John Garfield’s noir films got darker as he went along. After The Postman Always Rings Twice and Nobody Lives Forever, Garfield formed his own production company with Bob Roberts. They promptly made the classic Body and Soul and then one of the noirest of the noirs, the corrosive Force of Evil. Their final film, He Ran All the Way, made not long before Garfield’s death by heart attack at age 39, isn’t far behind that one. It’s a sad, disturbing look at lonely, frightened, desperate, even vicious humanity.
Nick (Garfield) is a worthless punk living with his slattern mom (Gladys George). While he lies in bed, she comes in harping that if he were a man, he’d be out looking for work. His response is: “If you were a man, I’d kick your teeth in.” Their charming rapport is clearly a long ongoing siege, and thus the movie introduces its major theme: “being a man” vs. what kind of man “ought to be wearing skirts”.
Nick has a reason not to want to get out of bed this day, besides having a dream of ill omen like Caesar’s wife. Nick’s equally worthless buddy (Norman Lloyd) talks him into a robbery that ends with Nick shooting a cop and on the lam from a police dragnet. He hides out in the apartment of Peggy (Shelley Winters in her pathetic period, and as excellent as always), a lonely girl he meets at a public pool in a scene that manages to simultaneously be sexy, mundane, and nervous. His lack of trust, temper, and brains causes him to hold her family hostage for the rest of this queasy hothouse drama that becomes an early “home invasion” movie.
The great uncertainty isn’t the degree to which Nick might fly off the handle, but the degree to which Peggy might fall for what’s probably her first boyfriend. Garfield conveys a character so stunted and abused by false trust that he can no longer recognize what might be genuine, and Winters makes her eyes, her body language, and her trembling voice convey what the script hasn’t time to. They’re aided by Wallace Ford and Selena Royle as Peggy’s fretful and ashamed parents, and Bobby Hyatt as her kid brother, who vacillates with perfect credibility from fascination to teasing to rage and sorrow against the violent intruder.
At under 80 tight minutes, the script by two blacklistees — Dalton Trumbo (operating behind “front” Guy Endore) and Hugo Butler, working from a novel by Sam Ross — and directed by another, John Berry, keeps the tension tensing and the paranoia popping, and it pauses for plenty of searching moments like the dialogue about “that church stuff” and love for “the human family.” The ironies of this scene aren’t underlined, but they’re there if you think about it. Peggy’s family is solid, if riddled with uncertainties once their complacencies come under tension, while throughout and around the edges are glimpses of the despair and hopelessness that mark many lives.
Franz Waxman’s opening music is nerve-wracking, its staccato jabs anticipating Psycho. However, the true star is the photography. Whether in the “neo-realist” locations of the opening act, populated by hundreds of extras and sometimes shot elegantly from above, or the close confines of the apartment, great cinematographer James Wong Howe provides compositions whose clarity and artistry are shown off on this Blu-ray’s superb HD remastering. Let’s also give a shout-out to the tense cutting of distinguished editor Francis D. Lyon, who won an Oscar for Body and Soul. The swoon-worthy visual and musical melodrama of the final scenes are earned.
Berry had been a protégé of Orson Welles and John Houseman in the Mercury Theatre, and his Hollywood career began when producer Houseman hired him as a director. He repaid the favor by casting Lloyd, another Mercury alumnus. Wikipedia reports that in the year of this movie’s release, Berry was named as a communist before House Un-American Activities Committee by Edward Dmytryk and Frank Tuttle, who returned from Europe to save their Hollywood careers, and Berry promptly moved to France. He continued a long career as a director, although this is possibly his best film. It’s hard to say, since many of them, like Tamango with Dorothy Dandridge, aren’t easily available.