Last summer, my grandmother and I watched “The Breaking Point,” a 1950 Hemingway adaptation about a desperate fishing boat captain whose efforts to provide for his family by getting involved with smugglers end up costing him dearly. Directed by Hungarian Jew Michael Curtiz (who also directed “Casablanca”), the movie stars John Garfield as Captain Harry Morgan. When I asked my grandma about him, she practically swooned: “Oh, John Garfield.”
So who was he?
Jacob Julius Garfinkle, called Julie by family and friends, was born to Russian Jewish immigrants David (a clothes presser and part-time cantor) and Hannah Garfinkle on the Lower East Side on March 4, 1913. His mother died when he was 7, and he and his younger brother were shuffled between relatives. Renowned educator Angelo Patri took an interest in young Julie, engaging him in speech and debate, which led to theater, where he caught the acting bug. He married his childhood sweetheart, Roberta Seidman, with whom he had three children.
He got into the Group Theatre, a left-wing collective that was teaching the earliest form of Method acting in America, performing in plays like “Awake and Sing!,” “Waiting for Lefty” and “Golden Boy,” by Jewish playwright Clifford Odets. Denied the “Golden Boy” lead written for him — a young boxer torn between fighting and music — Julie went to Hollywood merely hoping to earn “diaper money.” But his debut role as composer Mickey Borden in 1938’s “Four Daughters” (his first collaboration with Curtiz), made him a heartthrob and a Best Supporting Actor nominee in one fell swoop.
Adapted from a story by Jewish writer Fannie Hurst, “Four Daughters” was a vehicle for the Lane sisters. But Garfield walks away with the picture from the moment he appears on screen, a jolt of city-wise cynicism into the sweet suburban world of the film, with “the face of a bar mitzvah boy gone just wrong enough to enhance his appeal.” It’s not simply that he’s cute, though — Garfield’s Method training makes Borden feel realer than everyone else in the movie. Women loved him, and men saw themselves in him.
He’d been billed as Jules Garfield on stage, but Warner Brothers studio head Jack Warner worried that gentile audiences would find Jules “too Jewish,” so Jules became John, as Michael Bolgar became Mickey Borden in the film, though he remained Julie to those closest to him. He was so popular as Borden that despite his character’s death, a sequel, “Four Wives,” included him in flashbacks, and the cast reunited with Curtiz for “Daughters Courageous,” an unrelated film where Garfield plays another troubled youth. But Garfield chafed at his typecasting, often opting to take unpaid suspensions rather than act in mediocre pictures. Warner Brothers refused to loan him out for Columbia’s movie adaptation of “Golden Boy,” which became William Holden’s first starring role.
Rejected to serve in World War II due to a heart weakened by a teenage illness, Garfield threw himself into the war effort at home: selling war bonds, doing USO shows in war zones and co-creating the Hollywood Canteen with Bette Davis to entertain servicemen headed to the Pacific front. He starred in movies like “Air Force,” “Destination Tokyo” and “Pride of the Marines,” which Garfield himself pitched after reading in LIFE magazine about real-life hero Al Schmid, who was blinded at Guadalcanal. Groundbreaking in its portrayal of a disabled veteran, he even moved in with Schmid and his family for a month to prepare.
Post-war, Garfield excelled in the emerging genre of film noir, most famously in “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” where he and Lana Turner conspire to kill her husband and end up ruining both their lives.
Wanting more autonomy, he formed his own production company, where he made two of his greatest films: “Body and Soul” and “Force of Evil,” both of which Martin Scorsese has cited as influences. “Body and Soul” earned Garfield his second Oscar nomination, this time for Best Actor, as a boxer in deep with the mob. Both movies featured Garfield playing Jewish characters, as did 1947’s Best Picture winner, “Gentleman’s Agreement,” in which Garfield is a veteran friend of Gregory Peck’s reporter uncovering antisemitism in restricted communities in Connecticut. He took the supporting role because he felt the topic was important, despite not being a particularly observant Jew.
But also in 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee started investigating the movie industry for Communist infiltration. Garfield joined other stars in protesting HUAC, not as pro-Communists, but as the Committee for the First Amendment, protecting free speech. He’d been an early member of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, which could get one labeled “prematurely antifascist.” He’d advocated for better roles for Black actors and more diversity in front of and behind the camera, and he’d insisted that the Hollywood Canteen welcome soldiers of all races, when the military was still segregated. He also wrote checks and signed petitions for practically anything put in front of him if he thought it was a good cause — especially to help the poor. This generosity came back to haunt him, when publications like Red Channels were listing stars’ donations to “Communist fronts,” ending careers practically overnight. This was the era of the Hollywood blacklist, and Garfield was on the list.
Called to testify before HUAC in 1951, Garfield refused to name names, claiming he’d never met a Communist in the Group or in Hollywood, even though his own wife had (briefly) been a Party member and he’d worked with actors, writers and directors who espoused Marxist beliefs. What made Garfield a target for HUAC was that he was such a huge Jewish star (“Communist” was often code for Jew, or at least indicative of a conspiracy theory of Jewish control), and what made him vulnerable was that he’d succeeded outside the studio system; he wasn’t under contract, so studio heads had no incentive to protect him.
Unfortunately, his testimony didn’t get him cleared to work again, and now the FBI was after him for perjury. His two final films were released without fanfare: “The Breaking Point” and “He Ran All the Way,” where Garfield plays a man hiding out from the cops — not far off from his own life. He wasn’t blacklisted from the theater, though, and it was during this time that he finally got to play the lead in “Golden Boy” on stage.
But the stress of the blacklist and his refusal to slow down, despite doctor’s orders, pushed him to his own breaking point. He separated from his wife, and in May 1952, he was found dead of a heart attack in another woman’s bed. His funeral on the Upper West Side drew thousands of mourners, the most for an actor since Rudolph Valentino’s in 1926.
He was only 39 years old.
Odets wrote in the New York Times that Garfield “was just beginning to reveal himself as an actor in terms of wider range, new sensitivity and maturity” at the time of his death. His story exemplifies the human cost of HUAC and the blacklist. It’s particularly tragic when comparing his war years to how the government hounded him during the Red Scare. He gave so much to his country, only to be treated like a traitor. Cate Thurston, curator of the Skirball Center’s 2023 blacklist exhibit, states that, as a classic Hollywood star, Garfield is “underrecognized today, but… he was all of the Chrises. He was Pine, he was Hemsworth, he was everything,” which explains my grandmother’s reaction. The rabbi at his funeral called him “almost an American legend.” Born 112 years ago this month and now gone almost twice as long as he lived, it’s worth remembering him and what moviegoers — and America — lost.
