Rent He Ran All the Way (1951)

Corned by Fear: Garfield's Last Stand - He Ran All the Way review by griggs

A tight, sweaty little noir that feels like a 1930s gangster movie dragged into the Cold War, He Ran All the Way traps everyone in a rising panic. John Garfield, in his last film before his sudden death at 39, is fantastic — jumpy, cornered, and cracking under the weight of his own nerves. You can almost smell the fear coming off him.

Director John Berry keeps things tense and airless, shooting mostly in small rooms where nobody can breathe. James Wong Howe’s cinematography does the rest — shadows, blinds, sweat, and faces half-lit with guilt. It’s noir boiled down to its essentials: light, darkness, and the mess in between.

The plot’s simple enough — a botched robbery and a desperate man on the run — but it hits harder when you know what was happening behind the camera. Both Berry and Garfield were being chased by HUAC, and you can feel that paranoia seeping into every frame. The movie’s grim, gripping, and strangely moving — a tough little send-off for an actor who, in the end, really did run all the way.

Hostage Drama. - He Ran All the Way review by Steve

Minor film noir in which a routine home hostage situation is employed to a really strange effect. John Garfield plays a sociopathic cop killer from the slums of Los Angeles who takes refuge in the apartment of a docile stranger (Shelley Winters) and her compliant family, as the police dragnet tightens its grip on the streets below.

The narrative focuses on the utterly loathsome fugitive more than the traumatised hostages. Given his ostentatiously unloving mother (Gladys George) it's possible we are even expected to sympathise... Except he's such a creepy, narcissistic weasel that it's impossible. And the family's attempt to defend themselves is so wretched it's frustrating.

Maybe there's another way of seeing this. All the main players on this picture were being persecuted by Senator McCarthy's witch hunt on alleged communists. It's not too difficult to imagine the menacing, cowardly criminal as a stand-in for HUAC, and the peaceful, innocent family as its victims. Tenuous, perhaps, but it's the only way the film works.

It's a difficult watch either way. The hostage scenario only succeeds if we empathise with the captive family, but the inexperienced (and blacklisted) John Berry gives all the light to his star. This now seems most significant as Garfield's last performance before his premature death and for its uncredited script by Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten.