JOHN GARFIELD AND THE AMERICAN JEWISH SON STUART HANDS A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTERS OF ARTS GRADUATE PROGRAMME IN CINEMA AND MEDIA STUDIES YORK UNIVERSITY, TORONTO, ONTARIO JANUAR Y 2010 Library and Archives Bibliothéque et 1*1 Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de 1'édition 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington Ottawa ON K1A 0N4 OttawaONK1A0N4 Canada Canada Yourfile Votre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-62266-7 Ourfile Notre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-62266-7 NOTICE: AVIS: The author has granted a non- Lauteur a accordé une licence non exclusive exclusive license allowing Library and permettant å la Bibliothéque et Archives Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public communicate to the public by par telecommunication ou par Nnternet, préter, telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des théses partout dans le loan, distribute and seil theses monde, å des fins commerciales ou autres, sur worldwide, for commercial or non- support microforme, papier, électronique et/ou commercial purposes, in microform, autres formats. paper, electronic and/or any other formats. The author retains copyright Uauteur conserve la propriété du droit d'auteur ownership and moral rights in this et des droits moraux qui protege cette thése. Ni thesis. Neither the thesis nor la thése ni des extraits substantiels de celle-ci substantial extracts from it may be ne doivent étre imprimés ou autrement printed or otherwise reproduced reproduits sans son autorisation. without the author's permission. In compliance with the Canadian Conformément å la loi canadienne sur la Privacy Act some supporting forms protection de la vie privée, quelques may have been removed from this formulaires secondaires ont été enlevés de thesis. cette thése. While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires aient inclus dans in the document page count, their la pagination, il n'y aura aucun contenu removal does not represent any loss manquant. of content from the thesis. •+• Canada Abstract In two films produced in Hollywood after the Second World War, American Jewish actor John Garfield dramatizes the conflicted feelings of the assimilating second-generation Jewish son. These films revisit conventions established by a cycle of Hollywood films from the 1920s that romantically depict the Jewish son as able to successfully assimilate into dominant American culture while maintaining a vital and nurturing connection to his Jewish family and community back home. Through close readings of the two postwar Garfield films, Humoresque (1946) and Body and Soul (1947), along with comparisons to some of the 1920s Hollywood Jewish family melodramas, I discuss how the actor's expressions of pent-up anger, vulnerability, cold disillusionment and brimming sexuality problematize the earlier Hollywood depictions of the assimilating Jewish son. IV Table of Contents Certificate iii Abstract iv Table of contents v Introduction 1 Chapter 1: John Garfield and the Hollywood Tough Guy 7 Chapter 2: John Garfield and the American Jewish Family 35 Chapter 3: John Garfield, the Jewish Family and the Immigrant Community 67 Epilogue 101 WorksCited 105 Filmography 108 v Introduction: John Garfield and the American Jewish Son Hollywood movie star John Garfield was born Jules Jacob Garfinkle on March 4, 1913 to Russian and Ukrainian Jewish immigrants living in a two-room tenement on Rivington Street of New York's Lower East Side. These ethnic working class roots would continually be associated with his star persona. While working at the Warner Bros. studio, his screen roles would follow the mould of the ethnic street tough defined by the likes of James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson. Non-filmic materials—such as fan magazines and film reviews—would also reference GarfiekTs Lower East Side roots and help authenticate his onscreen characters. Upon the release of Garfield's first film, Four Daughters (1938), where he played cynical street kid Mickey Borden, critic Bosley Crowther would muse about the source of Garfield's "difference" from other Hollywood stars: "Maybe [it] is because of his not-far-removed background—New York's Lower East Side and the Bronx."1 In his films at Warner Bros.—as well as the few pictures he made as loan-outs while locked into a sometimes oppressive contract to this studio—he almost always portrayed the working-class generic ethnic. But in four films made after the war—Humoresque (1946), Gentleman's Agreement (1947). Body and Soul (1947) and Force of Evil (1948)—Garfield portrayed specifically Jewish men. Although only two of these films would specify his character's Jewish roots, all four can be easily read as Jewish texts at least by the nature of the characters' family relations, the characters' predilection toward social collectivity as well as 1 Bosley Crowther, "A Man Who Means to Make a Dent," New York Times. December 18, 1938, sec. 9. clues provided by occasional Yiddish inflections spoken by secondary characters and locales such as the Lower East Side. In this paper, I contextualize GarfieWs Jewish characterizations by comparing his Jewish films of the mid-forties with a cycle of Hollywood films of the 1920s that explicitly explored Jewish assimilation and the American Jewish family. Perhaps the best known of these early films is Warner Bros.' The Jazz Singer (1927). Although these early silent films focus on generational conflict within the Jewish family—with the children wishing to break away from the parochialism and poverty of their old-world parents and embrace the promise of upward mobility in the New World—they also emphasized the need to maintain familial and communal ties in the face of such assimilation. And in the end, many of these films suggest that the Jewish son is able to achieve success and assimilation in America while maintaining a vital connection to his Jewish family and the immigrant community back home, with the mother providing the key link to these roots. In contrast to many of the Jewish sons in these 1920s ghetto melodramas, GarfieWs screen characters are often alienated from a nurturing support net that the Jewish family provides in these earlier films. First appearing during the second half of the Depression, his screen persona dramatizes the emotional and moral isolation felt by such an absence. In most of John GarfieWs prewar and wartime films, when playing the generic working-class ethnic, this vulnerability was worked into the narrative by håving the actor play orphans, men who are forced to grow up on their own in the streets. But when playing specifically Jewish sons in the mid-forties, GarfieWs dynamic expressions of pent-up anger, vulnerability, cold disillusionment and brimming sexuality reinterpret these earlier Hollywood stories of the Jewish son lost between two worlds and update them for an audience that had been weathered by the Depression 2 I Page and the spread of fascism. More specifically, the Jewish sons played by Garfield question the ability to have it both ways—success in America while maintaining a nurturing connection to the people and values of the family. In this thesis, I pursue close readings of two of these Jewish films, Humoresque and Body and Soul, which resemble those early Jewish ghetto melodramas. In the first chapter, I discuss a few of the films that Garfield made in the prewar and wartime years. On screen, Garfield is caught between the ideals of brashness, toughness and independence (as expected of the Warner street tough character type) and feelings of alienation and vulnerability. These two aspects of his screen persona become reconciled through the New Deal and wartime ethos of social collectivity, and also through the emphasis on reason—as opposed to impulsive aggression—that is part of Garfield's screen persona in several of his earliest films. Here, I will discuss three early Garfield films—Four Daughters (1938), Garfield's screen debut, Thev Made Me a Criminal (1939), the actor's first starring role at Warner Bros., and The Fallen Sparrow (1943), a wartime spy film he made while loaned out to RKO—and how they depict and reconcile the traits of independence, toughness, rationality and vulnerability. It is these competing traits that the Jewish sons played by Garfield try to reconcile in Humoresque and Body and Soul. I will end this chapter by briefly discussing how these traits are used and modified for the intentions of Darryl Zanuck and Elia Kazan's Gentleman's Agreement (1947) and the film's image of the Jew. In the second chapter, I compare Frank Borzage's 1920 film adaptation of Fannie Hursfs short story, "Humoresque"—as well as the significant cycle of silent Jewish ghetto dramas that it spawned—with the 1946 remake starring John Garfield. While the Garfield version does make major changes to the original story, the later remake—along with Body and Soul—share 3 f P a g e commonalities with these earlier silent films in terms of narrative structure and themes of assimilation and social mobility. These later Garfield Jewish ghetto melodramas also revisit the archetypes that were depicted in these early silent films; Patricia Erens defines these as "the Stern Patriarch, the Prodigal Son, the Rose of the Ghetto... [and] the Long Suffering Mother."2 Both Hursfs original short story and the Borzage silent film centralize—and celebrate— the intimate