He Ran All the Way (Roberts Pictures, United Artists, 1951)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Later last night (Saturday, September 6) my husband Charles and I watched the blessed return of Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” show on Turner Classic Movies after the month-long hiatus from their August “Summer Under the Stars” feature. It was a film I’d wanted to re-see since the disappointment of The Gangster, the 1947 Allied Artists nèe Monogram film directed by Gordon Wiles and starring Barry Sullivan as – what else? – a burned-out gangster hurtling towards destruction. It was He Ran All the Way, a 1951 film produced by and starring John Garfield, the actor I thought should have been cast instead of Sullivan in both The Gangster and its immediate predecessor, Suspense (1946). He Ran All the Way was made at a critical juncture in Garfield’s career. He was under investigation by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) as an alleged Communist, and in order to keep from being blacklisted he published an article in the Hearst papers called “I Was a Sucker for a Left Hook” which disavowed all his previous Left-wing political affiliations. Garfield also testified before HUAC for three hours, and while he apparently avoided naming the names of other actors and people with Leftist or specifically Communist affiliations, the ordeal of testifying put a strain on his marriage. Garfield’s wife left him because she thought he shouldn’t have testified at all, and they were separated (though still legally married) when he died at age 39 on May 21, 1952 of a heart attack (his second).

He Ran All the Way was Garfield’s last film, and he actually paid for the production himself, though the named producer was Garfield’s business partner Bob Roberts. He got good help both in front of and behind the cameras; his co-star was Shelley Winters and he got Gladys George, Iva Archer in the 1941 The Maltese Falcon, to play his mother. Garfield also hired John Berry as director, Hugo Butler and Guy Endore as writers (with an uncredited assist from the already blacklisted Dalton Trumbo), Franz Waxman to compose the background score, and James Wong Howe to photograph (splendidly, as usual). Based on a novel by Sam Ross to which Garfield had used his own money to buy the movie rights, He Ran All the Way is the story of gangster Nick Robey (Garfield). At the start of the film he’s having sleepless nights and angst-ridden days; his associate Al Molin (Norman Lloyd, the villain in Hitchcock’s Saboteur) tries to get him to join a payroll robbery. Nick is reluctant and scared, but ultimately agrees to pull the job. They get away with a small briefcase containing a few bundles of cash – an amount that hardly seems worth it – but on the way they’re confronted by a police officer and both the officer and Al are wounded. Later the officer dies, and when Nick learns this he’s scared that he’s now wanted for killing a cop and the police will be out, not just to arrest him, but to kill him. Nick hides out in an amusement park featuring a large community swimming pool called “The Plunge,” where he runs into a young woman named Peg Dobbs (Shelley Winters) who lives with her family in a small New York apartment. Her family consists of a father, Fred (Wallace Ford), a mother (Selena Royle), and a younger brother, a typically obnoxious movie kid named Tommy (Bobby Hyatt). Peg invites him to come to her place, and once he’s there he freaks out, blurts out who he really is and why he’s staying there, and holds the family hostage in what’s become known since as a home invasion.

What makes this a great movie is Garfield’s glaring intensity as Nick – we really believe he’s mentally discombobulated and capable of glare-ice shifts in his character, nice and personable one moment, psychopathically crazy the next. When he learns from a newspaper headline – dad gets the paper regularly (in fact he works for a newspaper, but only in the pressroom) and tries to hide it from Nick, but Nick catches on – that his partner recovered and ratted him out to the cops, he works out an escape plan that involves getting Peg to agree to run away with him. He gives her part of the loot and tells her to buy him a car, with which they’ll flee the country together. Then while she’s away he gets paranoid and becomes convinced that she double-crossed him and has no intention of running away with him or helping him in any way. His paranoia goes into overdrive when she returns and tells him that she bought the car but there’s been a delay – there was a fault in the headlight wiring and the dealer will deliver the car once it’s fixed – and she can’t come up with a receipt for the car. Meanwhile, Fred has acquired a gun and intends to shoot down Nick as soon as he shows his face outside the apartment building. At this point we’re wondering how the writers will end this with Nick either in custody or dead, and the family back together. Apparently the writers were wondering about that, too. They were undecided as to whether Nick would be killed by the police or by Fred, and Shelley Winters suggested that she should kill Nick. They worked out a quite powerful scene in which [spoiler alert!] Nick is standing at the doorway of the building, facing Fred standing across the street with a gun trained on him. Having dropped his own gun, Nick calls on Peg to get it for him. Instead, obviously and quite naturally choosing to spare her father’s life rather than her no-account boyfriend’s, Peg grabs the gun and shoots him down. He falls into the gutter of a typically rain-drenched street (a lot of films noir have their climaxes take place on rain-drenched streets, and when Mad magazine parodied the early-1960’s TV show The Fugitive they drew in the last panel a man in a white janitor’s uniform whose jacket said on its back, “Making Streets Look Like It Just Rained Co.”), and he finally dies just as he notices the yellow convertible Pat said she’d got him: she bought the car after all.

Like a lot of famous actors’ last films – Rudolph Valentino’s Son of the Sheik, Jean Harlow’s Saratoga, Laird Cregar’s Hangover Square, James Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause and Giant, Peter Finch’s Network, Brandon Lee’s The Crow – Garfield’s real-life demise hangs heavy over this movie. Though it’s a bit more violent and edgy than most of the works Walter Legge was thinking of when he wrote, “There is in the last works of nearly every great artist a strangely luminous quality, as if the creative mind had already seen the world beyond death and were conscious of things infinitely greater than the emotional experiences of this world,” He Ran All the Way does seem to have a sense of doom about it. I think John Garfield knew on some level that this was likely to be his last film, and in his own life he was as surely hurtling towards destruction as his character was. One thing that isn’t often realized was that Garfield was the first Method-trained actor to become a movie star, and he had shown that early on in his career as a Warner Bros. contract player. Doubtless thinking that they could do with Garfield, t/n Julius Garfinkle, the same transformation they’d wreaked on Edward G. Robinson, t/n Emmanuel Goldenberg – transform a mittel-Europan Jewish actor into a convincing Italian gangster – the “suits” at Warners gave him a series of gangster roles in films like They Made Me a Criminal, Blackwell’s Island, Castle on the Hudson, and Out of the Fog. Garfield responded by playing these parts with a chilling understatement that strongly contrasted with how Warners’ previous tough guys, Robinson and James Cagney, would have snarled through them.

Of the four major Method actors who became leading men in movies – Garfield, Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, and James Dean – Brando was the only one who didn’t die young, and as he got older and more bloated and his characterizations got schtickier and schtickier, the early exits of his colleagues started to look more and more like blessings. At the same time one of the saddest things about Garfield’s early exit is he missed out on a lot of parts he’d been considered for, many of which had been written for him (including the leads in A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront, both of which eventually went to Brando) and one of which was written for him and which he played on Broadway: Clifford Odets’s The Big Knife. The Big Knife cast Garfield as movie star Charlie Castle, who resents the way Hollywood has pulled him away from both his artistic and political ideals, and in his outro to He Ran All the Way Eddie Muller wondered what it had been like for Garfield to do more than 100 performances in a role so blatantly based on his own life. By the time The Big Knife was filmed in 1955, Garfield was dead and Jack Palance – a strong character actor but not someone we could believe in as a major movie star – played Charlie Castle.