He Ran All the Way

                           Shelley Winters and John Garfield                     

John Berry's He Ran All the Way is a good criminal on the run picture from 1951. John Garfield stars as Nick Robey who we meet screaming in his sleep in a very seedy LA apartment as the picture opens. Robey's trauma, stemming perhaps from the war, is never given a back story in this brisk 77 minute independent B feature. Nick's screams piss off his mother, memorably portrayed by Gladys George as a fierce harridan smoking cigs and drinking Pabst. In real life, Ms. George was on her fourth husband, a former bell hop twenty years her junior. Mom tears her boy a new one, so he escapes to the street where his pal Al (Norman Lloyd) greets him with a plan for a payroll robbery at a railroad warehouse. Lloyd who shared roots in the Mercury Theater with Berry, is dastardly fun in a brief appearance. Al and a cop are wounded in the holdup, Nick fleeing on foot with the loot.

He takes refuge in an indoor public pool where he has a cute meet with Peg Dobbs, a shy working girl well played by Shelley Winters. Desperate for a place to hide, he ingratiates himself with Peg and is soon ensconced in the apartment that Peg shares with her father (Wallace Ford), mother (Selena Royle), and baby bro Tommy (Robert Hyatt). The film has flipped into High Sierra and The Desperate Hours territory: a miscreant holding hostages in a confined space. Berry and cinematographer James Wong Howe get the right sense of menace from the interiors featuring looming and brooding figures in jagged geometric configurations; as above. Nick is pictured as a victim of nurture, as opposed to nature, who cannot love, so he tries to dominate. He treats Peg roughly, even on the dance floor. The white lace curtain gentility of the Dobbs' apartment represents a happy domesticity that is utterly foreign to him. It is in stark contrast to the flat that he shares with his mother which is so seamy that I craved a tetanus shot after seeing the film. Later in her career, Ms. Winters made a mint being loud and abrasive, but she is convincing as a naive girl who responds to Nick's masculine allure. Winters soon became typecast as the submissive girl, seduced and then abandoned, usually at the bottom of a body of water. For once, in He Ran All the Way, Winters' character gets the last laugh. 

Gladys George, fully armed

He Ran All the Way is one of the last gasps of red Hollywood. Berry soon went into exile in France. Garfield, beleaguered by the blacklist, was dead of a heart attack by the next May, at the age of 39. He Ran All the Way is based on a 1947 novel by Sam Ross. Dalton Trumbo wrote the initial adaptation, but it passed through many hands before being filmed. The leftist bent of the writers helps the film by conjuring a genuine working class milieu. Peg, who works at a large bakery, and her dad, who is a printing press operator, have believable occupations that are well integrated with the narrative. Regardless, Garfield owns the picture, his last. I think Berry lets him get away with some over statement when Garfield signals his paranoia early in the pool sequence, but this film does show the range of his talents. He looks a little harried and worn, but it suits his character. When little Tommy breaks down in tears, Garfield shows great restraint, sensitive towards tipping this moment away from bathos. At the other end of the spectrum, He Ran All the Way provides him a final exit that stand's along Cagney's bravura death scenes.