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JOHN GARFIELD Depression's child
John Garfield in Under My Skin (1950), screen version of Hemingway's "Twenty Grand."
"If HE wasn't WINNING, he didn't know who he was." Thus the character of John Garfield as seen by a director who worked closely with him. Garfield was a tough, vital young man from the streets of New York, a graduate of the Neighborhood Playhouse and of the Group Theater to which he had brought a burning desire to learn the craft and the mystique of acting. Actually, Garfield was a natural — strong, sexy, motivated by a driving ambition that charged every part he ever played with his own restlessness and energy. Beneath the energy, but not obscured by it, one sensed a sweetness that made his ambition palatable. He was, to reverse the formula, a bad good man, wicked only in a boyish way.
A nice fellow hustling to improve himself, he was excellent in films like Body and Soul, in which he played a character much like himself. Temporarily bemused by the success ethic, the young fighter found himself groping in confusion for the values his better self sensed but could not practically
define. On screen Garfield reflected much of the urge for social mobility of a generation unsure as to whether the picket line or the night school would provide it.
Garfield himself was confused by the stardom thrust so suddenly upon him after he deserted the Group for the movies. That rather self-righteous collection of actors actually held a meeting to register their disapproval of Garfield's trip to Hollywood. Among his grievances was the Group's absurd failure to cast him as Golden Boy, relegating him to a minor part where he could watch the miscast Luther Adler do a part for which Garfield was born. The Group may have polished Garfield's talent, but its lingering effect on him was to create doubts about the value of his work, the reality of his talent. Its influence robbed him of the chance to enjoy the movie stardom which a part of his personality craved. He died of a heart attack in 1952. He was thirty-nine.
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