from making sure your algebra is right. Time is the only critic. If your algebra is right, if the progression is logical, but still surprising, it keeps.

When they were making "Double Indemnity" in Hollywood, Billy Wilder complained that Raymond Chandler was throwing away my nice, terse dialogue; he got some student actors in from the Paramount school, coached them up, to let Chandler hear what it would be like if he would only put exactly what was in the book in his screenplay. To Wilder's utter astonishment, it sounded like holy hell. Chandler explained to Wilder what the trouble was that Cain's dialogue is written to the eye. That ragged right-hand margin that is so exciting and wonderful to look at can't be recited by actors.

Chandler said: Now that we've got that out of the way, let's dialogue it with the same spirit Cain has in the book but not the identical words. Wilder still didn't believe him. They got me over there, purportedly to discuss something else, but the real reason was that Wilder hoped I would contradict Chandler, and somehow explain what had evaporated. But, of course, I bore Chandler out, reminding Wilder I could write spoken stuff well enough, but on the page there just wasn't any room for talky climaxes. Chandler, who was an older man, was a bit irked by Wilder's omniscience, and he was pleased I backed him up". Source: www.theparisreview.org


Lana Turner plays femme fatale Cora

Cora/Kora: *k(o)-ra as a girl's name is pronounced KOR-ah. It is of Greek origin, and the meaning of Kora is "maiden". Can be traced back to classical mythology, though the modern form was coined by American writer James Fenimore Cooper in "The Last of the Mohicans" (1826), its proto-Germanic root, *khoraz (fem. *khoron) means “one who desires.”

John Garfield as Charley Davis and Hazel Brooks as Alice in the boxing drama "Body and Soul" (947) directed by Robert Rossen

"Body and Soul" is an experimental ethnography in the originary meaning of the term, in that the researcher is one of the socialized bodies thrown into the sociomoral and sensuous alembic of the boxing world. Boxing has declined tremendously from its glory days of the 20's or the 60's and it is only a shadow of its old self now.
It’s hard for us to imagine how central it was to national life half a century ago, when a heavyweight championship fight brought the whole society to a complete standstill. The first reason for this is the general transformation of the life of the working classes, with the marginalization of hard manual work, the improvement in the standards of living, and the generalization of schooling as a means of access to even unskilled jobs: it has nearly dried up the supply of volunteers for the pugilistic front.

Secondly, boxing occupies a lowly position at the bottom of the hierarchy of athletic avocations in the United States: it is something of a pariah sport, practiced mostly by those who have failed at other sports. It is not integrated into the normal academic courses: you cannot get a fellowship to go to college by boxing. Boxing is the quintessential body craft: you work on your body, to produce a new, skilled, body capable of withstanding and giving punishment in the ring.

If you are small and stubby, with short arms and a strong upper body, you are tailormade for becoming what the lingo calls a “slugger” who is willing to take punches in order to walk up close to his opponent and fight from inside. But if you are lightly built, with a lithe torso, thin legs and long arms, then you’ve got to be what specialists call a “boxer” in the sense of technician who punches at a distance and avoids fighting by moving around and keeping his opponent at bay with straight jabs and right hands. As a rule, sluggers or counter-punchers have much shorter careers than “boxer-punchers” because they absorb a lot more blows and their bodies wear down much quicker. And they are also more prone to suffering long-term physical damage (medical studies show that dementia pugilistica, the “punch-drunk” syndrome, affects primarily sluggers and brawlers). —“Busy Louie” in the Ring: A Sociologist Among Prizefighters - An interview with Loïc Wacquant

Disc 1, side A: The Maltese Falcon Disc 1, side B: The Big Sleep Featurette The Big Sleep Comparisons 1945/1946 with UCLA archivist Robert Gift analyzing differences between the movie's two versions Disc 2, side A: Dial M for Murder
Featurettes: Hitchcock and Dial M, 3-D: A Brief History

Disc 2, side B: The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), Documentary profile: The John Garfield Story, Introduction by historian Richard Jewell, Behind-the-scenes Image gallery

Ida Lupino as Stella Goodwin and John Garfield as Harold Goff in "Out of the Fog" (1941) directed by Anatole Litvak

When Barbara Stanwyck turned down the role of Stella in "Out of The Fog" (1941) directed by Anatole Litvak (written by Robert Rossen, Jerry Wald & Richard Macaulay, based on Irvin Shaw's play "The Gentle People"), Ida Lupino jumped at it. Producer Henry Blanke asked George Raft to play the heavy, but he declined. Bogart asked for the role, but Ida Lupino used her influence and Blanke agreed that her pal John Garfield would play the smooth-talking hoodlum Harold Goff.

Filming "The Big Knife" (1955) directed by Robert Aldrich (based on a stage play written by Clifford Odets inspired by John Garfield - Odets's wife Bette Grayson supposedly slept with Garfield in real life), every scene was a heart-rendering experience for Ida (playing Marion Castle); the similarity between the film's character Charles Castle (Jack Palance) who commits suicide, and Garfield's downfall was emotionally upsetting to her. Ida told Aldrich the last scene gave her an eerie child (on screen, she reacted to her husband's suicide with a shattering scream).

Ida Lupino & John Garfield in "Out of the Fog" (1941)

Exiled from Hollywood, Garfield had come back to his theatrical origins and played 'The Big Knife', 'Peer Gynt' and 'Golden Boy'. Garfield had sent Ida tickets to see him onstage. She arrived at his apartment with a writer friend from the New York Times for a toast before the performance. When Garfield opened the door of his dressing room, Ida was taken aback by his haggard appearance. Garfield prepared cocktails. He pointed to a basket of flowers, champagne and glasses. Ida read his note: "To my favorite sister. Sorry, I'm not going to make it tonight but I've always loved you, kid". Ida was perplexed.

Ida wanted to hire John Garfield for her company but felt it was hopeless. Howard Hughes would never permit such a controversial actor to work at RKO. The heart condition that had prevented him from performing the last evening Ida saw him soon took his life.
—from "Ida Lupino: A Biography" (2000) by William Donati

John Garfield with Ida Lupino

"'My father once said to me, 'You're born to be bad', she recalled. 'And it was true. I made eight films in England before I came to America, and I played a tramp or a slut in all of them'." —Ida Lupino, The Hollywood Reporter (August 7, 1995).

"Her films [as a director] display the obsessions and consistencies of a true auteur. What is most interesting about her films are not her stories of unwed motherhood or the tribulation of career women, but the way in which she uses male actors: particulary in "The Bigamist" and "The Hitchhiker" (both 1953), Ida Lupino was able to reduce the male to the same sort of dangerous, irrational force that women represented in most male-directed examples of Hollywood film noir." —Richard Koszarski in "Hollywood Directors 1914-40" (Oxford University Press, 1976)

John Garfield and Hedy Lamarr in "Tortilla Flat"

Spencer Tracy, Hedy Lamarr and John Garfield as Pilon, Dolores and Danny in "Tortilla Flat" (1942) directed by Victor Fleming

Tortilla Flat had begun filming on November 23, with Spencer Tracy and Hedy in the leading roles. As added box-office insurance the young stage and film actor John Garfield, born on New York's Lower East Side, was borrowed from Warner Bros. to play Danny. All three incongruously portrayed poor Hispanic Californians living in Northern California.

Based on the bestselling 1935 novel by John Steinbeck, with screen adaptation by John Lee Mahin and Benjamin Glazer, Tortilla Flat was assigned to the rugged Metro director Victor Fleming. MGM had bought the rights to the project for $65.000 on April 8, 1940, announcing it as a vehicle for Tracy. Steinbeck, fearing that his beloved paisano characters would be patronized and made quaint, offered to purchase the rights of his story back from MGM for $10.000.

At one point, while Hedy Lamarr dragged her heels before accepting the role, MGM had wanted to secure the services of Rita Hayworth, now a huge star at Columbia Pictures, for the part of Sweets Ramirez. (In the original story, Dolores "Sweets" Ramirez was but a minor character. For cinematic purposes, her character's importance was built up).

The story revolves around the lives of poor, impoverished Mexican paisanos who live in a Norther California coastal fishing village just north of Monterey called Tortilla Flat. Pilon (Spencer Tracy) and Pablo (Akim Tamiroff) are but a couple of the wanderers and scoundrels who populate the village. The other paisanos who follow Pilon, the ringleader, are Portegee Joe (Staten Island-born Allen Jenkins), Jose Maria Corcoran (John Qualen) and Danny Alvarez (John Garfield).

Sweets Ramirez (Hedy Lamarr) is the town beauty.

Unexpectedly Danny (John Garfield) inherits two houses and a watch. He generously rents one of his houses to his pals for $15 a month and keeps the other house for himself. He sells his watch for money to buy wine and rejoins the group in their wasteful laziness. He is soon drawn to the beautiful cannery worker Dolores (Hedy Lamarr).

The story of "Tortilla Flat" didn't have the same universal appeal of Steinbeck's earlier filmed novels, "Of Mice and Men" and "The Grapes of Wrath", but MGM took a chance with this early work of the author, and the filmed version proved a moving and sincerely made project that surprisingly was sensitive and lovingly executed.

John Garfield enjoyed working with Hedy Lamarr in their love scenes, calling her 'Wild Cat Lamarr', and she relished the opportunity of not having to glamorize her character.

She wore ten-cent lipstick and rubbed grease on her body to darken her porcelain skin. Spencer Tracy called her costumes her "dime-store wardrobe". One of her outfists cost a total of $3,95.

Coached by the studio coordinator of speech, Dr. Simon Mitchneck, Hedy was able to pitch her voice down to a lower, middle register, which effectively aided her characterization. In one of Tortilla Flat's scenes, filmed at the fish cannery, Hedy actually worked on a fish-canning line, sweating real sweat and packing real fish. She loved that she was required to be smelly and dirty, and she took special pleasure in doing that particular scene.

Hedy also enjoyed working with John Garfield. Together they projected remarkable screen chemistry. Hedy took delight in Garfield's stories of riding the rails as a hobo when he was a youngster, before becoming an actor. There was something very Steinbeckian in his persona. Hedy loved adventure, and her romantic fantasies were whetted by Garfield's tales. One particular vignette, when Dolores feeds a sickly baby, is tenderly photographed by Karl Freund.

About her role, Hedy would say later: "It was a honest part... and I was glad to get away from glamour".

Garfield recalls shooting his first scene with Fleming at the helm:
"The director called a halt and shouted: 'For Christ's sake, Garfield, you have to do better than that. I fought like hell to get you in this picture, so don't make me look like a fool'. As Tracy snickered in the background, Fleming railed at Garfield some more and they shot the scene again. "Take it easy, Garfield, don't get too good. A lot of your scenes are with Hedy Lamarr. She's not what you'd call unoutclassable, and we can't let that happen. Let's take it again. Be better than you were the first time, but worse than the second."

When a movie was in production during the 1930's and 1940's, filming would continue on weekends and on Sundays, and actors would literally be on call twenty-four hours a day. And so it was on Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, as Tracy, Garfield and Hedy were gathered together rehearsing a scene with Fleming on the vast soundstage on the Metro lot, that the country was forced into World War II.

Author John Steinbeck, an acquaintance of Garfield's, had suggested him for the role of Danny in Tortilla Flat. Jack Warner didn't want to let him go. Garfield threatened to leave for Europe as a war correspondent if Warner didn't let him go. The threat may have been an idle one, but Warner gave in, lending Garfield to MGM in return for the services of Hedy Lamarr. Besides, Warner would benefit from the $5,000 per week salary MGM would pay them to use him because Garfield was then earning $2,000 per week for Warners. The studio would pocket the other $3,000 and make a profit of $30,000 over the ten weeks Garfield was at MGM.

Danny falls for the fiery Dolores. She wants Danny to get a job. "I got no time for work", Danny says, while laying about strumming his guitar. But to impress Dolores he trades in his guitar for a vacuum cleaner, even though her house does not have electricity.

In her late days in Florida, Hedy spoke highly of her leading men James Stewart and John Garfield, of whom she had autographed, framed photographs prominently displayed in her living room.

Danny would remain one of Garfield's favorite roles. "Getting something like this, something so real you can reach out and put your hand on it, is like going back to the stage", he told journalist Charles Darnton.

He developed a respectful professional relationship with Tracy, who was, along with Cary Grant, the biggest male star he ever worked with in film. For Garfield, Tracy proved to be a good acting partner, for he liked to ad-lib or throw a curve into the scripted dialogue to see what sort of color he could bring to a scene. But the two men would not become friends.

As for Garfield's relationship with the beautiful Hedy Lamarr, perhaps his nickname for her: 'Wildcat', hints at an intimate relationship. Lamarr's rather explicit 1965 autobiography makes no mention of an affair with Garfield, but the on-screen chemistry between the two stars led the Hollywood gossip mill to believe the two were involved.

Tortilla Flat proved to he a very mild commercial success in the spring of 1942. "One of his better performances", Variety's critic said of Garfield's work in the film. It would remind everyone that John Garfield was capable of solid character work, but it still didn't make Warner Bros. want to offer him anything remotely similar.

John Garfield would forever consider Tortilla Flat one of his best. "He would always talk about that film", actor Robert Brown, a friend of Garfield's, said. "I knew the song he sang from that film, 'Mrs. Morales' and he and I would go from bar to bar in New York, singing it together".

Sources:
"He Ran All the Way: The Life of John Garfield" by Robert Nott
"Beautiful: The Life of Hedy Lamarr" by Stephen Michael Shearer

Happy Thanksgiving Day 2011!

Peggy Dow as Miss Kelly, Charles Drake as Dr. Sanderson and James Stewart as Elwood P. Dowd in "Harvey" (1950)



Elwood P. Dowd (James Stewart): -Years ago, my mother used to say to me, she'd say "In this world, Elwood, you can be oh so so smart, or oh so pleasant." Well, for years I was smart... I recommend pleasant. You may quote me. 


James Stewart as Elwood P. Dowd in "Harvey" (1950) directed by Henry Koster

Call Harvey Ort old-fashioned and he probably won’t argue much. After all, this Jimmy Stewart sound-alike knows a thing or two about tradition. His great-grandfather was a farmer. His grandfather was a farmer. His father was a farmer. His son is a farmer. And so is he.
The Orts run a pumpkin-picking patch until Halloween, shuttling up to 25 patrons at a time on hay rides to the pumpkin fields.

Ann Shirley wearing a Thanksgiving bonnet

"Here is Hollywood's contribution to Thanksgiving Day wear. Edward Stevenson designed this hat for charming Anne Shirley. This attractive sports chapeau features the original motif of the Pilgrim folks hats. It is of bright beige felt, with a high sugar-loaf crown and turned-up brim. A colorful feather, reminiscent of the turkey's gorgeous bright wingspread, trims the center front. The band is of narrow brown grosgrain ribbon fastening with a square buckle of metal."

Jeanne Crain grinds her ax while a scared turkey watches

At Thanksgiving, Mrs. Ort commands a kitchen crew that produces a feast for the entire family of 45. “We have turkey and all the fixings, plenty of fresh vegetables, and every kind of pie – sweet potato, pumpkin, apple, cherry, blueberry... you name it,” she said.

“I often wonder what my great-great-grand-father would think if he could see all the technology we have today,” he said. “You get a sense of the land when you’ve farmed one place as long we have. It’s almost like you’re a part of it.”

“I’ve been here a long time and I love it. I sure couldn’t live in a city. Who needs the city?” -“Pumpkin Pickers Parade to Family Farm” (Author: Tim Ensign)