USA,
1951, 77 min
Shown in 1998
CREDITS
- dir
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John Berry
- scr
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Guy Endore, Hugo Butler
- cam
-
James Wong Howe
- cast
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John Garfield, Shelley Winters, Wallace Ford, Selena Royle
- source
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MGM Classics, 2500 Broadway Street #fF4262, Santa Monica, CA 90404. FAX: 310-264-1193
-
COMMENTS
Part of The Unvanquished series. John Berry appeared in person.
OTHER
Completed just as both director and star were called before McCarthy’s anti-Communist brigade, John Berry’s He Ran All the Way is one of the most ideologically charged films ever to come out of Hollywood. In the opening scene, Nick Robey (John Garfield) gets a sock in the kisser from his mother, and since this is a social-determinist drama, you can be sure things are only going to get worse. After killing a cop in a robbery gone awry, Nick flees to a public swimming pool, where he bumps into Peggy (a sexy young Shelley Winters). She whisks the fugitive away to her family’s tenement apartment, where the real drama unfolds: Should her parents abandon a working-class boy who was driven to crime by the poverty that they share with him? The cops close in on Nick, and the pressure mounts for the family to turn him in. As these largely invisible forces circle the apartment (just as invisible economic forces shape, and often destroy, individual lives), the inhabitants of the crowded tenement begin to turn on one another. He Ran All the Way is a courageous film, and all the more remarkable since Berry made it as anticommunist sentiment was sweeping the country in the wake of the Soviet expansion in Eastern Europe.
FACTOID #336
Bing Crosby was invited several times for an onstage tribute at the Festival, reports then-director Claude Jarman, but declined the honor. “Nobody wants to see those little things that I used to do,” he modestly replied. He did attend though, with wife Kathy and their friend, Rita Hayworth.
