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When Warner Brothers introduced John Garfield in the 1958 film FOUR DAUGHTERS, the tremendous impact he made on critics and audiences everywhere went beyond optimistic expectations. ‘The most startling innovation in the way of a screen character in years,” said the New York Times, and critic James Agee called Garfield’s performance “bitterly brilliant.” Audiences agreed. Playing Mickey Borden, a fascinating fatalist, reckless, poor and unhappy, whose hate of middle-class hypocritical conventions makes him insufferably rude to everybody and who assumes as a matter of course that all the cards are stacked against him, Garfield was the very opposite of Hollywood’s classic glamour boy image, a welcome relief from conventional screen types, and as such was an immediate sensation.

Garfield was twenty-five years old, truly devoted to the legitimate stage and completely unimpressed by his success. In fact, he was far from considering himself a good actor. “No actor can really be good,” he said, “until he’s reached forty.”

For him, Hollywood was an aggregation of “overdressed mugs” who didn’t have guts enough to stand up against tough going in the legitimate theatre. His wife, the former Roberta Mann, didn’t want him to go into motion pictures. “We’ll ‘go Hollywood,” she argued plaintively. Garfield promised her that he would take every precaution against “going Hollywood.” First, his contract with Warner Brothers allowed him to perform in a stipulated number of New York plays at his option. Second, the Garfields refused to own a home in Hollywood. When they moved into their first rented house, Garfield took a salami from a paper bag, hung it on a hook in the kitchen, and announced proudly, “Now we live here.” The salami served Garfield as a symbol and a warning against arrogance. It was also a reminder of a humbler period in his life, when he was a Bronx boy and a possible candidate for reform school.

He was born Julius Garfinkle on New York’s lower East Side on March 4, 1913, the son of David and Hannah Garfinkle. “My father was a presser in a factory during the week,” he recalled, “but a cantor on weekends and holidays.” Subsequently, the family moved to the Bronx, where he started attending school. The death of his mother, when he was seven, disrupted all home life for him. He was shifted from relative to relative, but nobody wanted to be responsible for a child whose behavior became more and more uncontrollable, for he spent most of his time on the streets associating with other young rowdies who were up to no good. He missed classes so often that he was expelled from several schools. Finally, as a last chance before possibly being sent to reform school, he was enrolled in P.S. 45, in the Bronx, where Angelo Patri, noted for his rehabilitation of problem children, was the principal. Garfield said of him, “That was the beginning of everything for me. Whatever I am I owe it to Mr. Patri. If it hadn’t been for him, I’d have probably wound up in jail with others of the gang who weren’t fortunate enough to land at 45.” Mr. Patri recognized potential in the tough Garfield and sought to gain his confidence. Learning that Garfield liked to talk, Mr. Patri interested him in debating and also encouraged him to take up boxing. Garfield became as adroit with words as he was with his fists, sufficiently expert to become a semifinalist in a Golden Gloves tournament. With Benjamin Franklin as his subject, Garfield won the New York State Oratorical Contest, sponsored by the New York Times. Curiously, his success in the oratorical competition convinced him that he should become an actor rather than a lawyer or a politician. But how does one become an actor? Patri sent Garfield to the great Russian actor Jacob Ben-Ami for advice. “Enroll at the Heckscher Foundation Dramatic School,” he was told. The six dollars a week he earned selling newspapers could not finance an acting course. He explained that to the Foundation and asked for a scholarship. To his surprise, he was granted one. He continued to sell newspapers for the six-dollar-a-week income, which Mr. Patri augmented with five dollars of his own.

With the Heckscher theatre group, Garfield appeared in a number of productions including A Midsummer Night’s Dream. After the Foundation, Garfield landed a job with Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre, but at no salary. Miss Le Gallienne recommended him to Maria Ouspenskaya and to Richard Boleslavsky, both well-known acting teachers, and from them Garfield learned the details of stage deportment.

After his Civic Repertory experience, Garfield took to the road for five months, hitchhiking from New York to California and back, working his way by washing dishes, harvesting wheat, picking fruit, and fighting forest fires. Long afterward, he recalled these experiences with deep emotion: “I’m sure that happiness can mean different things to different people. For me, it came once, when I was on the bum, holding down the rods under freight cars or riding couplers. I dropped off in Nebraska and went to work for an old German farmer shucking wheat. The farm was wonderful. I used to sit out on the back porch at night, after the chores were done, and watch the darkness, like smoke, fall over the countryside. From the barns came the sound of horses stomping in their stalls, the faint creak of a windmill and the whisper of the night breeze through the cottonwoods. And over everything was a vast, pervading calm. Pretty soon the old man would come out and drop down beside me, tamping tobacco into his pipe. We didn’t talk much but it was almost beautiful. Your body tired and your mind at peace. That was happiness for me.”

Soon after his return to New York, Jules Garfield-he had already made the first change in his stage name-became associated with the Group Theatre acting company, which had been formed during the 1930-31 season. This company was to exert a powerful influence on Garfield’s career, as it had on American theatre and would on American film because so many of its members went into the movies. Lee Strasberg and Harold Clurman were among its directors. Elia Kazan, Ruth Nelson, Frances Farmer, Lee J. Cobb, and Karl MaIden were some of its actors. Clifford Odets, Irwin Shaw, and William Saroyan were among its playwrights. Of this period Garfield said, “It seemed to me that in the Group lay the future of American drama. What bound the Group was the belief that theatre should present the life of our times, plays about the Depression and working-class life in the Bronx instead of the commercial inanities that pervaded Broadway. We all shared the Group’s joys and of course the sorrows and turmoil. It was, in a way, like growing up together.”

He appeared in Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing!, in Paul Green and Kurt Weill’s anti-war play Johnny Johnson, and in the Group’s most financially successful production, Golden Boy. Garfield felt so close to the Group Theatre that he left his three-hundred-dollar-a-week role in Having Wonderful Time to take a forty-dollar-a-week secondary part in Golden Boy. Though the leading character seemed to have been written for Garfield (the playwright later admitted having written it with him in mind), director Harold Clurman chose Luther Adler instead, a choice that surprised everybody Warner Brothers had been trying for several years to sign Garfield to a contract, but his demand for a ”time-off” clause in his contract to allow him to do one stage play a year met with opposition. Warner Brothers finally agreed, however, and Jules Garfield left the cast of Golden Boy to become John Garfield in Hollywood.

During his nine years at Warners, his relationship with his bosses was, to put it mildly, stormy. He became a distinguished member of The-Most-Suspended-Star-of-the-Lot Club, which had in its ranks such impressive names as Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, Olivia de Havilland, and James Cagney. “I was suspended only eleven times. I served my time and I took it like a sport,” Garfield said later. But he was not bitter or resentful toward Warner Brothers. “They taught me the business and they made me a star. They took their chances with a cocky kid from the East who still talked out of the corner of his mouth. I appreciate all that.”

His early triumph in FOUR DAUGHTERS could not be sustained with a series of hackneyed prison stories. There were three films in this genre: BLACKWELL’S ISLAND (1939), CASTLE ON THE HUDSON (1940), and EAST OF THE RIVER (1940) – and Garfield rebelled. His refusal to play scheduled roles resulted in suspensions but led to better opportunities in such films as SATURDAY’S CHILDREN (1940), THE SEA WOLF (1941), OUT OF THE FOG (1941), and TORTILLA FLAT (1942), the last one on loan to MGM. In 1943 he appeared in one of the best war films of the period, Howard Hawks’ AIR FORCE and he was loaned to RKO for THE FALLEN SPARROW, an engrossing experiment in psychological terror. But it was in 1945 that Garfield got his best role at Warner Brothers when he appeared in PRIDE OF THE MARINES the real life story of Marine Sergeant Al Schmidt, who heroically defended a machine-gun post in Guadalcanal and was blinded by the explosion of a Japanese grenade. Garfield brought uncommon compassion, understanding, and dignity to the months-long and fear-ridden struggle of this hero to recover his nerve and face the prospect of going through life sightless. “If there is one thing for which I am thankful to Warner Brothers, it is the chance they gave me to be in this story about the rehabilitation of a wounded man. I spent many hours with Al Schmidt, and the quality of his human courage was an inspiration for me and, I’m sure, for millions of servicemen maimed by the war.”

The last film under his Warner Brothers contract was HUMORESQUE, in which he was cast against type as a violin virtuoso. The script had somebody saying of Garfield’s character that “he looked more like a prizefighter than a fiddler,” a line that served only to accentuate the obvious. This glossy melodrama, derived from a Fannie Hurst novel, was better suited to the acting mannerisms of his co-star Joan Crawford, than it was to Garfield’s earthy characterizations. The completion of this film meant that he was at last free to follow his career as he, and not the studio, thought best.

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