He Ran All the Way

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Dead of a heart attack at only 39, John Garfield’s final film, He Ran All the Way, is a typically punchy affair, the scrappy Garfield playing a smalltime criminal who holds a family hostage after a heist gone wrong results in the death of a cop.

In early scenes reminiscent of Brighton Rock fugitive Nick Robey (Garfield) darts among the holiday crowds at an amusement park and picks up a sweet blonde, Peg (Shelley Winters), using her to help him hide in plain sight from the police. But for the most part this short, cheap movie is set at the apartment where Peg lives with her father (Wallace Ford), mother (Selena Royle) and pipsqueak brother (Robert Hyatt), and where Nick decides to take the family hostage after realising he needs somewhere safe to hide out until things cool down.

Here on the one side Nick, twitchy, driven paranoid by the uncaring alcoholic mother we meet in the film’s opening scene. On the other the Dobbs family, decent hard-working folks with a sense of duty – the salt of the earth. Between them Peg, clearly attracted to Nick and unsure which way to jump. That’s the nub on which the film turns, with Winters – still in the process here of shaking off her studio-manufactured blonde-bombshell image – delivering a performance that’s all about ambiguity. Does Peg harbour feelings for this murderer or is she playing him?

While Peg struggles with her emotions, the rest of the family fights Nick, in an undeclared battle of wits that’s thematically not dissimilar to Le Silence de la Mer (Silence of the Sea), the debut by Jean-Pierre Melville that saw a French family cold-shouldering the Nazi lieutenant billeted with them.

Wallace Ford as Fred Dobbs
Decent Fred Dobbs


Even if Garfield hadn’t died the following year, his Hollywood career was pretty much over. He’d figured on the infamous Red Channels list published the previous year, which consisted of 151 entertainment people deemed to be “Red fascists and their sympathizers”. If he’d lived he’d have struggled to find work in Hollywood.

Selena Royle also featured on that list. This film’s writer, Dalton Trumbo, was already blacklisted, having been one of the original Hollywood Ten determined to defend themselves from attack by Senator McCarthy by going on the offensive. Director John Berry would be named later. With all this baggage it’s no surprise that the film is often described as left-leaning. However, that claim is quite a stretch unless you want to see He Ran All the Way as an allegory – violent, unstable Nick as capitalism; the Dobbs family as its victims, each reacting differently to it – accommodating, resisting, or oblivious. Allegorise away if you like, but it’s a fruitless exercise.

There are in any case many surface joys to savour. Garfield’s switchback acting – psychopathic thug or misunderstood crazy mixed-up (if rather superannuated) kid? Wallace Ford is also very good as the patriarch bristling at the way this stranger is throwing his weight around in the family home and worried that his daughter has the hots for this fugitive from justice.

On the other side of the camera there’s the taut screenplay by Trumbo (using writer Guy Endore as a front). He covers a lot of ground in 77 minutes and is aided by a driving noir score by Franz Waxman, lean direction by John Berry and cinematography by James Wong Howe. You could watch it for Howe’s work alone, in fact, and he keeps visual interest up by switching between askew angles, deep-focus, sudden close-ups and lighting that’s dramatic but still satisfies the demands of realism. We’re in an apartment after all.

Try and get a hi-def copy of this overlooked film if you can. The blu-ray I watched is pin sharp and glorious.






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© Steve Morrissey 2024







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