He Ran All the Way (Blu-ray Review)

3 Aug, 2015 By: Mike Clark

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Street 8/4/15
Kino Lorber
Drama
$19.95 DVD, $29.95 Blu-ray
Not Rated.
Stars John Garfield, Shelley Winters, Wallace Ford.

Pioneer “rebel” actor John Garfield (and he just about invented the form) made his career at Warner Bros. with a popular flurry of Depression romances and dramas of varied stripes, with a slight prejudice toward the World War II and Big House genres when it came to the latter. But he might not be quite the cult figure he is today without the handful of independent projects he made late in his career — adjacent to his belatedly revered Warner swan song The Breaking Point — at a time when the House Committee on Un-American Activities was hounding him to premature death at age 39. The first of these indies, Body and Soul, was a hit and earned him his only Oscar nomination. But the other two had to wait a lot of years for their merited acclaim: the unforgettable Force of Evil, which Martin Scorsese has acknowledged as a major career influence, and He Ran All the Way, which ended up being Garfield’s final movie.

For a long time after its release, Ran wasn’t that easy to catch, and I waited maybe a quarter-century to see it again after a 1959 late show TV viewing at age 11 or 12 when it became one of the movie pets of my childhood. It’s the first picture I can recall where a hood or hoods hold family members hostage even in their own home, predating The Night Holds Terror, The Desperate Hours and Cornel Wilde’s Storm Fear (all from ’55 and the last also just out from Kino Classics, as well as another childhood favorite). A borderline comedy like, say, MGM’s Hide Out from 1934 doesn’t really count because lead Robert Montgomery’s unscheduled household guest exudes a lot of the usual Montgomery charm (we’ll leave Night Must Fall out of this), a quality Garfield’s character doesn’t display much of here.

Instead, Garfield’s slow-witted payroll robber is more like a wounded animal — something we pick up on quickly when we see how his boozy mother (Gladys George) regards him in a couple punchy and swiftly delineated early scenes that indicate good fortune probably isn’t coming sonny’s way. Accordingly, the robbery gets bungled, a cop is fatally wounded, and Garfield’s accomplice (Norman Lloyd) is killed. In a rather amazing viewing coincidence during the evening of the afternoon I saw this new Ran Blu-ray, Lloyd (who’ll be 101 this coming November) showed up in the Amy Schumer-Judd Apatow hit Trainwreck. There’s nothing like building up that Social Security reservoir.

Sweaty, jumpy and probably terrified, Garfield picks up a “good girl” bakery employee (Shelley Winters) in a public swimming pool and accompanies her home to an apartment shared with parents and a kid brother, who quickly go off to a movie. Garfield is getting so feverish (or close) that he doesn’t even want any food — and I, for one, flashed on the stories of how Garfield later suffered a fatal heart attack sleeping on the couch (well, maybe) of a female friend not quite a year after this film’s release. That time span suggests that Garfield didn’t have a whole lot of professional irons in the fire after he refused to name names for HUAC (and he was such a subversive that he’d been a co-founder of the Hollywood Canteen to entertain service personnel during World War II). I have in my mammoth early-TV collection a 1950 Dumont Network “Cavalcade of Stars” in which Jerry Lester (no fellow Group Theatre alum he) hosts Garfield doing a scene from Clifford Odets’ Golden Boy with Kim Stanley, certainly the weirdest and most unlikely credit of the actor’s career this side of his Blues in the Night rendition in Warner’s Thank Your Lucky Stars (also just out on Blu-ray).

Projecting real-life fatigue that helps him in the role but couldn’t have helped him any personally, Garfield is probably too old for his role yet brings total conviction to every scene; the tension never flags, and the closed apartment quarters almost become characters in the story instead of contributing to any potential narrative sluggishness. After noting recently that a lot of the recent Kino Classics line looks acceptable but not extraordinary, I have to say that the black-and-white print here is one crisp beauty — which it deserves to be, given that the movie was shot by James Wong Howe, who was gray-listed at the time. (Screenwriters Dalton Trumbo and Ben Maddow, uncredited at the time, were already out-and-out blacklisted, and about to be was Ran’s director John Berry.) Thanks to Congressional showboating, the movies — or at least ‘A’-budget movies — lost the services of Howe for too many years. When the cloud lifted in 1955, he merely delivered Technicolor Picnic and the black-and-white/VistaVision The Rose Tattoo in a single year, winning an Oscar for the latter.

An interesting footnote here is the casting of veteran actor Wallace Ford (he played the one informed upon in John Ford’s landmark The Informer) as Winters’ father — an excellent performance, by the way. Much later and in his final screen appearance, he memorably played her father again in 1965’s A Patch of Blue, for which Winters got her second Oscar playing a character who was not a good girl (prostitute, racist, ill-tempered, dumpy — the whole package). Winters played a lot of women you wanted to run all the way from, but she was a brave actress and fine foil for Garfield here as one who finds herself falling for the wrong kind of guy despite a solid upbringing.
 

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