Garfield’s performances marry subtle physical shifts with roiling undercurrents of subtext and emotion, revealing as much as possible with the smallest of gestures and shifts of facial expression. ![]() It’s a fine film, deserving of its classic status, but many other delights await you in the Criterion’s retrospective. If you aren’t a film buff, you most likely know Garfield from the 1946 film of “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” in which he plays the lunkhead patsy to Lana Turner’s murderous femme fatale. He moved to Los Angeles, making his film début, in 1938, in “Four Daughters,” for which he received an Oscar nomination. Garfield left the company to better support his family and because he felt cheated out of a role that had been promised to him. It was the most exciting theatre company in America, but it rarely found financial success. The Group included many of the future stewards of acting instruction in America-Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner-as well as the directors Elia Kazan and Harold Clurman. Stanislavski’s ideas are so complicated that people have argued over them for more than a century, but his main goal was to create a series of exercises, techniques, and approaches that would allow performers to truly “experience” a role, living a character’s reality while remaining in control as an actor. In the mid-nineteen-thirties, he acted with the Group Theatre, a company responding to the Depression with a utopian, left-wing vision of the American character, and an ensemble model of acting rooted in the teachings of the great Russian director Konstantin Stanislavski. He was a creature of the Great Depression whose early life included familial neglect and riding the rails reciting “The Raven” for his supper money would often shape his life and career choices. ![]() John Garfield never wanted to be a movie star. His best performances have a timeless brilliance they feel, somehow, classical and contemporary at once. He was far better than his contemporaries at solving the puzzle of how to take the new acting techniques coming out of the New York theatre during the thirties and forties and adapt them for the screen. ![]() But Garfield is much more than a footnote. It’s tempting to see Garfield, who worked as the doorman for the first session of the Actors Studio, in 1947, as also holding the door of acting history open for Brando, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Ben Gazzara, Paul Newman, and others to walk through. Brando, despite his protestations to the contrary, was often credited as the first Method movie star, the one who inspired generations of young men to move to New York and learn the Method at its high temple, the Actors Studio. Garfield died in 1952, his performances overshadowed by the actors who followed him-particularly Marlon Brando, who rose to fame playing Stanley Kowalski in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” a role that Garfield turned down. In the course of a career that stretched from the height of the studio system to the depths of the Red Scare, Garfield pioneered a new, naturalistic approach to acting for the camera, one rooted in the same techniques that would soon be called the Method. The Criterion Channel is hosting a retrospective of films featuring the late John Garfield, a superstar of the nineteen-forties whose body of work has long gone under-recognized.
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