The Santa Fe Journal North, December 2003
"...a valuable introduction to a real Hollywood player...an excellent reference text to the studio blacklist era."
Book Description
George Hurrell, the great Hollywood portrait photographer, in recalling a shooting session with John Garfield, said, "He was a strange, fascinating guy. He couldn’t sit still. There was a frantic air about him...He never thought he was good looking. ‘I’m a mug,’ he would laugh, ‘just a mug’...But occasionally...[h]e’d look at the proofs and say, ‘Ain’t too bad for a kid from the Bronx, eh?’ and he’d roar with laughter." Here that thumbnail description has been vastly enlarged and deeply enriched with detail, but never airbrushed, and has become He Ran All the Way. In a sense, Garfield never left the Bronx. He began his acting career not far away, on Broadway as a member of the Group Theater in the mid-thirties. But soon, seduced by the myth of Hollywood and the reality of Warner Brothers, he made his movie debut, in 1938, in Four Daughters and immediately established himself as an earthy, rebellious and electrifying presence on the screen–in retrospect the James Dean of the Depression era. Frequenty cast as a lawbreaker, in such films as They Made Me a Criminal, Dust Be My Destiny, Castle on the Hudson and, late in his career, the cult favorite Force of Evil, Garfield went on to roles in classics like The Postman Always Rings Twice (with Lana Turner), Body and Soul and Gentleman’s Agreement. Married to a teenage sweetheart, from whom he was never divorced, Garfield soon earned the reputation of a womanizer. And, reflecting the values of his upbringing and the political climate of the time, he staunchly supported leftist causes. As a result, by the early 50s his screen career was cut short by the Hollywood blacklist. He retuned to acting on Broadway and on tour. At 39 he died in New York, in the bed of a woman who was not his wife. This biography, superbly reseached and compellingly written, is as exciting as the best of Garfield’s films.
