JOHN GARFIELD AND THE AMERICAN JEWISH SON

STUART HANDS

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•+• 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 relationship between the Jewish immigrant mother, Sarah Kantor, and her son, Leon.

The mother helps her son make the transition from Old to New world less painful. The commercial success of the 1920 Humoresque spawned a series of Hollywood Jewish melodramas, which, as J. Hoberman writes, "sweetened the melting pot with the promise of upward mobility and the comfort of transcendent materaal love."3

While embodying the insecurity and sense of anonymity of the Depression, Garfield displays brashness, sexuality and independence that puts him into conflict with his Jewish family: As in Body and Soul, the same drive that his character in Humoresque needs to get ahead in America is what alienates him from his family, particularly his mother. Garfield as the Jewish son is caught between his struggle to be a dutiful child and his anger and humiliation caused by the poverty that he and his family are forced to endure. In addition, the sexuality that Garfield's

2 Patricia Erens, The Jew in American Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 74. For various reasons, this early cycle of films ended abruptly in the early 1930s with Hollywood's sudden refusal to depict, at least overtly, Jews on screen. See Erens, 135-137 and Lester Friedman, Hollywood' s Image of the Jew (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1982), 64. This cycle returned briefly to the screen after the Second World War with the two Garfield films discussed at length in this paper, as well as the Jolson and Gershwin biopics and a remake of the 1920s stage and screen hit, Abie's Irish Rose.

3 J. Hoberman, Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film Between Two Worlds. (New York: Museum of Modem Art: Schocken Books, 1991), 116.

4 I P ag e screen presence brings to his portrayal of the Jewish son problematizes the Oedipal mother-and-

son relationships celebrated in these silent Jewish films.

In this chapter, I also suggest that the later Humoresque's inability to reconcile these

contradictory traits is in many ways a product of the film's complex production history. Made at

the tail end of GarfiekTs contract at Warner Bros., the film speaks for the ambivalence of the

major studios to represent the Jewish family in any way that would show it as an outsider to the

values of American assimilation and social mobility.

In the last chapter, I discuss how Body and Soul fully articulates the latent progressive

aspects of Garfield's screen persona that I idcntify in the first chapter: in particular, its

ambivalent relationship to the American male ideals of toughness, violence and independence, its

dignified embodiment of the social outsider and its inclination toward reason, social

responsibility and collectivism. Body and Soul is part of a cycle of postwar Hollywood films that

scholar Thom Andersen labels, "film gris," a subsection of film noir written and/or directed by

soon-to-be blacklisted left-wing film artists, a group of films distinguished also by "greater psychological and social realism." Andersen refers to Garfield as "the first axiom of film gris"

and Body and Soul as the first film of this cycle. To Andersen, the actor's screen persona

embodied a group "that had never before appeared in American films, the Jewish working class."

Body and Soul fully represents Andersen's definition of the archetypal Garfield role, the "kid

from the streets of the slums, ambitious, talented, sensitive but tough, fighting his way up only to discover that success doesn't mean the end of moral choice."4

4 Thom Andersen, "Red Hollywood" in "Un-American" Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklisted Era, eds. Frank Krutnik et al., 225-263 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 257-9. 5 IPage Garfield came of age artistically within the New York theatre world of the 1930s, inhabited by many left-wing children of immigrant Jews. Part of the 1930s Group Theatre ensemble, Garfield played Ralph Berger in the original production of Clifford Odets' Awake and

Sing and was the actor initially intended for the role of Joe Boneparte in the theatre company's first mounting of Odets' Golden Boy. The aspirations of the New York Jewish Left became part of his screen identity (especially since some of his most successful films were either written and/or directed by those who were schooled—politically if not also artistically—in this milieu: for example, Clifford Odets, Robert Rossen, Abraham Polonsky, Elia Kazan and Albert Maltz).

Revisiting the archetypes of the 1920s Jewish ghetto melodrama, Body and Soul has the voice of the Jewish family—in particular, the Jewish mother—embody an alternative to

American social mobility and espouse the values of social responsibility and ethnic solidarity.

Significantly, as opposed to Humoresque which was produced at a major studio, Body and Soul was Garfield's first independently-produced film.

Body and Soul depicts working-class Jews, African-Americans and women as equally exploited by the American social and economic system. Here, the Jewish immigrant community that boxer Charley Davis (Garfield) abandons in favor of success is depicted as outside American capitalism and patriarchy. And, at the end of the film, GarfieWs character finds his place in society when he decides to re-align himself with this outsider community.

6 IPage Chapter 1:

John Garfield and the Hollywood Tough Guy

"I ain 't so tough. But I ain 't a sucker either. "

John Garfield as Johnny Bradfield in They Made me a Criminal (1939)

In his study of the Hollywood tough guy, Robert Sklar defines the cultural type that he calls "The City Boy" and suggests "the trait of dependence was a central aspect in [its] shaping."5 Sklar goes on to say that the City Boy's "most important relation to women was not as lover but as son."6 But when we approach Garfield's most mature work, it is evident that unlike the roles of someone such as James Cagney, another subject of Sklar's study, whose attachment to family, particularly the mother, is expressed in a more primal way, Garfield 's characters are often attached to family and mother figures through a body of values and the need for a supportive community. New Yorker critic John Mosher, upon the release of They Made Me a

Criminal (1939) would notice:

.. .some discretion and common sense in his toughness. He doesn't display spectacular

nerves, or any leaning toward the comedy a quick turn of those nerves can give a Cagney

5 Robert Sklar, City Boys: Cagney, Bogart. Garfield (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 17.

6 Sklar, 15.

7 I Page performance. He is a somber young man, and it is that quality the camera people have

stressed in this first major picture of his.7

Such a quotation reveals that the roots of what would define Garfield's later work would be apparent even in his early films at Warner Bros. As we will see, in comparison to the characters for which Cagney would become known, the Garfield screen persona is grounded, both morally and socially.

This latter point could be partially explained by the specific years in which Garfield first appeared and made an impact on screen. Although GarfieWs victimized characters are rooted in the ethos of the Depression, his screen persona was created in the late thirties, during the second phase of the New Deal. As Sklar points out, at this time, the Roosevelt administration was attempting to foster a national attitude of social collectivity.8 Nick Roddick writes that "the bleak portrayal of losers in a lost world gave way to a kind of determined optimism... through the images of problems being faced, either with the help of Federal Authority or through the reassertion of an individual conscience."9 The nihilism that made up the film world that the characters of Cagney and Edward G. Robinson first inhabited would be somewhat reformed by

1938 when Garfield first arrived in Hollywood.

7 John Mosher, "They Made Him a Star," The New Yorker. January 28 1939, 50.

8 Sklar, 63.

9 Nick Roddick, A New Deal in Entertainment: Warner Brothers in the 1930s. (London: BFI Publishing, 1983), 65.

8 I P a g e John Garfield as the Reformed Street Kid

Biographies and contemporary articles portray young Julie Garfield as an uncontrollable child with no interest in school, often engaging in street fights and joining gangs. In the promotional material for his first boxing picture, They Made Me a Criminal. Garfield is recalled as a "one-time champ" and a former "Golden Gloves performer." Some of the contemporary

Jewish American periodicals would portray him as a tough Jewish youth: "[Garfield] was the sole non-Aryan of a gang of Italian kids ... [who would get] into fights and ... [be] expelled from schools and Talmud Torahs.. ."10

According to biographies and contemporary clippings, while attending PS. 45 in the

Bronx, principal Angelo Patri took Julie Garfinkle, the problem child, under his wing and encouraged the young boy's interest in acting. Countless articles would depict Garfield as the reformed street kid who could have ended up in a life of crime. The following quote comes from an article that Garfield wrote in 1948. Here, he describes joining the debating team as a school kid:

Debating taught me respect for reasoning rather than brute force, an appreciation of

words and how to use them... From debating I sort of gravitated naturally to acting. Here

was a field where I could give vent to some of the mixed-up feelings inside me that

heretofore would erupt in fisticuffs.11

10 Quoted in Samuel Rosenthal, Golden Boychik: Star-Audience Relations between John Garfield and the Contemporary American Jewish Community. (Masters thesis, The Annexberg School for Communication University of Pennsylvania, 1993), 37-8.

11 John Garfield and Canada Lee, "Our Part in 'Body and Soul'," Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life. Januarv 1948. 20.

9 I Page Here Garfield depicts himself as an actor who could have been a fighter, whose "mixed-up feelings" could have easily turned into physical aggression. This clash between muscle and sensitivity, as well as aggression and reason, gets played out repeatedly in most of Garfield's films.

John Garfield and Clifford Odets' Golden Bov

Biographer Robert Nott states that playwright Clifford Odets had written the role of Joe

Boneparte—the boxer and violinist—in the seminal American play, Golden Boy (1937), with

Garfield in mind. But director Harold Clurman chose Luther Adler to play the lead for the Group

Theatre's original production and assigned Garfield the supporting role of Siggie, Boneparte's

Jewish brother-in-law.12 (Garfield received a second blow when Warner Bros. refused to lend him out to Columbia, when the latter studio was making the film version of the play. Instead, the role went to William Holden.)13

Garfield appears to have identified with the character of Boneparte, the young Italian violinist who turns to boxing in his drive for success within the American capitalist system. In

1951, after producing and starring in his final film, He Ran All The Way. Garfield revisited the play when he directed and starred in a touring production of it followed by, shortly before his death in 1952, its Broadway debut directed by Odets. The only existing record of Garfield as

Boneparte comes from a scene that was performed on a 1950 television variety show, Cavalcade of Stars. This key scene from the play was performed with actor Kim Stanley. In this scene,

12 Robert Nott, He Ran All the Way: the Life of John Garfield (New York: Limelight Editions, 2003), 68.

13 Nott, 119.

10 I Page Boneparte sits in the park with Lorna Moon, his boxing manager's streetwise and world-weary fiancée, with whom Joe falls in love. The innocent boxer confides to her:

May I tell you something? If you laugh, Hl never speak to you again.. .With music, Fm

never alone when I'm alone. Playing music, thafs like saying 'Tm man, I belong here.

How do you do, world? Good evening." When I play music, nothing is closed to me. I'm

not afraid of people or what they think or say. There's no war in music, like in the

streets.. .Does that sound funny to you?

As Garfield speaks these lines, his voice is soft but boyishly excitable (even melodic in a limited way); he allows himself to express his sensitivity. Here, Odets beautifully articulates the sense of transcendence that Boneparte feels through the violin. Garfield then stands up and continues,

"But when you leave your room and go down into the streets, it's war, and music can't help me there." He then begins to speak emphatically as he stares ahead, his body and head almost immobile with only his lips moving; he is now giving expression to his pent-up anger and resentment:

Joe Boneparte: People have hurt my feelings for years. I never forget. You can't get even

with people by playing the fiddle. If music shot bullets, I'd like it better. Artists and

freaks like that, well, they're considered freaks by people today. And the world moves

fast, and they just sit around like forgotten dopes.

Lorna Moon: Joe, you're loaded with fireworks...

JB: You have to be what you are.

LM: Fight! See what happens.

JB: It's not my nature to fight.

11 I Page GarfieWs expression of pent-up anger as he speaks the lines "You got to be what you are" and

"It's not my nature to fight" reflects Boneparte's humiliation that he feels as an artist in such a competitive society as well as the bitterness and reluctance he feels in being forced to be something he is not and does not want to be. The noticeable shift in GarfieWs tone during this passage speaks for the central dramatic conflict which would become vital to GarfieWs screen persona, and not only when he portrayed boxers. In so many of his films, GarfieWs characters seem to be conflicted among feelings of anger, vulnerability, ambition and moral sensitivity.

John Garfield in Four Daughters

Due to the enormous success of John Garfield in his film debut, Four Daughters (1938). the Warner Bros. drama that catapulted him to stardom, it is necessary to identify some of the key elements in his characterization of Mickey Borden, the supporting role he played in this film, as the studio would continue to utilize aspects of this character in the actor's future films.

Midway through the film, Garfield as Mickey Borden, a struggling musician, walks into the bourgeois middle-class home of the Lemp family, which consists of four pretty girls with musical ability and their old-fashioned but jovial father. Their home signifies white bourgeois

America from which Borden, as a "city boy" from more humble origins (and part of an unspecified ethnic minority), feels perpetually excluded. In this film, Borden uses sarcasm to vent his aggression toward middle and upper class America. The studio director—and Jewish

Hungarian émigré—Michael Curtiz plays up the entrance of GarfieWs social outcast. When he first walks in the door, Curtiz cuts to a close-up of Borden's reaction to the home. The film holds for a moment as he looks ahead, hesitant to fully enter. This pause highlights the gulf between

Borden and the Lemp home and accentuates the culture shock that he feels. ("Rug on the floor,"

12 11 P a g e Borden sarcastically observes, "Smell of cooking in the kitchen. Piano. Flowers. It's hornes like these that are the backbone of the nation. Where's the spinning wheel?") He wears his hat on the back of his head and his tie loose. He also has a cigarette constantly dangling from his lips; this creates an almost permanent cloud of smoke around him that visually separates him from the rest of the film's characters, as well as highlights the sense of rootlessness he always feels.

Borden speaks to the youngest Lemp daughter, Ann (Priscilla Låne), of his hard luck in life. He talks of how "The Fates" have been responsible:

.. .They've been at me now nearly [a] quarter of a Century. First they said, let [him] do

without parents. He'll get along. Then they decided he doesn't need any education—

thafs for sissies. Then right at the beginning they tossed a coin—heads he's poor, tails

he's rich. So they tossed a coin with two heads...

Such a speech, which has Borden reflect on his unflagging bad luck, will recur in various forms in several of his early films at Warners (e.g., They Made Me a Criminal. Castle on the Hudson).

In addition, starting with this first film, Garfield will often play orphans. This isolation from parental figures not only connotes his characters' hard luck and not being protected from life's harsh realities, but also, as in his later films, dramatizes their search for guidance— emotionally, practically and, in some cases, morally. Additionally, I will discuss the fact that

Garfield's screen characters only reluctantly accept the male ideal of independence, as they have no other choice.

When Borden is describing the role of these Fates in his life, Curtiz films him in a tight head-and-shoulders shot with the camera slightly below eye level. As he continues to speak, the same frame stays on Borden with only slight readjustment. After a reaction shot of Ann, we see

Borden again with the piano lid blurred out of focus at the side of the frame, further tightening

13 I Page the space given him. All of this accentuates the alienation that he feels. In addition, Curtiz's numerous close-ups allow us to glimpse Borden's reactions to the characters around him, thereby securing the audience's sympathy and identification with this outsider. The film's dialogue,

GarfiekTs performance and the way he is photographed help to undercut the sensibilities of the

Lemp family. Ann responds to Borden by saying that she is "a person who believes that a man decides his own destiny, who believes that if a man has enough courage and ambition..." She then sees Borden sitting back in his chair, eyeing her, his slight change in posture and facial expression mocking her belief. Upon seeing his facial response she answers, "I guess I deserved that."

A contemporary review from The New Yorker is characteristic of the critical and public acclaim that was heaped on Garfield upon the release of the film:

Though it's no triumph with so frail a cart, he tips over the whole thing and, at least while

he is in evidence, secures far more attention [than] he is supposed to have. Just as we

have adjusted our senses to a generally amiable, good-natured comedy of the gentle

sentiments, with a snack of melody thrown in, the door opens and this young man of

lowering aspect, a mean and embittered waster, ambles in and distracts us entirely from

the nice things of life.14

Borden's well-written sarcastic remarks created by the screenwriters (Lenore Coffee and Julius

Epstein) take aim at this ideal image of American gentility. For example, when offered a cup of tea by the family's Aunt Etta (May Robson), Borden mocks this pretense of hospitality, "You needn't look so noble. Tea is only a little hot water." In addition, Borden's hard luck and outsider

14 "The Current Cinema: A New Face and Some Old Storfes," The New Yorker. August 27, 1938,52. 14 I Pag e status undermines the unquestioned optimism and security of the Lemp family and their utopian world.

Four Daughters begins with the four sisters— Ann, Thea (Lola Låne), Emma (Gale

Page), and Kay (Rosemary Låne)—playing Shuberfs Serenade, a performance conducted by their father (Claude Rains). Large, bright windows, a white picket fence and ever-present flowers define this ideal American home. A very strong emotional bond ties the four sisters together, especially the two youngest daughters: the youngest, Ann, says to her older sister, "Emma, don't let us get married ever... We'll grow old together—beautifully and gracefully." The rest of the

film depicts the daughters' romantic interests and the challenges they bring to the family's closeness.

Four Daughters also depicts somewhat effectively how these girls' childhood dreams of romance often lead to disappointment in adulthood. Early in the film, Ann speaks of her desire to find a man whom she could mother. Borden, with his troubled life and world-weariness, brings out this impulse in her.15 Though when Felix Dietz (Jeffrey Lynn), a young and handsome musician, visits their home, all daughters—including Ann—fall in love with this polite but cocky and self-assured man. Ann's attraction to him is far stronger than her urge to mother Borden. But

Ann finds out that she shares with her sister a romantic interest in Felix. As a dutiful sibling, Ann marries Borden, allowing her sister to be with the one they both love.

Jeffrey Lynn and John Garfield were both being added to Warner's roster of stars in the same year; it was the studio's intention to use this film to introduce their new romantic leading man, Lynn, to the public. Garfield, on the other hand, was expected by the studio to be its new

15 We also see evidence that Thea's (Lola Låne) youthful but pragmatic aspirations to marry someone rich is undermined by the annoyance she feels toward her husband, the nouveau riche Ben Crowley (Frank McHugh).

15 I Page dynamic character actor. In Four Daughters. Lynn plays the romantic lead, whose character possesses a wit, charm, honorability and stability that defined the conventional juvenile lead of the time.17 According to biographer Larry Swindell, Lynn was carrying most of the studio's hopes at the time of the film's production.18

Not surprisingly, the film's happy ending brings Ann and Felix together. Its final scene returns to an idyllic shot of the Lemp home which closely resembles the film's opening sequence: again, the fiowers are in full bloom as the father conducts all four sisters as they perform Schubert's Serenade. This ending seems to suggest that, despite the changes imposed on the Lemp family by the women's marriages and sexual desires, the sisters are able to enjoy the security and permanence that they felt as children; the only change is that on the other side of the room sit two of the women's husbands as they play cards. It is in such an environment that Felix and Ann resume their romance.

Interestingly, unlike the rest of the film, the initial scenes depicting Ann and Borden's marriage are removed from the security symbolized by the Lemp family home and their utopic neighborhood; these scenes are set in New York City and are defined by Borden's transient world of cheap apartments and cafes and his financial insecurity. The atmosphere of this world is defined by the presence of smoke (a steaming pot on the stove in the first scene and cigarette smoke in the second), crowded restaurants and syncopated piano music in the background. We

16 Rosenthal, 32-33.

17 Sklar, City Boys. 18. Sklar contrast this character type with what he terms "the roughneck sissy," the city boy that would undermine such conventions of leading men. See Sklar, City Boys. 15.

18 Swindell, Larry, Body and Soul: the Story of John Garfield (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1975) 114-115.

16 I Page soon learn of Ann's unhappiness in her marriage to Borden, as this New York sequence begins with her reading a letter from back home and wistfully touching a bracelet given to her by Felix.

Here, Borden's restlessness and rootlessness contrast the stability and permanence associated with the Lemp family. In the second scene showing Ann and Borden's life in New

York City, they are sitting in a cheap restaurant with three of Borden's musician friends. The four men discuss the prospects of moving to South America, which interests Borden and his hopes for a change. Although he says that his life with Ann is the closest to happiness that he has ever felt, he half-jokingly wonders "if I found a wallet in the street or something like that, Fm just wondering if I'd be a big enough of a heel to run out on you... Nothing I would do would surprise me."

After this scene, there is a reunion at the Lemp home for Christmas. In the evening, Felix heads to the train station where he offers Borden money, as pawnshop slips were earlier seen dropping from Ann's pocket. Borden resentfully responds, "Don't you get tired of being such a swell guy? It would bore me stiff." He refuses the assistance. While stepping on the train, Felix drops some money in Borden's pocket, "something for Ann," he calls it, "Use it on something you think would make her happy." Borden is unable to return it as Felix's train begins speedily moving away. Curtiz cuts to a close-up of Borden, his body and face becoming almost motionless, as he watches Felix's train leave. He walks slowly and stiffly to the car, with the camera following him from behind. The camera films Borden as he drives away, his face appearing as if he is in a trace. During these moments, Curtiz seems to be distancing our identification with Borden, but he is clearly showing that Borden is now sadly responding to

Felix's gesture and what it represents—his continual failure and his inability to provide for Ann.

Borden begins speeding away in his car. The camera then starts filming him from more dynamic

17 I P age angles—such as below the steering wheel—as he purposely accelerates the engine into a blinding snowstorm. While he races his car, the scene ends and dissolves to the women at the

Lemp home.

Borden's final scene shows him lying on a hospital bed, swaddled in bandages. He speaks slowly and softly to Ann during his last few moments of life. He looks around and notices where he is, "More of their [the Fates] work. They wouldn't even let me go out in style." He then asks for a cigarette. As Ann lights it, his head falls away from her and we realize that he has died.

Borden becomes a figure of pathos in spite of his wish "to go out in style." In his later films,

GarfiekTs screen characters will more actively insist on maintaining their integrity in the face of bad luck and humiliation.

John GarfiekTs Toughness and its Inherent Contradictions

After Four Daughters, Garfield's films try to reconcile the tough guy image—typical of the Warner Bros. gangster films and expressed through the actor's brawn physique—with his boyishly gentle facial features and the vulnerability that these reflect. This contradiction is usually play ed out through his characterizations of young men who are forced to grow up quickly on the tough urban streets.

In addressing the portrayal of such contradictions in GarfiekTs films at Warner Bros., it is important to emphasize the studio's influence. Sklar writes that by the time Garfield came to

Hollywood in 1938, Cagney was older and "reluctant to play the mug." With Garfield, Warner

Bros. hoped to maintain their "uncanny rapport with the young, rootless, working-class city boys" that they achieved with Cagney's films of the early 1930s.19 In his early films at Warner

19 Sklar, City Boys. 89. 18 I Pag e Bros., we see the Garfield persona trying to fit into the gangster conventions that were imposed

on him by the studio, as they attempted to fit him into the tough guy mould defined by Cagney,

Edward G. Robinson and George Raft. The following critical response perhaps demonstrates an incompatibility between Garfield and the expectations of the Warner Bros. tough guy image:

Upon the release of Daughters Courageous in 1939, Dick Potts of North Carolina wrote: "What

I'd like to know is when they are going to take Garfield's voice out of the East Side and let him portray something other than a cynic who's so tough he inhales cigarette smoke."20 Sklar points out that the studio was not equipped to turn him into something other than this tough action hero:

"Tough guys and worldly women were the personås they could build."21

John Garfield in They Made Me a Criminal

They Made Me a Criminal (1939) is the third film Garfield made under his contract with

Warner Bros. (but the second to be released).22 The film was a close remake of a 1933 Douglas

Fairbanks film, The Life of Jimmy Dolan. An examination of They Made Me a Criminal's crude narrative construction as well as its play with the male protagonist's identity will show that even such an early film in the actor's career allows for the contradictions that will make up his screen persona.

20 Quoted in Sklar, City Boys. 91. 21 Sklar. City Bovs. 91.

22 Before the release of Four Daughters. unaware of the success Garfield would be with audiences and critics, the studio quickly starred him in the B-Movie Blackwell's Island. After the success of Four Daughters. they delayed the B-film, adding extra scenes to make it into an A- Picture. In the meantime, they had him star in They Made Me a Criminal. making it their follow- up to his star-making performance in Four Daughters. Sklar, City Bovs. 89.

19 I P age The film begins during the last few moments of a boxing match where Johnnie Bradfield

(Garfield) triumphs over his opponent. After the knockout, the referee raises Bradfield's arm as he is declared champion. The crowd swarms around Bradfield—his body malleable as they touch and move him. Bradfield helps his losing opponent off the ground and into his corner of the ring.

A reporter makes his way through the crowd and puts a microphone in front of the winning boxer. "That thing scares me," Bradfield nervously laughs. After some prodding, Bradfield continues, "Are you listenin' morn? I won ma and there isn't a mark on me! Not a mark! I'11 be home soon sweetheart. Don't wait up for me." While smiling giddily, he nods to the people around him. The reporter cuts in:

Reporter: Say, this isn't a private telephone line. You got to say something to the public.

Johnnie Bradfield: Heilo folks. Excuse me for mentioning ma but I know you'd do the

same if you had a mother like mine. Well anyway, I want to thank you folks for rootin'

for me on my way back to the championship. Well anyway, I guess we're all glad it's

back in the U.S.A where it belongs.

He laughs nervously and walks away from the microphone. As he speaks, he is positioned in the bottom left of the frame, which emphasizes the crowd of onlookers to whom he is speaking: these spectators see Bradfield as a guy like them whose triumph personifies the American success story. In the next scene, someone in the backroom mocks him for worshipping his mother. Bradfield then grabs this man roughly by the lapels and justifies himself, "Just because a guy doesn't drink and fool around with women and respects his mother, you don't have to make a monkey out of him." This mild outburst anticipates a darker and more resentful side that is fully realized in the film's next few moments.

20 I Pag e In these first two scenes, Johnnie Bradfield comes off as boyish, naive, agreeable, humble as well as violent without any one particular quality diminishing another. He is a boy from the streets who has achieved success as a boxer, yet is still able to keep himself attached to a supportive family and has a strong sense of who he is. But the rest of this film—specifically its characterization of Bradfield—reflects the alienation and fractured sense of the male ethnic working-class identity that GarfiekTs persona overtly dramatizes in later films.

In the third scene, Bradfield acts in complete opposition to the sentimental image he previously presented of himself. We first see a close-up of a radio with an announcer's voice proclaiming Bradfield's boxing victory as well as the publicized details of his lifestyle (no booze, no women, loves his mother). The camera pans over to a woman, Goldie (Ann Sheridan), who is lying on a couch with her head raised as she excitedly listens to the voice on the radio.

From below the frame comes the hand of a man as he recklessly pulls her head to kiss him—the identity of this man is immediately shown to be Bradfield. He is drank and it is now revealed that most of our prior knowledge of him was nothing but a performance and publicity stunt.

Also in this scene are Doc (Bradfield's manager), Budgie (a female friend of Goldie) and her boyfriend. While drunk, Bradfield speaks of his lack of faith in people: he feels that everyone is merely out for themselves. Bradfield also reveals that the mother, of whom he spoke so sweetly, does not exist. The film neglects to offer any specific back-story concerning his social roots; it merely draws on aspects of the Mickey Borden character—specifically, his general cynicism and disillusionment, as well as his being an orphan.

The boyfriend of Budgie reveals himself to be a journalist who will splash the real identity of the mother-loving boxer all over the newspapers. Bradfield and Doc try to stop him as he begins to exit the room. Drunk, Bradfield collapses on the ground after throwing a punch in

21 I P a g e mid-air. It is Doc who knocks the journalist out, accidentally killing him. (It is worth pointing out that in the earlier Fairbanks version, it is the boxer who successfully knocks out the reporter and kills him. The later film, on the other hand, makes Bradfield an entirely innocent victim.)

Doc and Goldie abandon the passed-out body of Bradfield and head off together. They reflect on how they are fulfilling Bradfield's expectations of people always being "out for themselves" and then flee, leaving Bradfield to accept the murder chargés for the dead reporter. As Doc and

Goldie drive away, they die in a car accident that leaves their bodies burned beyond recognition.

Bradfield is then mistakenly assumed to be the now-dead driver of the car. A lawyer who

Bradfield seeks out advises him to maintain anonymity in order to avoid the murder chargés.

Johnnie Bradfield must take on a new identity. He not only changes his nåme23 but his publicly-known, characteristic "south paw" boxing stance must never reveal itself again.

Bradfield must therefore never engage in fighting, as it might instinctively cause him to step into his idiosyncratic "south paw" position and potentially betray his true identity. When confronted,

Bradfield must now resist resorting to violence and allow himself to be passively victimized. In one particular scene, he is in a small-town diner. A billfold falls out of his pocket and is picked up by another man. Bradfield tries to take it back but is challenged to a fight. He then remembers that he must walk away in defeat. Following the scene in the diner, we see Bradfield being chased along the tops of railway cars by train officials. This scene again shows him merely accept his situation and jump off the train, instead of trying to outwit or fight his pursuers; in light of the previous scene in the diner, we read him again as a victim.

Despite GarfieWs playing a boxer and the studio's attempt to place him in the tough guy mould, violence or aggression in no way define the character of Johnnie Bradfield. Even his

23 Johnnie Bradfield changes his nåme to Jack Dorney. But to avoid confusion, I will continue to use his original nåme. 22 I P a g e attempt to strike the reporter failed. The film has it both ways: As a character, Johnnie Bradfield is a successful boxer whose toughness is proven in the ring, but on a narrative level, his relationship to violence is ambivalent and at times, such as the diner scene, he is forced to internalize such aggression and accept defeat.

Thev Made Me a Criminal: Garfield and the Dead End Kids

After wandering alone and anonymously across the country, Johnnie Bradfield collapses on an

Arizona ranch. This land is being used as a reformatory for delinquent street kids from the East

Coast (played by the Dead End Kids). The figures of authority here are a young woman and potential love interest, Peggy (Gloria Dickson) and her mother, Grandma Rafferty (May

Robson). A priest formerly ran the ranch until his death.

Biographer Robert Nott makes a helpful observation when he notes that in the World War

Two combat films, Cagney and Bogart play leaders of platoons while Garfield personifies the rank-and-file members. The personås of the former two stars, Nott suggests, convey a "sense of authority" that Garfield does not have.24 This suggestion is helpful when discussing Garfield's screen persona, especially as defined in They Made Me A Criminal. On this note, it is worth briefly comparing the Garfield vehicle with James Cagney in Angels With Dirty Faces (1938) as both films use the Dead End Kids to bring about the "rehabilitation" of the "criminal"; the Kids represent the social responsibility that the lone individuals must recognize. Nick Roddick identifies the Dead End Kids as part of the "Kids at risk from social pressures" cycle that was part of the rehabilitation theme in the mid-1930s Hollywood pictures.25

24 Nott, 148.

25 Roddick, 130. 23 I Pag e Cagney's Rocky Sullivan inspires a sense of awe in the Kids, who have followed the gangster's successful past and look up to him both as a role model and a dangerous figure to fear.

In turn, as we see in the film's famous final scene, Rocky, as his death sentence is being carried out, initially intends to spit in the Warden's eye as an assertion of his dignity and unrepentence.

Instead, Sullivan is convinced by his childhood friend, Father Jerry Connolly (Pat O'Brien), to display cowardice in the face of death, with the intention of convincing street kids to stop looking up to such criminals as role models. In comparison to Rocky Sullivan, Johnnie Bradfield in They Made Me a Criminal becomes more of an equal. In his first confrontation with the Kids, after trying to flee the ranch that has tåken care of him, Bradfield is greeted hostilely; the Kids size him up and one of them spits in front of his feet. After a few moments, this initial enmity gives way to identification between the Kids and the older Bradfield as they talk of their roots in

New York. Over the next few scenes, Bradfield spends time with the Kids and appeals to them on their terms: While boxing, he shows them how to disregard the sport's rules without the referee noticing. When they go swimming, he encourages them to flout the rules set by Peggy and Grandma Rafferty. It is worth comparing these moments to the basketball scene in Angels with Dirty Faces. In the Cagney film, Sullivan, in an attempt to help his childhood friend, Father

Connolly, encourages the Kids to engage in activities that will keep them off the streets and out of poolrooms. Sullivan encourages the kids to play basketball in the recreational center Connolly has built. When the Kids begin playing against the rules, Sullivan takes over as referee, matching their foul play with his own lightning-quick, violent reprimands; Sullivan's rules are enforced by his overpowering the Kids through hitting and tripping them. During this scene, director Michael

Curtiz's camera matches Cagney's manic and larger-than-life presence, as he uses quick pans and fast editing, breathlessly keeping up with Sullivan's quick actions.

24 I P a g e In the second half of Thev Made Me a Criminal. Johnnie Bradfield enters a boxing match to win money so that the Kids, Peggy and Grandma Rafferty can open a gas station that will help rid the ranch of its debt. A detective from New York, Monty Phelan (Claude Rains), convinced that the boxer did not die in the car crash, sees a recent picture in the newspaper of Bradfield with his characteristic "south paw" boxing stance. When Bradfield sees Phelan outside the local boxing ring, he tries to evade him. Disappointing Peggy, Grandma and the Kids, he tries to back out of his participation in the fight and leave the ranch. One of the boys, Tommy (Billy Halop), who has developed an unconditional trust and admiration for him, has decided to follow him wherever he goes. Bradfield is moved by the boy's unshakable faith in him. His decision to go ahead with the fight is underlined by the camera's swift track in toward a tight close-up of

Garfield's face, as if Tommy is appealing to BradfiekTs deeper emotional core.

After the match, Phelan arrests Bradfield and intends to bring him to New York for a trial. But impressed by Bradfield's commitment to the kids and the women on the ranch, Phelan lets him go. The final shot of Thev Made Me a Criminal shows Bradfield, joined by Tommy, walking away from the camera into the distance. Set free, Bradfield has found himself, an identity forged through his connection to others like him. This allows him to maintain his screen persona as one of the crowd. To John Mosher of The New Yorker. upon the release of this film,

Garfield resembled "the five hundreds... along Sixth Avenue, spelling out signs in front of the employment agencies.. ."26

26 Mosher, 1939, 50. 25 I Pag e The Fallen Sparrow: Garfield as "the man alone"

In The Fallen Sparrow (1943), Garfield plays John 'Kit' McKittrick, a veteran of the

International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. In Spain, the Nazis tortured him as they were looking for the whereabouts of the Loyalists' flag. Members of his Brigade, we find out, have murdered a Nazi officer, and the hidden flag symbolically represents the anti-fascists' possible re-formation after their defeat in Spain. The film begins with McKittrick's arrival back home in New York. In the meantime, he had been recuperating in Arizona. But his friend, Louie

Lepetino—who helped him flee his forturers in Spain—has been murdered, which the police write off as suicide. Among the world of upper-class socialities and German refugees,

McKittrick is determined to find the killer of his friend. This killer, we find out at the end of the film, is the same person who tortured him in Spain.

In The Fallen Sparrow. McKittrick's assertiveness is deeply undermined by moments of introspection and mental breakdown in the wake of his traumatic experiences in Spain. In one particular scene, a policeman asks McKittrick why he needs to carry a gun. McKittrick answers simply, "To shoot people with." (Such a succinct line seems characteristic of Bogart, for example.) But one cannot help but see such moments in the context of The Fallen Sparrow's first scene which is set in a train compartment. There is a close-up of McKittrick as he vaguely looks ahead in thought. The camera holds on him as the train goes through a tunnel causing him to see his reflection in the window. He stares frozen at his slight frown and furrowed brow, while we hear his thoughts through voice-over: "Alright, go on, lefs have it. Can you go through with it?

Have you got the guts for it or have they knocked it out of you? Have they made you yellow?" A porter soon asks for his bag. McKittrick turns and acknowledges him with minimal movement,

26 I P a g e accompanied by a slight sound as if he has been quietly awakened. From the outset of the film, all moments of decisive action on McKittrick's part are compromised by this scene (as well as others) that betray his underlying uncertainty.

Robert Sklar astutely comments on how the film reveals GarfieWs maturity as an actor as well as how his screen characters begin to reveal a richer interiority:

In his performance, Garfield created a physical correlative for the tortured veteran's

mental weakness. His movements convey the impression of a powerful figure repressed

or held back. There is a sense of forced immobility in his screen presence, an implosion

that expresses itself in nervous eye movements, excessive perspiration, and tic-like

gestures of his hand and mouth.

Sklar goes on to refer to this performance as his "richest" since his initial film appearance in

Four Daughters.27 Sklar's description of Garfield's performance is not a far cry from what can be described of Mickey Borden and Johnnie BradfiekTs brooding and internalized aggression as well as, in the case of The Made Me a Criminal. the ambivalence towards physical violence. At this point in his film career, RKO's The Fallen Sparrow displays the fullest and most overt treatment of these aspects of GarfieWs persona.

During the film's climax, when confronted by Dr. Christian Skaas (Walter Slezak), the refugee who killed Lepetino as well as the Nazi who tortured him in Spain, McKittrick is poisoned with a truth serum that immobilizes his body. His ability to kill Dr. Skaas despite his forming paralysis works as a metaphor for his forced internalization of his aggression and potential for action.

Sklar, CitvBovs. 148. 27 I P a g e At the end of the film, McKittrick returns to Spain to locate the flag and re-form the

Brigade in the fight against fascism. His assurance as he states these intentions is revealing. In the opening scene, McKittrick expresses vulnerability and anxiety at the thought of being the lone hero out to solve and avenge the murder of Louis Lepetino. McKittrick's enthusiasm toward heading back to Spain in hopes of reforming the Brigade speaks of his need for community and camaraderie. Unlike those of Cagney or Bogart, GarfieWs screen characters are often least effective and comfortable as loners. As his character mumbles to himself at the climax of The

Breaking Point (1949), "A man alone ain't got no chance." Though he often portrays the rebel or the outsider, Garfield often dramatizes the isolation from and/or need for a supportive community.

John Garfield in Gentleman's Agreement

Although the next two chapters—the heart of this paper—analyze GarfieWs roles in

Humoresque and Body and Soul, it is necessary in this exploration of GarfieWs Jewish screen identity to discuss his supporting—though seminal—role of Dave Goldman in Daryl Zanuck's

Gentleman' s Agreement (1947) and how it taps into aspects of his previous film roles.

Gentleman's Agreement tells the story of journalist Phil "Schuyler" Green (Gregory

Peck), a widower who has just moved to New York along with his mother (Anne Revere) and son (Dean Stockwell) to write for a high profile magazine. He is disappointed to find out that he has been assigned to write an exposé on anti-Semitism, a topic he does not know how to bring to life. He struggles in search of a "new angle" on the subject. He thinks of his good friend Dave

Goldman:

28 I P age How must a fellow like Dave feel about this thing [anti-Semitism]? Over and above what

we feel about it, what must a Jew feel about this thing? Dave! Can I think my way into

Dave's mind? He'd be the kind of fellow I'd be if I were a Jew, isn't he? We grew up

together. We lived in the same kind of hornes. We were the gang. We did everything

together.

Green eventually decides to try to pass as a Jew and report on the prejudice he experiences. He titles his article "I Was a Jew for Six Months."

In the meantime Green has begun a relationship with an upper class schoolteacher, Kathy

Lacey (Dorothy McGuire), who seems to share Green's dreams and liberal values. But Green's passing as a Jew causes Lacey to betray her unconscious anti-Semitism and her reluctance to fight for her liberal beliefs. Dave Goldman—now back from army service and looking for a house in New York for him and his family—teaches Lacey about the need to fight the politely- ignored prejudice within WASP society. In turn, she offers him and his family the house in a segregated neighborhood that she was intending for herself and Green.

Phil Green enlists the image of Dave Goldman/John Garfield to convince himself that he can pass as a Jew. He looks in the mirror and comments:

Dark hair, dark eyes. Sure, so has Dave—so have a lot of guys who aren't Jewish. No

accent, no mannerisms—neither has Dave. Nåme: Phil Green—Skip the Schuyler. Might

be anything.

So according to Green's—and by extension, the film's—logic, Goldman needs to be depicted as virtually identical to Green in terms of temperament, background and appearance. "The film is so anxious to prove how much Jews are like everyone else," comments Patricia Erens, "that no time

29 I P age is allowed for the ways in which they might be different in terms of history, religious practice, and ethnic characteristics."28

On the one hand, John Garfield's performance as Dave Goldman provides a dynamic but overall non-threatening image of the Jew. In fact, one of the aspects of John Garfield that director (and fellow Group Theatre member) Elia Kazan wanted to draw upon was his likeability, which the latter knew intimately: "a naive, pure-hearted, awfully nice boy," Kazan once described Garfield, "... [he had] a natural ebullience... [was] life-loving... bouncy, playful."29 In fact, some of the studio's publicity materials for the film mention Garfield dropping his "characteristic toughness" for the role.30

Although he is mentioned within the earlier scenes, Goldman first appears midway through the film. In the early morning, Green is awakened by his son and mother, who are determined to get him out of bed for a telephone call. He reluctantly and sleepily walks down the hall to answer the phone. Green then brightens as he hears the person on the other end of the phone. We first see Goldman smiling and talking brightly and excitedly as the film immediately cuts to him. He is in military uniform; he has just returned from service overseas. Dave is framed in a head-and-shoulders shot as he stands in a phone booth at the airport. This use of a tight shot—rather than opening with any sort of conventional establishing shot—invites a sense of familiarity and spontaneity which the film associates with Goldman. In addition, showing him throughout the film in military uniform not only emphasizes him as a patriotic American but also

28 Patricia Erens, The Jew in American Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 177.

29 Richard Schickel. Elia Kazan: a Biography (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2005) 159.

30 Quoted in Rosenthal, 107.

30|Page taps into Garfield's appearances in such Hollywood war films as Air Force (1942), Destination

Tokyo (1943), and Pride of the Marines (1945).

We next see Green and Goldman enjoying breakfast, which Green's mother is serving them. This moment is a familiar image of American domesticity. Garfield wordlessly conveys the incredible nourishment that the meal is providing him. Knowing as we do that the two men grew up together, and seeing Goldman's enormous pleasure and comfort as he eats breakfast, this moment not only subtly implies the two as being rooted in similar childhood backgrounds but also vaguely suggests the generic American environment that they probably enjoyed together as children.

Donald Weber suggests in his well-argued essay on Gentleman's Agreement and

Crossfire that, in these two films from 1947 that explore anti-Semitism, the Gentile world—not

Jewish identity—is the subject of exploration. Examining Sam Levene in Crossfire and Garfield in Gentleman's Agreement. Weber shows that the Jew serves as the analyst for the non-Jew.31 As a result, since he is the one who has to help Green figure out how to balance his ideals with his relationship, Goldman's identity needs to be fluid and non-fragmented; he needs to be fully aware of who he is in order to help his friend through his inner-struggle. Accordingly, Garfield cannot exhibit the alienation he had shown as Mickey Borden when immersed within the world of WASP privilege. But there are aspects of GarfiekTs performance—at times recalling elements of his previously-defined screen persona—that give a depth to his characterization of Goldman and even, during certain moments, undermine the upper-middle-class environment of Phil Green and his crowd.

31 Donald Weber. "The Limits of Empathy: Hollywood's Imagining of Jews ca. 1947," in Key Texts in American Culture. ed. Jack Kugelmass, 91-104 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 99. 31 I Pag e In the previously discussed breakfast scene, Peck and Garfield—along with director Elia

Kazan—very effectively depict a relaxed environment of close intimacy and honesty between the

two men: There are unspoken exchanges, half-mumbled phrases that are understood by the other,

lighting of each other's cigarette and friendly gesrures of physical contact (i.e., touching one's hand, patting the other on the back). But when Green tells Goldman about the article he is

currently writing on anti-Semitism, Garfield gives subtle but effective hints into his character's

real—but sometimes unarticulated—response. (Jeff Young, in his later interview with director

Kazan, interpreted Goldman's response to his friend's article, "Garfield looks baffled and bemused, as if he can't believe what a putz Peck is being."32) Previously during their

conversation, Goldman blinked frequently, but now his eyes stay open as they avoid looking back at Green. He then looks down at his coffee, evading Green's questioning look. Such

gesrures indicate that the mention of Green's article triggered in him some strong private response, which he seems to be considering somewhat intensely. For a few moments, his verbal response is elusive:

DAVE [coolly]: Thafs interesting.

PHIL: "Interesting"? Don't you want a good, stiff series in a big national magazine?

DAVE: Me? Sure.

PHIL [slightly agitated]: You sound bored.

Goldman continues, "Listen, I don't care about the Jews as Jews. It's the whole thing, not the poor, poor Jews. You know what I mean. Don't force me to make with the big words." Goldman half-mumbles the words "poor, poor Jews." The actor's decision (perhaps with the encouragement of Kazan) to throw away these words achieves two things: First, he resists the

32 Jeff Young, Kazan on Kazan (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1999), 46. 32 I Pag e image of he Jew as victim, speaking these words in a way that mocks and resists the condescension of such a stereotype; his mumbling shows how tired Goldman is of hearing it.

And second, we again glimpse spontaneity in Garfield's performance that stands him apart from the other actors, perhaps as a contrast to the more repressed WASP characters.

The film taps into GarfiekTs streetwise screen persona, as defined at the Warner studio: its unpretentiousness and its aura of toughness. Nowhere are these qualities more apparent than in Dave Goldman's final scene with Kathy Lacey. Here, she tells him of her inability to speak up when someone at a party she attended told a racist joke. Goldman's tone undermines the politeness of WASP society that allows such racism to fester. Goldman bluntly tells Lacey of the

"funny kind of elation in socking back." While appearing polite and non-threatening, there is a directness in Goldman's questioning of her: "what kind of story?", "what kind of joke?", "what did you do Kathy?", "what did you say?" Donald Weber sees this questioning as further evidence of Goldman's role of therapist in the film.33 But Goldman's assertiveness in his questioning plays an active role in undermining the polite veneer of Green and Lacey's world.

One particular scene draws upon the ambivalence toward violence that, as I discussed above, is part of GarfieWs onscreen persona. In one of the film's most memorable moments,

Dave Goldman, while dining in a stylish restaurant, is assaulted with an anti-Semitic slur. He then instinctively stands up to physically confront and grab this man. But Goldman stops himself after this initial threat of violence: After looking around at the public setting, he realizes that he must contain himself (and, as Donald Weber interprets it, maintain "the composure required to survive in a gentile universe").34 After such excitable action, Goldman's movements are

33 Weber, 100.

34 Weber, 99. 33 I P a g e immediately stilled and, with minimal movement, he sits down at the table and stares ahead in hurt. He remains mostly oblivious to those aroundhim. Here, Goldman's intense stillness, and

Kazan's decision to hold on Goldman while the action around him continues, show that he must suffer this pain in private. Despite Goldman's apparent comfort in this WASP upper-middle- class world and his being warmly ingratiated by Green and his crowd, Goldman, for a moment, is still the outsider. Although he resists the image of the passive Jew, Goldman's instinctive physical response to the anti-Semite in this scene is not necessarily an attempt to assert his toughness or masculinity; what makes this moment so effective is Goldman's expression of pain behind the toughness. In fact, it is significant that Goldman provides only the threat of violence.

In contrast, Edward Dmytryk's Till the End of Time (1946) shows two white non-Jewish World

War Two Gis (Guy Madison and Robert Mitchum) become reinvigorated during a prolonged brawl, sparked by their punching out of bigots belonging to a veterans group. They feel it as a

"unifying experience."35 Goldman, on the other hand, is immobilized by deep pain and his alienation as an outsider within this world of white upper-class privilege.

35 Paul Buhle, From the Lower East Side to Hollywood: Jews in American Popular Culture (New York: Verso Books, 2004) 133-134.

34 I Pag e Chapter 2:

John Garfield and the American Jewish Family

In the 1925 silent film, His People. Jewish son Sammy Cominsky (George Lewis) is fighting in an especially difficult boxing match in order to win prize money that will enable his father to move to a warmer climate and recuperate from his life-threatening illness. His opponent is proving more of a challenge than Sammy anticipated. Round after round, Sammy is becoming increasingly weak and beaten. But his mother (Rosa Rosanova), håving just found out what

Sammy is doing for his father, is now sitting in the bleachers, begging for Sammy to regain his strength and get up off the ground: "Sammy, get up," she pleads, reminding him of what he is fighting for, "it's so your papa won't die—you got to get up—you got to." The knocked-out

Sammy suddenly notices his mother in the crowd. He then immediately gets up, regains his strength and chargés after the larger welterweight opponent. "Although Sammy is being trounced

[in the ring]," Jewish American culture scholar Ted Merwin describes, "his mother's cries and inspiration allow him to rise up and triumph over his adversary."36 Immediately after Sammy is declared the winner of the fight, he embraces his mother.

Although such a moment seems overly-sentimental, the scene works within the logic of the film and its depiction of supportive Jewish family relations. Even in the rough world of boxing (whose values run counter to those with which he was raised), Sammy—the Jewish son—is able to maintain an intimate connection with his mother. She is still a voice of

Ted Merwin, In Their Own Image: New York Jews in Jazz Age Popular Culture. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2006) 129. 35 I P a g e inspiration and nurturance, providing him with the strength that enables him to pummel his opponent and physically triumph.

Let us compare this with the opening moments of the early John Garfield Depression-era vehicle, They Made me a Criminal (1939), as discussed in the previous chapter. In the first scene, Garfield as Johnnie Bradfield tricks us into thinking that he is a successful boxer who shares the same sort of spiritual connection with his mother—and by extension, his roots—that

Sammy does. Bradfield also speaks of a watch—a gift from his mother—that he wears as a good luck charm in the boxing ring. But as we soon find out, not only does this mother figure—whose virtues he had been extolling—not exist, we also find out in later scenes that he has no coherent sense of himself. Nor can he experience the world with the confidence and comfort that such a maternal presence provides the immigrant sons in films like His People. The Jazz Singer (1927) and the original version ofHumoresque (1920). In fact, Bradfield's invention of a mother as a publicity gimmick mocks the overly-sentimental and unrealistic wish-fulfillment represented in a film like His People.

The Hollywood Jewish Melodrama and the Jewish Mother

After the First World War and into the twenties, many children of Jewish immigrants were leaving their parents behind for acculturation into the American melting pot. Silent film historian Kevin Brownlow suggests that the release of the Borzage/Hurst film could not have been more timely: "The postwar generation was rebelling against its parents, and the story exploited their suppressed sense of guilt while it (briefly) restored their parents' confidence."37

37 Kevin Brownlow, Behind the Mask of Innocence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 391. J. Hoberman points out that the successful Yiddish song "A Brivele der Mamen" (A Letter to Mother) was replaced in the 1920s by "My Yiddishe Mamen," the latter lamenting the mother 36 I P age The film served as wish fulfillment for many Eastern European Jewish families in America. In the silent Humoresque—as well as several other contemporary Hollywood Jewish melodramas of the decade—not only is the son able to freely mo ve between the world of his Jewish family and that of success in the New World, but the mother is shown to be the link that makes such fluid movement possible. As Joyce Antler describes the mother-son relationship in The Jazz

Singer. "His mother's understanding allows [him] to become the fully American person he wants to be, to have both Americanness and his Jewishness."38 Here, through the mother figure, the

Jewish son could have it both ways—successful assimilation in a society that expected him to shed visible signs of his otherness, without losing a vital connection to the people and values of home. In the opening few moments of Borzage's Humoresque. an intertitle proclaims that Sarah

Kantor (Vera Gordon) can be heard by her children above the sound of the elevated trains.

Within the streets of the New World, amid the frantic pace of the modern city, the mother still remains the centre of her children's lives.

Both Fannie Hursfs original short story and the 1920 film version are strongly Oedipal tales of a young violin prodigy, Leon Kantor (played in the film by Gaston Glass), and his mother, Sarah. The story and film open on the evening of young Leon's fifth birthday. His father,

Abrahm (Dore Davidson) is out at the local shop with Leon, allowing his son to choose a birthday present. Abrahm arrives home angry and frustrated with Leon's insistence on choosing a violin, a far more expensive gift than the toy the father was prepared to purchase. Sarah then who was left behind no longer in the old country, but in the old neighborhood. J. Hoberman, Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film Between Two Worlds (New York: Museum of Modern Art: Schocken Books, 1991), 113-114.

38 Joyce Antler, You Never Cali! You Never Write! A History of the Jewish Mother (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 24.

37 I Pag e tells her husband that Leon's interest in the violin is fulfilling her prayers to God. In the film, an intertitle reads:

I swear to you, Abrahm, God hears a mother's prayers. All the months before he was

born I prayed for it. Each one before they came I prayed it should be the one.

Until his father gives in, Leon cries and hollers loudly. Abrahm then recalls an old seventy-five cent fiddle that was bought for their older son. But "fumbling for strings and for notes the instrument could not yield up to him,"39 Leon begins to cry until his father slaps him. While the rest of the family sits down to eat, Sarah leaves to purchase the new violin for which her son wished.

Also introduced in this birthday sequence is the character of Gina Ginsberg, the young

Jewish neighbor who cannot walk without a crutch. She is befriended by the young Leon, and the two ultimately become romantically involved.

Years pass and Leon has grown to become a celebrated violinist, and with his mother— along with the rest of the family—in tow, he now performs concerts for European royalty. Gina, now free of her handicap, is also in Europe finishing her education. In New York, the violin prodigy and his family are, as an intertitle describes, "polished off," now living on Fifth Avenue.

Leon then gives a concert for the neighborhood from the Lower East Side. Despite the concerfs enormous success and the presence of an influential agent who wishes to sign him, Leon has enlisted to fight in The Great War, much to the dismay of his mother.

In the film, the whole family is on hand the day Leon is leaving home to fight overseas.

Among those present is the eldest son Mannie, who was born while the parents were fleeing the pogroms. He is the sole visible remnant of the family's past persecution and a reflection of the

39 Fannie Hurst. Humoresque (New York: P.F. Collier & Son Company, 1920) 16.

38 I P a g e conflict Leon feels tugging at his heart: Through Mannie, Leon connects his need to fight in this war to the suffering his family endured in Russia, "Look at Mannie. Born an imbecile because of autocracy," he says. His mother then insists that Leon sit on her knee while she rocks him.

Before leaving, he plays Dvorak's "Humoresque" on the violin for her.

The film shows Leon going off to war and suffering a shrapnel wound. The doctors tell

Gina that they can only heal him when he recovers from his psychological shock, which takes the form of paralysis in his hands and arms. Bleak in outlook, Leon suggests to Gina that she find another boyfriend. Out of frustration and anguish, Gina collapses. Leon reaches out his arms to help her and rediscovers his ability to move his hands and play the violin. The film ends with

Leon embracing Gina, while surrounded by his parents.

In the silent film, Humoresque, the Jewish mother is depicted as a large, round woman.

Heartiness and physical strength characterize the Jewish mother in all of these silent melodramas. They are strong women whose physical strength reflects their pragmatism, adaptability and emotional strength. In the opening scene of Hungry Hearts (1922) for example, we first see the Jewish mother back in Russia shoveling coal into the stove. In comparison, the

Jewish father, a rather frail figure, is shown teaching torah to a group of young children. Such a succinct visual contrast reflects the traditional Jewish gender roles as well as prophesizes the changing dynamic within the Jewish family upon arrival in the New World. The prized male role in the Jewish community was, traditionally, that of scholar. Failing to find a practical outlet for his studies in America, the father is shown in these films as weak, impractical, and sometimes, as

J. Hoberman observes, a figure of "pathos."40 Joyce Antler writes on this changing family

40Hoberman, 116. 39 I P a g e dynamic, "With the father's loss of masculine potency and status, the Jewish mother's power

within the family increased to fill the void."41

As opposed to the father who is shown in these films as living according to strict

religious law and therefore blind to the reality of the New World, the mother has both a sense of pragmatism and instinctive understanding of her children. She becomes the only possible

connection between the differing worlds represented by the father and the son. The mother

comes to represent the son's Jewish identity—it is no longer the domain of the unyielding law of the father. And the Jewish identity defined by the mother is usually depicted as allowing a

greater degree of flexibility, compassion and accommodation to American society.42 In The Jazz

Smger, while the father is unyielding in his demands of his son to fulfill his role in the family generational line of cantors, the mother does not openly contradict her husband's expectations, but feels for her son's ambitions as well as the pain that he is put through at the hands of his father. As in so many of these melodramas, she is, in fact, often in a tug-of-war between these two men, trying to appease both of them. Also aware of her husband's blindness to the real world, she tries to comfort her son while also serving to maintain the father's illusion of reality.

The mother comes to represent the son's Jewish roots without the strict adherence to Jewish patriarchal law.

41 Antler, 26.

42 While they do support their son's adapting to American life, the Jewish mothers in these films are often seen partaking in aspects of Jewish ritual. In the silent film version of Humoresque. Borzage spends time depicting Sarah Kantor as an ideal symbol of faith and devotion. Early on, the film makes special effort to praise her religiosity. In one particular scene, we see Sarah alone in the synagogue praying to the torah. The accompanying intertitle comments, 'Torever blessed are those who have faith." At another moment, Mama is performing the blessing over the Sabbath candles. The beauty and expressiveness with which Borzage lights and photographs such images imbue these moments with a special sacredness. 40 I P a g e In The Jazz Singer, the Jewish mother (Eugenie Besserer) is more sympathetic than her husband (Warner Oland) to the desires of their son; "the [Jewish cantorial] music is in his head, not his heart," she explains to her husband. Also, when the son, Jackie Rabinowitz, decides to leave home, he takes with him a picture of his mother, a nourishing image of home. After the father's death, the film ends with Jolson as Jackie Rabinowitz (now going by the nåme of Jack

Robin) performing "Mammy" to his mother, who sits in the packed audience at the Winter

Garden Theatre. His mother's beaming face—a reflection of her approval—allows Jackie to maintain his career in American show business while still being connected to his roots. Sitting next to her is Yudleson (Otto Lederer), described by an intertitle as "a power in the affairs of the ghetto."

Although the narratives of these silent Jewish melodramas favor the son's sexual transference from Jewish mother to girlfriend/wife, the emotional weight of most of these films is given to the mother-and-son relationship. The scenes between the son and his girlfriend do not match the intensity of the moments with the mother. In the "Humoresque" short story, Leon refers to his mother, Sarah, as "the sweetest girl in the world." Sarah responds:

"'Girl'! Ah, if I could only hold you by me this way, Leon. Always a boy—with

me—your poor old mother—your only girl. That's a fear I suffer with, Leon—to lose you

to a—girl. Thafs how selfish the mother of such a wonder-child like mine can be."

"All right! Trying to get me married off again. Nice! Fine!"

"Is it any wonder I suffer, son? Twenty-one years to have kept by me as a child. A

boy that never in his life was out after midnight except to catch trains. A boy that never

has so much as looked at a girl and could have looked at princesses. To have kept you all 41 I P a g e these years—mine—is it any wonder, son, I never stopped praying my thanks to you?

You don't believe Hancock, son, the way he keeps always teasing you that you should

have a—what he calls—affair—a love-affair? Such talk is not nice, Leon—an affair!"43

Although this passage from the book does not appear in the silent film, which is a fairly close adaptation of the original text, such a moment can speak accurately for the intensity of the mother-and-son relationship in the movie. In addition to its reflection of the intense relationship between Sarah and Leon, this passage also helps articulate the story's distinction between marriage and an affair: whereas marriage is considered part of the natural cycle of life, the passion of a "love-affair" has the potential to threaten the mother's role in her son's life. These early Jewish melodramas never raised the issue of the sexuality of the Jewish son or his girlfriend; in these films, the relationships between the son and his girlfriend appear rather sexless. In The Jazz Singer. for example, Jackie Rabinowitz and Mary (May MacAvoy) do not display much passion onscreen. In fact, only his relationship with his music can match—and perhaps replace—his emotional attachment to his mother; his deeply sensual and dynamic musical performances can be read as his only sexual outlet.44 (On this note, it is worth mentioning that in the early twenties, critic Gilbert Seides would praise Jolson's musical performances for håving subversive "daemonic" energy.45)

43 Hurst, 23.

44 Biographer Herbert Goldman suggests that Jolson seemed "ill at ease" during love scenes "and his failure in that line would later hinder his career in films." Jolson "was a great comedian, but the only way he could express emotion on stage was in a song." Herbert G. Goldman, Jolson: The Legend Comes to Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 46.

45 Quoted in Donald Weber, Haunted in the New World: Jewish American Culture from Cahan to The Goldbergs (Bloomington, In: Indiana University Press, 2005), 65.

42 I Pag e In the silent version of Humoresque. the character of Gina Ginsberg is introduced at the beginning of the film. She is a young Jewish neighbor who cannot walk without a crutch.

Borzage structures the film with imagery suggesting the pairing of Leon and Gina as the ideal outcome of the narrative. Toward the end of the original short story, Leon and Gina reunite when the latter comes backstage after his successful concert. He has not seen her since she was a crippled child in the poor Lower East Side neighborhood, but now she has grown into a mature woman free of physical handicaps. The story ends with the young couple speaking of resuming their relationship after the war, in the spring. Borzage picks up this hopeful springtime and nature imagery; spread throughout the film is the motif of springtime and the possible blooming of plants amid the concrete and harsh conditions of the city. In the latter part of the film, the action depicting Leon's postwar convalescence and his subsequent recovery stimulated by his affection for Gina is set in a room with a large window, outside of which vines and flowers are in full bloom. Such imagery further suggests the pairing of Leon and Gina as the final triumph of the Kantor family. While positioned next to Gina in a medium-shot of the two women, Sarah says, "I tell you, Abrahm, God always hears a mother's prayers." In another two-shot, Abrahm, who stands beside Leon, responds, "I suppose a papa's prayers has nothing to do with it!" These two-shots pairing Gina with Sarah and Leon with Abrahm suggest perhaps that the relationship of the young couple will provide their parents with a sense of continuity within the New World.

The film ends with a long shot of the two couples—Leon and Gina, Abrahm and Sarah—as they laugh and hug. Leon has reconnected with Gina, and by extension, the entire family. In this way, the position of the mother in her son's life is never really threatened.

43 I Pag e The Jewish Mother and the Immigrant Community

In Frank Borzage's Humoresque, the mother maintains a vital connection to her son

which is never shown as threatened in the face of American social mobility and assimilation.

This is especially evident by the mother's accompanying Leon to all of his musical engagements.

In one particular scene, Sarah Kantor warms Leon's hands to calm his nerves before one of his

performances. In the original short story, Hurst articulates how Sarah maintains a strong

mothering role in his son's life, "Sarah Kantor.. .still brewed for him, on a small portable stove

carried from city to city and surreptitiously unpacked in hotel suites, the blackest of soups, and

despite his protestations, would incase his ears [at night] in an old home-made device against

their flightiness."46 In turn, Leon becomes his mother's favorite child and the fulfillment of her

dreams. Sarah blooms as Leon succeeds: When Hursfs story moves forward in time from Leon's

success at age seventeen to that at twenty-one, Sarah has grown "stouter, softer, apparently even

taller."47

While maintaining this very strong bond with his mother, Leon is able to retain strong

and unambivalent affection toward his immigrant roots, despite his successful social climb to

Fifth Avenue. He refers to his concert for the Lower East Side neighborhood as his "final seal of

triumph," and he is more nervous playing in front of "his own" than in front of European

aristocrats. For the audience, Leon performs Kol Nidre "as if he were weeping," an intertitle

describes. He then walks off stage in tears. The exact roots of Leon's emotions in this scene are not clear: Is it sentimentality for the world he feels he left behind? Is it from the beauty of the

46 Hurst, 17.

47 Hurst, 19.

44 I P a g e music? Or is it caused by a felt connection with the immigrant community? But what remains significant is his vital, emotional and unrepressed connection to his roots.

What is most remarkable about this sequence is the realism that Borzage injects into this concert scene. Borzage takes time to show the many Jewish immigrants in the audience who are wearing their best clothes to this concert. And the Jews that people the audience are also shown to be diverse: some have beards and wear yarmulkes while others appear more assimilated. On the stage behind Leon sits the overfiow of the audience.

Borzage also uses shots from the Lower East Side to establish the neighborhood where the Kantor family lives. These realistic glimpses of the immigrant neighborhood became a staple of these early Jewish family melodramas. Often these films are also careful to authentically depict moments of Jewish ritual. Despite the assimilationist message of these silent melodramas, such authenticity displays a respect for this unassimilated world. Like the Jewish sons depicted in the narratives, the films themselves convey dual allegiances.

Humoresque: John Garfield and the American Jewish Family

Reflecting the disenchantment of postwar film noir, the 1946 version of Humoresque begins on a rainy night. We immediately see a shot of the Manhattan skyline, clearly identifying this film as one set in New York. Then posted above a drenched sidewalk, on the wall of a grand concert hall in the upper part of Manhattan, is a row of large posters showing John Garfield playing the violin. In the poster he is wearing a tuxedo and there is a certain bravado to his pose that suggests his success as a violinist. By providing these posters as our first glimpse of

Garfield, as well as håving these portraits dwarf the people who are walking in front of them, the film opens with a rather mythic image of this violinisfs success. This poster image of Garfield is

45 I P a g e the last part of a lateral tracking shot that begins on the subway exit in front of the concert hall, which suggest a more democratic route of transportation to this upper class part of the city.

A large banner is suddenly plastered over the poster, announcing that the concert has been cancelled. The camera moves in closer toward the picture to gaze at the face of this celebrated violinist. From this, there is a dissolve to a head-and-shoulders shot of John Garfield as Paul Boray: he is unshaven and stares thoughtfully off-camera. After a few moments, he slowly and softly reflects to himself:

All my life I wanted to do the right thing but it never worked out. I'm outside, always

looking in. Feeling all the time Fm far away from home. Where home is, I don't know. I

can't get back to the simple happy kid I used to be.

From these first few moments of the film, we know that, unlike the success stories celebrated in the earlier Jewish silent films, success in America will cost a price for Garfield's violin prodigy.

Unlike the 1920 version of Humoresque, this Jewish protagonist is not going to be able to attain success and social mobility while also maintaining an emotional connection to "home." In fact the rest of the film is going to eventually depict Paul Boray's emotional alienation from both worlds.

The production history behind this later screen version of Hursfs "Humoresque," as carefully researched by Samuel Rosenthal, reflects Hollywood's changing image of the Jew, circa the

1940s. In 1940 or 41, the Warner studio began to commission screenwriters to update the original "Humoresque" story in the form of screenplay outlines and treatments. The first few versions increasingly began to shed the Jewish aspects of the original material, emphasizing the patriotic, assimilationist values celebrated in Hollywood films as the Second World War

46 I P a g e approached. As Rosenthal comments, "The [Humoresque] project was no longer about the uniqueness of the Jewish ghetto, but rather, it was more overtly about the triumph of

Americanization." In addition, the nåme of the Jewish family began to be transformed into something more generically ethnic. Toward the end of the war, the Jewish roots were removed as the film became simply about "a violinist being turned into a soldier." An endnote on an outline read: "The mother and this boy are fine Americans. They epitomize the very spirit that has made

America, and the very America that has helped make them. And we think it would be a mistake, and have no value for the story that we can see, to make the nationality of the family any definite one thing." 48

In February of 1945, screenwriter Barney Glazer was hired by producer Jerry Wald to prepare another outline. According to Rosenthal, Glazer incorporated more details from the original silent film as well as aspects of an unused Clifford Odets draft of the Gershwin biopic,

Rhapsodv in Blue (1944). He also pleaded with Wald in a memo to re-establish the protagonisfs

Jewish roots:

I remind you that what has not yet been decided is the important question of the hero's

racial origins. I want to keep him a Jew as [HursfJ and Odets did. You are not sure that is

wise. I say we are too sensitive about putting the real Jew on the screen the way they put

the Irish Catholic on the screen in Going Mv Way: that storfes like Abie's Irish Rose and

Children of the Ghetto were so enormously successful because they pulled no Jewish

punches; that even Humoresque owed its popularity largely to the Yiddisha Mamma [sic]

48 Samuel Rosenthal, Golden Boychik: Star-Audience Relations Between John Garfield and the Contemporary American Jewish Community. (Masters thesis, The Annexberg School for Communication University of Pennsylvania, 1993), 66-68.

47 I Pag e who dominated its story... Perhaps you may want to consult the opinions of Jack Warner,

Charley Einfeld and Steve Trilling. After all it is a matter of policy too.

Wald agreed to maintain the protagonist's Jewish roots, but felt that the presentation of his

Jewishness should be ambiguous, allowing for a more generically ethnic representation of the family.49

During his revisions and updating of the script, Glazer added the supporting role of Helen

Wyman, a Jewish art patron who loves and supports the violinist. According to Rosenthal, this character originated in Odets' screenplay for Rhapsodv in Blue.50 (A variation of Odets' character appears in the Gershwin biopic and is played by Alexis Smith.) Eventually, screenwriter Zachary Gold, who finished off the Humoresque script, not only changed the nåme of Helen Wyman to the more ethnically ambiguous Helen Wright, but developed her character into a leading role.51

A different, though less detailed, version of the film's production history comes from

Garfield biographers Larry Swindell and Robert Nott, who both suggest that Odets played a large role in the initiation of the project. Swindell argues that Odets "got the idea of freely adapting" the Hurst story as a vehicle for his good friend, John Garfield.52 Robert Nott says that Odets' involvement became a major deciding factor in the actor's agreeing to participate in the film.53

49 Rosenthal, 68-70.

50 Rosenthal, 70.

51 Rosenthal, 72.

52 Swindell, Larry, Body and Soul: The Story of John Garfield (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1975), 200-201.

53 Robert Nott, He Ran All the Way: The Life of John Garfield (New York: Limelight Editions, 2003), 182. 48 I P age " Although Rosenthal's research is meticulous and rather thorough, more exploring needs to be done concerning Odets' specific contributions to the project: there are so many aspects of

Goldenboy in the writing and social criticism of this later version of Humoresque. John Garfield once commented on the similarity between Paul Boray and the pugilist in Golden Boy: in

Humoresque. the actor is quoted as saying, "you find out what would have happened to Joe

Boneparte if he had bumped into Helen Wright instead of Lorna Moon."54 According to

Swindell, Odets once credited Hursfs original "Humoresque" short story as an influence when he was conceiving his play Goldenboy.55 (What also needs to be considered more fully is the extent to which the character of Paul Boray was written with Garfield in mind once the actor had been east in the role.)

Transcendent Maternal Love and Economic Realities

As in the original short story and silent film version, the scenes depicting Paul Boray's childhood establish a strong Oedipal bond between mother and son as well as the pivotal role that the musical instrument plays in that relationship; it is the mother who nurtures Paul's interest in the violin. Similarly, early in the film, a young Paul (Robert Blake) is tåken by his father,

Rudy (J. Carroll Naish), to the local store to pick out a birthday gift. His father is exasperated with Paul's insistence on choosing the violin and drags his son out of the store. (Also in this scene, we are first introduced to Sid Jeffers—played by Oscar Levant—the son of the owner of the neighborhood store. He is a pianist who, although has a wry self-deprecating wit, encourages

Paul's interest in the violin.) When they arrive home, Rudy tells his wife, Esther (Ruth Nelson),

54 Swindell, 203.

55 Swindell, 200.

49 I P a g e of their son's interest in the violin; the father's utterance of the word "violin" triggers a close-up of Esther as her eyes begin to water.56 While Esther and Paul stare at each other, she asks her husband without breaking eye contact with her son, "He asked for a violin and you didn't buy it for him?" This strong gaze between mother and son overtly excludes the father. Rudy eventually gives in as Esther leaves to buy the instrument. In the next scene, as the family—and the young neighborhood girl, Gina—celebrate Paul's birthday, Esther gives her son the violin. With Rudy now looking on in delight, Paul smiles and hugs his mother, burying his head on her chest. These opening scenes establish the intense mother-and-son relationship, which will exclude and protect

Paul from the demands of the rest of the family.

A few scenes later, a ledger dated October 15, 1930 signals the onset of the Depression.

Paul's siblings complain of their financial troubles and of Paul not contributing his share to the family income; all he does, they say, is practice the violin. Esther and Rudy debate their respective expectations of their son as they sit around the kitchen table:

Esther: Don't blame him, Rudy. What can he do?

Rudy: Help, like everyone else in the family. Is that too much to ask? All this practicing,

these teachers—he'll never amount to anything. Esther, it's not for us. Look at Sid—he

plays music too but at least he's on the radio. He gets paid.

Esther: It's different with Paul.

Rudy: Different? Don't he eat? Don't he wear clothes? Whafs different? Whafs wrong

with getting a job?

Esther: There's nothing wrong with it. But if he could be a Heifitz...

56 Both Garfield and actor Ruth Nelson began their acting career at the Group Theatre. It is worth pondering whether their similar theatrical roots helped establish an onscreen bond between their characters. 50 I P a g e Rudy: Statistics show there's one of them in a million. Paul Boray: the genius who lives

over a grocery store?

Standing in the next room, Paul overhears this family conversation. Without being noticed, he enters the kitchen and listens to his parents. In a long shot, the camera films Paul from behind: he occupies the right side of the frame while opposite is the table around which sit his parents and siblings. Such an image accentuates Paul's alienation from the rest of the family. Such alienation, this scene suggests, is rooted in his ambition and his desire to transcend their economic realities. Esther not only nurtures her son's aspirations but shelters him from such economic necessities. When Paul finally makes his presence in the room known to his family, he looks at his mother, expressing his pain. Anger then overtakes him as he looks at his father and storms out of the room.

Angry and worked up, Paul rants to Sid Jeffers, "I'm not going to be a parasite from now on. Fm going to pay my way." Paul then bitterly rants, speaking rapidly:

I know what I don't want. I don't want to feel like a heel every time I eat a piece of bread

in my own house. And I don't want to spend the rest of my life living in a hot box over a

grocery store or feeding on gum and chocolate out of penny slot machines. Hot in

summer, freezing in winter, always worrying about the bill that wasn't paid yesterday or

the bill that's coming here today.

Despite Paul's rapid speech, his body is restrained, emphasizing his pent-up anger. Sid responds to his friend's frustration, "You got the old American itch. You want to get there fast and you don't want to pay for the ride." This is a crucial scene within the film's narrative. This is the first time in the film that we see Paul express his wish to achieve social mobility and wealth through

51 I P a g e his violin playing. Before this, he had always expressed his ambitions in the vague terms of being a great and renowned artist.

Such previous isolation from economic realities instilled in him illusions of independence and invulnerability. Before the scene in the family kitchen, such illusions take the form of strong self-assurance and ambition. In a moment before that kitchen scene, Paul says to Gina, 'Tm a self-starter. I don't need anybody's help." But rooted in the onset of the Depression is a bitterness and anger that thereafter becomes attached to PauPs sense of independence; an angry drive becomes evident from this moment onward. We begin to see Paul assume shades of Joe

Boneparte and his inner conflict between violinist and boxer, a struggle succinctly articulated by the short quotation from Odets' play, which I quoted in the last chapter:

When I play music, nothing is closed to me. Fm not afraid of people and what they say.

There's no war in music... But when you leave your room... down in the street... it's

war! Music can't help me there.57

Paul is unable to resolve the conflict between his aggression and the spiritual transcendence associated with the violin. This conflict is succinctly expressed when Paul the violinist is confused for a boxer by an upper class woman.

In many ways, Esther has the same expectations of her son that Mr. Boneparte in Golden

Boy has of his violin prodigy. "He's going to do something different," says Joe's father of his son: in Goldenbov and this later version of Humoresque. the parent sees special possibilities for their musical prodigy, removed from the family's working class background. It is perhaps possible to suggest that Esther's wish for a musician in the family and her encouragement of

Paul's interest is rooted in her vision of music, shared by Joe Boneparte's father, as transcending

57 Clifford Odets, Waiting for Leftv and Other Plavs (New York: Grove Press, 1993), 263-264. 52 I P a g e the social circumstances and expectations of America: a life devoted to the study of music is a life given "to the muses."58 Earlier in the kitchen scene, Rudy implies that the family business is losing money because Esther is allowing, in the tough times of the Depression, the neighborhood customers to buy on credit, "I know they got to eat, Esther. But we got to eat too." Here, the film briefly reveals Esther's compassion for the community around her. This version of Humoresque only faintly hints at something not suggested in the original Hurst story, but more clearly articulated in Garfield's first independent film, Body and Soul: the Jewish mother as encouraging in her son an alternative to the competitive and aggressive outside world.

Paul Boray's Cynical Seif

According to biographer Robert Nott, Garfield modeled his characterization of Mickey

Borden in Four Daughters—one of the actor's few screen characters to passively accept defeat— on his friend Oscar Levant.59 In Humoresque. Sid Jeffers, as played by Levant, provides a foil to

PauPs ambition. Whereas Paul attempts to assimilate, Sid skeptically rejects such aspirations and more passively accepts his fate. ("I don't make the world," he says at one point, "I barely live in it.") He confronts the possibility of social mobility and assimilation with cynicism and self- mockery. While playing piano at a high society party, Sid mocks and undermines, through self- deprecation, upper class society and their sexual pretenses. As he plays the piano, Sid jokingly flirts with a blond-haired but cold-looking woman who avoids eye contact with him:

Sid: Every time I look at you I get a fierce desire to be lonesome... Whatsa matter?

You're too shy to tell me you detest me?

58 Odets, 249.

59 Nott, 84.

53 I Pa ge Woman: I'm sure I've seen you somewhere.

Sid: Ever ride the subways?

Woman: Not very often.

Sid: You probably don't recognize me with my clothes on. I pose for the underwear ads:

The Body Scrawny.

Paul, on the other hand, seems more humorless in his aggressive struggle for success and acceptance.

Sid also deflates and demystifies Paul's success as a musician. When Paul throws down his tuxedo jacket after his first recital, Sid picks it up and says, "Careful. This has to go on a head waiter tomorrow night." In addition, Sid confronts PauFs ambition with the overwhelming odds against finding success as a musician. Paul looks down on Sid's lack of ambition, "You ought to try a few dreams yourself. It might make you less cynical. When I look at you, I know what I want to avoid." In another scene, after moving into a fancy uptown apartment, Paul refers to Sid as "the prosecuting attorney in my life. You won't ever let me think I'm good, will ya?" Sid represents Paul's Lower East Side seif that the assimilating violinist consistently relies on for guidance. Sid not only grounds Paul's ambition, but provides him with a sense of perspective.

The Upper Class Socialite and the Jewish Girlfriend

Briefly established in the early scene of Paul's ninth birthday party is the character of

Gina. In the original short story and silent film, she was given the full nåme of Gina Ginsberg and was Leon's Jewish girlfriend. In this updated version, she is not explicitly defined as Jewish but can be interpreted as so. She is shown as being from the same neighborhood. And the fact that she is present in the birthday scene among Paul's parents and siblings helps establish her as

54 I P a g e if she is part of the family, sharing the same roots. Esther feels that Gina can provide Paul with a stable home and children.

Early in this version of Humoresque. a grown-up Paul Boray and a mature Gina, who is now a cellist, begin their careers as musicians in an orchestra at a music academy. Cocky and lacking pretension, Garfield as Paul is animated as he passionately and earnestly talks to Gina— speaking quickly, with boyish excitement and expressiveness—of his ambitions as an artist. He then says, "I never open up like this to most people. Not even morn; it's only you. I don't have to pose with you. I don't have to fight or argue. I can be just what I am: no different, no better, no worse, just me..." She then looks at him, with her eyes excitedly scanning his face. "If I told you

I loved you," Gina asks, "would you laugh?" As she walks up the stoop to her tenement building, he stands at the bottom, smiling gladly to himself.

But Gina is no match for Paul's relationship with the upper class socialite, Helen Wright

(Joan Crawford), which partly becomes an outlet for his aggression. Both Helen and Paul have a lot of strength and drive, which is undermined by their respective social positions. Paul compensates for his status as a poor Jew from the Lower East Side with arrogance and showmanship (At one point, Sid criticizes Paul's playing as being "a little too brash, a little overbrilliant, [it needs] more restraint"). Frustrated by the patriarchal expectations of women of her social standing, Helen has deadened herself with alcohol; the remnants of her strong drive are evident through her bursts of sarcasm and verbal aggression, but she is deeply vulnerable and insecure. Her attempt to overcome the expected submissiveness of her social role and assume a dominant position in her relationships is expressed partly through the glasses which she wears at certain key moments in the film. In fact, Samuel Rosenthal keenly observes that not only is

55 I P a g e Crawford at times objectified by the camera's gaze but so is Garfield. This helps emphasize their respective feelings of vulnerability and inferiority at the hands of the other during their initial scenes together. (Helen's use of glasses that she sometimes wears to gaze at Paul also reflects the fact that here the Jewish son, as played by Garfield, is, for the first time, seen as a sex object. I will discuss the consequences of this in the next section.)

This shared aggression is apparent from their first meeting where Paul and Helen verbally duel back and forth for power and one-upmanship. At an upper class party, hosted by her and her husband, Helen is attracted to Paul's musical performance as well as his physical appearance. By the time he finishes playing, a crowd has gathered around him. Helen comments, "You play like a calliope." "I beg your pardon," Paul responds. We see Paul from Helen's point-of-view with the back of her head occupying the right side of the frame; this helps accentuate the vulnerability that he feels facing Helen and the social status she represents.

Helen then comments on Paul's apparent naiveté, "You're not the man who got up and gave his seat to the lady on the subway? Or do you come from the provinces?" "I was born in

New York," Paul responds curtly. "Oh here's that rare animal," Helen mocks, "A New Yorker from New York." As we see Paul from Helen's perspective, she and the camera edge toward him, as if goading him. This camera movement accentuates his increasing vulnerability and emerging defensiveness and anger. "New York is full of all kinds of animals," Paul responds bitterly, "Not all of them were born here." The conversation continues with Paul's hostility becoming ever more evident.

Helen: Did you mean that as an insult? I'm a very difficult person to insult, Mr... You do

have a nåme, don't you?

60 Rosenthal, 82-83.

56 I P a g e Paul: Sure, Fm in the telephone book under violins.

Helen: Bad manners, Mr. Boray, the infallible sign of talent. Shall I make a prediction?

Soon the world will divide itself into two camps—pro-Boray and anti-Boray.

Paul: Which camp are you, Mrs. Wright? Pro or anti?

Paul suddenly grabs his violin and his hands furiously break into a very rapid rendition of "Flight

of the Bumblebee"; this provides Paul, after participating in an exchange of hostile and sarcastic

comments that take aim at each other's social differences, a way of releasing his full aggression

back at Helen Wright.

In the next scene, Helen apologizes for her behavior and invites Paul for drinks, where

she talks about helping his musical career. While sitting across the table from Helen, Paul is

subdued, devoid of much expression and rather cautious about betraying too much of himself. He

answers Helen's questions with short, clipped answers. When Helen is inquiring into his past, his

skill and his relationships, Paul resists making much eye contact as he looks down and fidgets

with a cigarette holder. When the conversation topic switches to her past, he begins to look

intently at Helen, as he sits back in his chair with his body not moving much and a slight coy

smile appearing on his face. Helen comments on "that glint in [Paul's] eye [that men get] when

[they're] figuring out how to club [a woman's] wings down." PauFs coolness in this scene is rooted in his defensiveness as well as his aggression and hostility toward Helen.

In their initial scenes together, PauFs hostility toward Helen is well-rooted in her social

status and the upper-class world she represents. But at times, this anger becomes

indistinguishable from his resistance to the emasculation he feels as this strong woman helps and guides his musical career. This is particularly evident in the following exchange between Paul

and Helen:

57 I P a g e Paul: [referring to Helen] The patroness of the arts. What am I? A substitute for this

year's trip to Sun Valley? Or the discovery of a new painter? You think it's pleasant to be

patronized by a woman?

Helen: Doesn't it occur to you to be grateful for anything?

Paul: Sure. Fm grateful for the debut, for Bauer [the well-connected manager she finds

for him], Fm grateful for the chance to play for Hagerstrom [a music impresario he gets

the opportunity to play for]. Thafs the list so far. Fm in your debt.

Here, seeing himself as another of Helen's possessions, Paul feels his dignity undermined as both a working class immigrant and a man with illusions of independence.

A few scenes earlier, Esther inquires into her son's relationship with Helen Wright. This scene ends with a dissolve from Esther's face to that of Helen watching Paul try on a suit. Here,

Paul rejects Helen's recommendation of a dark plain suit and obstinately insists on one with stripes. "A good suit mustn't have any bones in it like ribs in an umbrella," she advises, "It's the dråpe of the cloth that does it." The camera then crosses the eye-line axis to photograph Paul from the other side of his head, emphasizing his talking to her from over his shoulder, rather than speaking face to face. His body suddenly stiffens and he lets out a curt snicker. "I wouldn't know anything about that. I just have time enough to get dressed in the morning," he says with a slight hint of aggression in his voice, quietly mocking her knowledge of the formalities of her social world. More significantly, it is also possible to read this scene's link—via the dissolve—to

Esther's inquiring and worried face in the previous scene as PauPs projection onto Helen—a woman whose strong presence and social standing evokes a sense of power—of those aspects of his controlling mother that he would like to resist and perhaps rebel against.

58 I P a g e Helen Wright and the Jewish Mother

In the second half of the film, the character of Helen Wright begins to dominate the narrative. This perhaps can be largely explained by the circumstances of the film's production, as described by Samuel Rosenthal. Humoresque was John Garfield's last film under his contract with the Warner Bros. studio, which he had no intention of renewing. On the other hand, the studio had recently signed Joan Crawford, who had already proven herself with the successful

Mildred Pierce (1943). Less interested in creating a star vehicle for John Garfield, who was soon leaving the studio, than it was for Joan Crawford, producer Jerry Wald began to describe the film as being primarily about "the problems that face women who marry and divorce so many times that their life-line has stretched so thin they lack the ability and insight to get back to the original base of operations."61 Robert Sklar explains the expansion of the Helen Wright role by suggesting the possibility that "the adulterous Crawford-Garfield relationship added to the Hurst story was inspired by the writer's (or producer's) knowledge that audiences would remember seeing, not so many months before, an adulterous [Låna] Turner-Garfield relationship [in The

Postman Alwavs Rings Twice (1946)]."62 After Postman, the studio may have also been more eager to capitalize on Garfield's sex appeal and explore his characters' sexual desires. Perhaps this partly explains why GarfiekTs version of Humoresque problematizes the transcendental

Jewish mother-son relationships of the silent Jewish family melodramas, preventing an easy resolution of the mother-son-girlfriend triangle as seen in the Borzage silent film. By

61 Rosenthal, 73-77. 62 Robert Sklar, City Boys: Cagnev. Bogart. Garfield (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 181. 59 I Pag e foregrounding the sexuality of not only the Jewish son but also the woman, the Oedipal mother- and-son relationship is threatened.

Like Joe Boneparte in Goldenboy, Paul is torn between the transcendental spirituality associated with the violin, as encouraged by his mother, and the earthy and aggressive, fast- paced world that threatens to leave him behind. (As Joe Boneparte bitterly remarks, "Artists and people like that are freaks today. The world moves fast and they sit around like forgotten dopes."63) Unlike Jackie Rabinowitz in the Jazz Singer. Paul is not content to fully sublimate his sexual appetite through his music. After we see a short sequence in which Paul and Helen express their affection for one another, Paul comes home late at night to be greeted by his mother. He is getting food from the kitchen while Esther stands at the top of the stairs, looking down at him, "I can see what's happening. I have eyes," she says. She then speaks of a possible scandal that will ruin his career:

Esther: You're a clean boy with a clean career. Why get involved? My opinion of Mrs.

Wright doesn't matter... But I know you: Inside, Paul, you want a wife, home, children...

Don't let your life get twisted. It's not the same as it is for you as it is for other people.

You're not someone who can put work in one drawer and his life in another. Everything

you do, everything you think is part of it.

Paul: Wind me up and I play? Concerts on request? Is that all Fm supposed to be? I want

something more. Fm not a machine. Fve got feelings too.

Esther: You have to pay for what you get. Special people got special things to pay for.

63 Odets, 264.

60 I P a g e After a few moments, Paul stands frozen as he soberly absorbs what Esther has to say. Then with his back to the camera, he sits back down at a table, looking up at Esther who is still standing.

With a tone of resignation, he asks, "Whafs left for me?" "Music," she exclaims. Non-diegetic orchestral music quickly blares in the background as it initiates a montage sequence chronicling his concert tour where his performances are greeted with acclaim; following his mother's advice,

Paul has immersed himself in his work.

Upon his return, Paul sees Helen again and responds coolly to her, his body and voice rigid as they are in their first scenes together. We find out that Helen tried to contact Paul while he was on tour but he did not respond: He "wanted time to think," he explains. They talk further and, expressing Paul's internalization of his mother's wishes, he answers Helen's hope for resuming their relationship with, "But you're married." To which she simply answers, "We're both old enough to vote." They both laugh. This scene, in conjunction with the earlier confrontation with his mother and the subsequent montage sequence showing PauFs immersion in his work, suggests his erratic behavior is partly due to his being torn between his mother and his attraction to Helen. At the same time, Helen's comment, "we're both old enough to vote," undermines the mother's authority and concerns; in many ways, the film seems to favor Helen's worldliness over the provincial beliefs of Paul's mother.

In this scene, Paul says to Helen, "It reminds me how alike we are. This sparring around like two wrestlers waiting for a hold." Such a comment reflects PauFs ability to, at times, let reason and self-awareness triumph over raw aggression. After this comment, Helen and Paul warm up to each other again as they laugh over their similar temperaments.

61 I P a g e Later in the film, Paul has moved into a fancy uptown apartment. His father looks around appreciatively while his mother frowns upon pictures of Helen that are scattered throughout the rooms. In this scene, Esther's opposition to Helen seems more irrational and desperate:

Esther: You don't know what you're doing.

Paul: Morn, don't be old fashioned.

Esther: Is that what you call it? It's your life. But remember, I told you.

Paul: Alright, I'm in love with her. Is that what you want me to say?

Esther: You know what she is. There's something wrong with a woman like that.

Paul: Please, you don't know what you're saying.

Esther: I haven't lived for nothing. Believe me, it's no good. What can marriage mean to

her?

Paul: You never gave her a chance. You never even tried to understand her.

Esther: Don't try to tell me what to do.

She then slaps him and exits, leaving him alone to reflect. Esther's desperation in this scene betrays the jealousy she feels about being replaced by Helen in Paul's life. Similarly, Helen, as she is forced to take second place to the violin in Paul's life, expresses the desperation that

Esther feels but cannot say. Unlike Paul, whose violin provides him with an outlet for his intense feelings and drive, Helen has previously subdued her passions through alcohol and a dull marriage. Her relationship with Paul has awakened those repressed desires, which makes her increasingly vulnerable to Paul's whims; "You're a noose around my neck," she tells him.

Similarly, like Sarah Kantor in the original version of Humoresque. both Esther and Helen must channel their ambition and desires through Paul's career and their respective relationships with

62 I P a g e him. In his very brief and succinct analysis of this later version of Humoresque. Michael Rogin

sees Esther and Helen as doubles of each other.

In the next scene, Helen's husband agrees to a divorce. Paul agrees to marry Helen;

significantly, he now has no apparent doubts about going against the wishes of his mother. Helen

then goes downtown to make amends with Esther and tell her of their plans for marriage. Paul's

mother responds by scolding her, "You only think of yourself. You leave nothing in return.

Leave him." Esther's words confirm the doubts Helen feels about herself and the success of a

future marriage with Paul, a violinist obsessed with his music.

In the next scene, Paul is in his dressing room before going on stage. He excitedly speaks to Bauer about his upcoming marriage to Helen. Sid enters to tell him that Helen's ticket is still

at the box office. Without missing a beat, Paul asks if his mother is in the audience, to which Sid

answers that she is absent as well. This is a curious moment: Boray connects Helen's absence at

the concert with that of his mother. He now appears troubled, nervously fidgeting with a towel

in his hands. Paul then speaks on the telephone to Helen, who is now at her beach house and

refuses to attend his performance; "it's so quiet and peaceful here," she says, pleading that she

does not want to be around people.

To Paul's performance of the finale of "Tristan and Isolde," the film cross-cuts between him on stage and Helen at her beach house as she drinks and painfully doubts that she will find comfort in her upcoming marriage. She eventually walks along the beach and into the water, purposely drowning herself. The music drowns out all diegetic sound from both Helen and

Paul's environment. The camera movements and editing are now in rhythm with the music, as if the actions are dictated by the tragedy suggested by "Tristan and Isolde."

64 Michael Rogin, Blackface. White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 211-212. 63 I P a g e The finale of the Wagner opera tells the death of two passionate lovers, whose mutual adoration can only be fulfilled in death. Helen dies literally, but, in a sense, Paul dies as well. On stage during this performance, Paul appears somber and dejected. And when he puts down the violin at the end of the performance, his face now shown in full close-up, Paul's sadness remains consistent with the final notes of the Wagner opera, despite the enormous applause heaped on him from off-camera. This shot dissolves to the beach at dawn where Helen has drowned herself, and the camera moves to reveal the back of Paul, now aware of his fiancee's death. In the picture and sound editing, there is a rhythmic flow that lasts from the end of the music to Paul staring at the water where Helen drowned herself, as if during his performance he is aware of some inevitable tragic fate that awaits him. The sense of tragedy associated with the music has seeped into Paul's life.

In the end, the film tries to prove that Esther is right. During the final scene, Paul reflects to Sid, "It all seemed so simple: Live your life. Do your work. But you find out it's not that easy"; such a comment echoes his mother's advice that as an artist, he cannot separate his life and his work. According to director Jean Negulesco, Humoresque is about "the great problem of genius."65 Earlier in the film, Båer advises Boray:

.. .Music is a compulsion, an obsession. You'll blow up if you don't play it. What do you

think a concert career would be? Something you could put together with toothpicks?

Little ink spots and finger exercises? Drop a nickel in the slot and out pops a concert?

[He points to the violin] How many minutes, days, months, years of your life are

embedded there in the waxed wood? There's your biography. Paul Boray, virtuoso,

artist...

65 Rosenthal, 73.

64 I P age The advice of Båer and Esther reflects the intended message of the film. Paul's eventual disillusionment makes him consider the truth of their advice; he realizes that music will be the only available outlet for his emotions.

The film's ending also allows for a counter-reading, which emphasizes the film's problematic portrait of the Jewish mother. During Paul's performance of "Tristan and Isolde," the film cuts to the box where sit Paul's father, brother and sister. Arriving late, Esther emerges as a silhouette at the back of this balcony and happily joins her family, who warmly respond to her presence at the performance. With Helen absent and Paul performing magnificently onstage, this scene offers Esther and her family a happy resolution. On the other hand, the dark music and expressive lighting as Esther first enters this shot—not to mention how this moment is intercut with Helen painfully considering her life—make the film's attitude toward the mother seem even more ambiguous. In addition, the sequence of events that leads up to Helen's death allow us to easily read her confrontation with Esther as what ultimately drives her to suicide. Even if Paul is unaware of this confrontation between the two women in his life, the viewer is aware of this event and knows that a retum to his family is not a viable option for the violin prodigy. We now know that, at the start of the film, it is Helen's death that provoked the film's flashback structure and prompted Paul to urter the lines, 'Tm outside, always looking in. Feeling all the time I'm far away from home." In the film's final shot—which echoes Paul's line, "Where home is, I don't know"—the Jewish musician walks down a shadowy street that only vaguely resembles the

Lower East Side, as night turns to morning. Garfield now resembles the rootless orphan from his earlier films.

65 I P a g e It is worth mentioning Michael Rogin's astute observations concerning Hollywood's portrayal of

Jewish parents in the mid-forties biopics of Jolson and Gershwin, which were produced at

approximately the same time as GarfiekTs remake of Humoresque. In contrast to the 1920s

Jewish melodramas like The Jazz Singer. Rogin sees these later Jewish parental figures as

lacking authority, almost childlike, and easily swayed by the influence of American opportunity.

In comparison, earlier films such as The Jazz Singer or His People show the parents'

expectations and values (not to mention, those films' vivid recreations of the Jewish immigrant

community) embody some sort of alternative to American assimilation, social mobility and its

inherent values.66 In this remake of Humoresque—a product of the Hollywood studio's

ambivalence toward representing Jewish identity on screen, and its opposition against depicting

Jewish difference—the social and cultural differences embodied by Esther and Helen and their

respective worlds are largely removed in the second half of the film, with the Jewish mother unable to represent any alternative to Paul's social success (other than an opposition to adultery).

And "since ethnic conflict does not separate mother and son," suggests Rogin concerning this

later version of Humoresque. "the incest taboo alone must do the trick."67

Humoresque was GarfiekTs last film in his contract with Warner Bros. Away from the ideological demands of the studio system, his next film would be his first venture as an independent producer. If the John Garfield version of Humoresque raises the problematic aspects of earlier Hollywood filmic portraits of the Jewish family and the success story associated with it, his next film, intelligently balancing the aspects and contradictions of the actor's persona,

offers an alternative model.

66 Rogin, 190-191.

67 Rogin, 211-212.

66 I P age Chapter 3:

John Garfield, the Jevvish Family and the Immigrant Community

With John Garfield, left-wing novelist, playwright, screenwriter and director Abraham Polonsky

would make two moral parables—Body and Soul (1947) and Force of Evil (1948)—dealing

with the need for ethnic/Jewish working class and family solidarity and the personal corruption

caused by social mobility within the world of American capitalism. Mainly through a close

reading of the film, this chapter will focus on their first collaboration and how it revitalized the

structure, archetypes and conventions of the early Jewish family melodramas. In addition, I wish

to suggest that in Body and Soul. Abraham Polonsky fully understood and articulated the progressive aspects of John Garfield's screen persona—in particular, its ambivalent relationship to the American male ideals of toughness, violence and independence, its dignified embodiment

of the social outsider and the inclination toward social responsibility and collectivism—and, in

doing so, created a portrait of the Jewish family that rebels against the social mobility celebrated

in the films of the twenties.68

With Body and Soul. John Garfield began his career as an independent producer. Within

the independent studio Enterprise Productions, he had his own unit called Roberts Productions,

named after his business manager, Bob Roberts. Enterprise Productions strove to give

681 am not suggesting that Body and Soul director, Robert Rossen, cannot claim any responsibility for the finished film or cannot claim an understanding of Garfield's screen persona, as he did write several of the actor's best and most important early roles at Warner Bros. The significance of Rossen's efforts in defining Garfield's persona and developing this film is a subject still yet to be researched and analyzed. However, this paper is based mainly on a close reading of Body and Soul and Polonsky's shooting script, which contains many of the significant details in the film that I will discuss.

67 IPag e unprecedented creative freedom to the stars, writers and directors, a lot of whom at the studio were politically on the left. Robert Aldrich recalled the utopian aspects of the production

company, "Enterprise embodied a really brilliant idea of a communal way to make films. It was a

brand new departure, the first time I can remember that independent filmmakers had the money

they needed." (But, he adds, "[the studio] didn't have anybody in charge who knew how to make

pictures," which resulted in its relatively-short lifespan.)69

In comparison to the major studios' tendency to downplay Jewish issues and

characterizations, Enterprise did not provide the same resistance. The Jewish artists at the studio

therefore were able to instinctively draw on their own Jewish roots as much as they liked. For

Polonsky and Garfield, "Jewishness was part of [their] lives." In a later interview, Polonsky recalled that the film's protagonist, Charley Davis, was always envisioned as a Jew, "It was just

accepted that he was going to be Jewish... No one ever discussed it, [and] during the course of the picture when I wanted to do a scene that made certain reference to the Jews, there was no

argument."70 As opposed to the social mobility promoted in the earlier studio-produced Jewish melodramas, perhaps the freedom that Garfield and Polonsky enjoyed in expressing the

characters'—and possibly their own—Jewish roots allowed Body and Soul's Jewish community

"back home" to not only stand for a much more specifically articulated and consistent body of values than it does in the 1946 Humoresque but also, the values of this community are shown to question the moral consequences of success in America.

69 Eyles, Allen, "Films of Enterprise: A Studio History," Focus on Film (April 1980): 25.

70 Samuel Rosenthal, Golden Bovchik: Star-Audience Relations Between John Garfield and the Contemporary American Jewish Community. (Masters thesis, The Annexberg School for Communication University of Pennsylvania, 1993), 104.

68 I P a g e The Popular Front and its Representation of the American Jew

Although Polonsky, director Robert Rossen and Garfield felt a relatively greater freedom at Enterprise to express their Jewish roots than they would have at one of the major studios,

Lester Friedman correctly points out the "ambivalence" in the film's "use of the characters'

Jewishness."71 Other than the mention of the Holocaust, the film refrains from developing the characters' Jewish identity in a way that would mark it as different from other American minorities. But too often Jewish film historians have ascribed the film's ambiguity in confronting the Jewishness of the characters to the general pro-assimilationist trend often celebrated in

Hollywood film, and failed to see the film's representation of Jewish identity as a product of the

Popular Front, to which John Garfield, Robert Rossen and Abraham Polonsky were important cultural contributors.

The Popular Front was a leftward alliance of the Communist Party and political sympathizers—liberal supporters of Roosevelt and the New Deal—in an attempt to confront the spread of fascism both at home and abroad. Body and Soul is certainly a product of that multi- ethnic, multi-racial working class solidarity. As Polonsky wrote in his tribute to Garfield, "That world of want, poor New York Jews, the Enlightenment, and Utopian Socialism, the Life of

Reason haunting the glorious future, was the heart of Body and Soul. It is Romance with

Rebellion."72

Michael Denning says that artists and intellects during the era of the Popular Front constantly questioned "the meaning of race, ethnicity and region in the United States, and the

71 Lester Friedman, Hollywood's Image of the Jew (New York: Ungar, 1982), 116. 72 Abraham Polonsky, "Introduction" in Abraham Polonsky's Body and Soul: The Critical Edition, ed. John Schultheiss, 7-10 (Northridge, CA: The Center for Telecommunication Studies California State University, 2002), 7.

69 I P a g e relation between ethnic nationalism, Americanism, and internationalism." What resulted,

Denning offers, "was a paradoxical synthesis of competing nationalisms and internationalism— pride in ethnic heritage and identity combined with an assertive Americanism and a popular internationalism."73 In his seminal book on the Jewish identity of the studio moguls, Neal Gabler goes one step further and suggests the personal attraction for Jews toward a kind of socialist utopia was a way for them to "become attached to something larger and distinctively non-

Jewish." It was a way of both refusing to assimilate into the dominant culture that rejected them as Jews, and "creating a utopia where Jews would be accepted." Gabler cites Ring Lardner Jr. speaking about his Jewish wife at that time:

One of the things that really appealed to her about the Party was the fact that it was kind

of a channel for her assimilationist viewpoint. I think that was certainly true of a lot of

people I knew. There was certainly, among the people I knew in Hollywood, much less

identification with Judaism generally than there was during and after the war or than

there is today.74

Body and Soul Plot Summary

The film opens as Jewish boxing champion Charley Davis (Garfield), lying in his bed at his training camp in the country, tosses in his sleep and wakes up shouting, "Ben!" He gets in his car and drives from the camp—much to the bewilderment of his trainers, promoter and manager—to the home of his mother and on-and-off girlfriend, Anna (Anne Revere) and Peg

73 Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: the Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London; New York: Verso, 1998), 130.

74 Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York: Crown Publishers, 1988), 333. 70 I P a g e (Lilli Palmer) respectively, on the Lower East Side. His mother seems to receive him coldly. He tells her that Ben, the person whose nåme he was uttering in his sleep during the previous scene, has died. After a few moments, his mother painfully tells him to leave. Failing to find comfort at his Lower East Side home, he goes to visit Alice (Hazel Brooks), a glamorous blonde nightclub singer, who has been his girlfriend during his successful run as a boxing champion.

The next day, shortly before his big fight, his manager, Roberts (Lloyd Gough), and promoter, Quinn (William Conrad), visit Charley in his dressing room. Roberts confirms with

Charley the agreed-upon details of the fixed fight:

You go in there and just box with that kid for fifteen rounds like we agreed. Nobody get

hurt. Nobody get knocked out. You'11 lose by a clean decision. You'll get your money

and we're squared away.

Although agreeing to this plan, Charley is still resistant, "I could knock that Marlowe on his ear

in two rounds." After Roberts and Quinn leave him alone in the room, "conflict, indecision, and memory touch Charley's face," as Polonsky's original shooting script describes.75 As Charley

lies down on the table, the camera cranes upward, looking down on him as he says to himself,

"All gone down the drain... everything down the drain... All these years... everything down the drain..."

The screen blurs and dissolves to the beginning of the film's flashback, which comprises the main body of the narrative. Charley now seems younger as his boyish energy is readily apparent. Charley has just won his first amateur bout and is being celebrated with a reception

given by the "Iroquois Democratic club of the 14* A.D." As a privilege for the nighfs

75 Abraham Polonsky, "Body and Soul" in Abraham Polonsky's Body and Soul: The Critical Edition. ed. John Schultheiss, 7-10 (Northridge, CA: The Center for Telecommunication Studies California State University, 2002), 29. 71 I P a g e triumphant amateur pugilist, Charley is given the opportunity to dance with Peg Born, the woman hired to be "Miss Iroquois Democratic Club, 14th A.D," as she appears in a bathing suit with a banner across her chest. After the reception, Peg reluctantly agrees to have Charley accompany her to her Greenwich Village apartment. He finds out that she is a painter and edges his way into her apartment where she, in spite of her playful resistance, becomes attracted to him.

Later that night, Charley comes home to the candy store owned and run by his parents.

His parents have heard about Charley's win in the boxing tournament and his mother, Anna, expresses her disapproval of his intention to begin a career as a professional fighter. Charley in turn articulates his bitterness at the prospect of working in the candy store all his life, "I don't want to end up like Pa," he insists. When Quinn, the neighborhood boxing promoter, is interested in supporting Charley' s possible career, his father gives him some money for boxing equipment.

Later in the evening, gangsters bomb the speakeasy next door, destroying the candy store and killing Charley's father.

The next scene shows the Davis candy store boarded up. Charley, following his mother's demands, has reluctantly given up his hopes of being a prizefighter and is instead enrolled in night school. At the start of this scene, he is waiting for Peg, as he grudgingly has arranged for her to meet his mother. He complains of not håving enough money to take Peg anywhere on dates. His friend, Shorty (Joseph Pevney), encourages Charley to pursue boxing as the only successful way of making money during the mass unemployment of the Depression. As Peg dines with Charley, Anna and Shorty, a welfare woman drops in to interview Charley's family.

Humiliated, Charley now furiously insists on a boxing career as the only way to survive

72 I P a g e economically. "No! I forbid," Anna insists, "Better buy a gun and shoot yourself." "You need money to buy a gun," Charley feverishly yells back.

There follows a montage chronicling Charley's meteoric rise as a prizefighter. At the end of this sequence, Charley realizes that cutting in business manager Roberts is his only chance of fighting for the championship title: "He's the dough, the real estate, everything. The business,"

Quinn insists. But Shorty warns Charley against allowing Roberts to assume ownership of him.

Charley arrives at his new spacious uptown apartment greeted by Peg. Shorty warns her that Charley has, in the meantime, become affected by his success. Charley and Peg then spend the day together and become engaged. Later, waiting at the apartment for Charley and Peg's return is Anna and Quinn's girlfriend, Alice. Roberts also enters the apartment and introduces himself to Charley; he belittles Shorty's role in the boxer's career and encourages him to postpone his engagement while he trains for the upcoming fight against the current champion.

The next scene shows Charley beating a punching bag at a training camp in the country. As he trains, he begins to eye Alice and the two start to flirt.

In an earlier scene, we see Roberts sitting with Quinn and Arnold (James Burke), the manager of the current champion, Ben Chaplin. Roberts, expecting to be paid for the debt accrued by Arnold, wants Ben to fight Charley, the new contender. But in this scene we are told that in Ben's last fight, his head cracked against a post and he is still suffering from a blood clot.

Arnold turns to Ben and asks if he is willing to fight. This precise moment is when we firstse e

Ben (as played by Canada Lee), an African-American fighter, who sits on a couch at the opposite end of the room, and answers, "You been square with me, Arnold. Fil fight Davis." But this agreement is based on a previously discussed condition that Charley will not hit Ben and the winner will be declared by "a decision." After Arnold and Ben leave the room, Roberts tells

73 I P a g e Quinn to let Charley knock out the former champ, "The crowd likes a killer, and Charley's a

hard fighter. It'11 look fixed if he takes it easy."

In his next fight, Charley knocks out Ben, who afterward lies seriously injured in his

dressing room. Charley, feeling concerned about Ben's condition, offers "anything I can do,"

then at a loss, he offers money. After Charley leaves for his victory party, Shorty overhears

Arnold angrily confront Roberts, "You promised to have Davis take it easy." At the party in his

honor, Charley is confronted by Shorty, who tries to reveal how Ben was double-crossed. Shorty

then quits his post on Charley's crew. On his way out of the party, Shorty is beaten by one of

Roberts' thugs. Charley runs to help him but Shorty gets up and uneasily negotiates his steps

across the street until he is hit by a passing car, after which he is declared dead. Peg and Charley

walk home, both bewildered by the evening's events. Peg thinks to herself, horrified by what

took place earlier, "If one could only say, Charley, that it started here or there.. .but we're in

something horrible...and we've got to get out." But Charley enjoys his status as "champ" and

wonders what he would do outside of fighting, "[Should I] go back to the candy store?" Peg

insists that she cannot continue their relationship as long as Charley continues working for

Roberts. Charley is left alone on the stairs as Peg walks into her home.

Next is a montage sequence showing Charley's high living as a successful boxing

champion. But feeling lonely and isolated, he asks Ben to work with him. As Charley has been

living extravagantly, he has become increasingly indebted financially to Roberts, who in

exchange asks the champ to throw his upcoming fight with the contender Marlowe (Artie

Dorrell). Roberts demands that Charley box fifteen rounds with Marlowe and lose by a

"decision," and even gives Davis sixty-thousand dollars to bet against himself. The rest of the

film concerns Charley's moral dilemma about whether to throw the fight. In the end, Charley

74 I P a g e decides to win the fight, realizing his allegiance to the American outsiders—like his family and

Ben—with whom he has grown up.

Young Charley Davis versus the Depression

Consistent with Garfield's characterizations in his progressive Warner films of the thirties often written by Body and Soul director Robert Rossen—such as Joe Bell in Dust Be My

Destinv (1939) and George Leach in The Sea Wolf 0941)—as well as Mickey Borden in Four

Daughters. Charley insists on maintaining his dignity despite the poverty and humiliation that is thrust upon him. And similar to Garfield's character in Humoresque. Charley has his own illusions of independence. In one of the film's early scenes, he walks down the street of the neighborhood, stops and faintly rolls his shoulders, a subtle gesture reminiscent of James

Cagney's self-aggrandizing characters. At various times later in the film, when feeling conflicted and alienated within the corrupt boxing world, he repeats this gesture—although less enthusiastically—as a way of reassuring his composure.

During the earliest moments of the film's flashback, Charley as a young man exudes a boyish energy and confidence as well as naiveté. This is nowhere more apparent than the first scene within the flashback. Charley is at the party celebrating his triumph in his first amateur boxing tournament. Charley smiles glowingly, applauds for himself and cheers with the rest of crowd. By making Charley so naive (emotionally, sexually), the film is setting the first part of the narrative are that will chart his growing maturity and wisdom in the face of his alienation and corruption. Although violence is instinctive to Charley, a product of his growing up on the streets, Polonsky's script is also drawing on GarfieWs persona and its ambivalence toward violence: throughout the course of the film, not only is Charley battling between the forces of

75 I P a g e poverty and success, as well as success and corruption, but also between violence and reason, the latter embodied by his family. When Charley is invited by the M.C. to dance with Peg, he is surprisingly bashfiil and self-conscious. The M.C mocks Charley's hesitancy, "Take her around,

Charley. She won't bite ya." In fact, at one point, Charley feels so humiliated by the M.Cs comments that he moves to take a punch at him, but is stopped by Peg: this slight violent threat reflects Charley's emotional and sexual irnmaturity. Finally, as Polonsky's script beautifully describes, "a little human pity comes into [Peg's] face" and she begins to help initiate the dance.76 In fact, Peg's attraction to Charley is based not only on his sexual attractiveness, but also his innocence. Early in the film, in a wonderfully playful scene at Peg's apartment, she articulates her attraction to Charley:

Peg: Well, Charley, you're sort of innocent... You know, when I went to school, I

learned a poem. Went: 'Tiger! Tiger! Burning bright / In the forests of the night / What

immortal hand or eye / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?'

Charley: What's 'symmetry'?

Peg [with a smile]: Well-built.

Peg is attracted to, as articulated through her quoting of Blake's poem, the contradiction between

Charley's boyish innocence and his physique. Earlier in this scene, she sketches Charley as a tiger with apparent fur. Peter Valenti comments on "the wonderfully ambiguous image" of Peg's drawing: "Charley is streetwise, but at the same time innocent. He knows survival skills, but not the most crucial ones for his soul. Charley is a tiger, but a neighborhood tiger."77 But despite

76 Polonsky, "Body and Soul," 30.

77 Peter Valenti, "Body and Soul in the Forest of the Night: Warner Bros. Meets HUAC" in Abraham Polonsky's Body and Soul: The Critical Edition. ed. John Schultheiss, 299-324 76 I P age such cheerfulness and naiveté, Charley's anger is always under the surface and capable of bursting forth at any moment. A more mild incarnation of this anger occurs in the scene mentioned above, when the M.C. mocks Charley's sexual insecurity, instinctively causing him to physically threaten the man. Even during this light moment in the film, there is an instinctive resort to violence in the face of humiliation, whether it is caused by sexual embarrassment or economic deprivation. To show local boxing promoter Quinn that Charley has the drive to make it as a boxer, Shorty starts an argument with another young man in the neighborhood. As expected, Charley comes to Shorty's defense by physically fighting the other man. Polonsky's script describes Charley at this moment as suddenly fighting "with a wild fury, as if to get rid of all his troubles."78 As Charley confides to Peg, he wants to become a boxer because fighting is the only thing he knows how to do.

In an earlier scene at the family-owned candy store, Charley's apparent cheerfulness is suddenly—but briefly—undercut when he expresses his resistance toward the limited future he sees for himself in the ghetto. During this moment, he speaks in a quick staccato tone with bitterness that can also be read on his face:

You think I want to spend the rest of my life seiling kids two-cent soda? 'Mister Davis,

gimme a penny candy! Mister Davis gimme a pack of cigarettes! Mind the baby... Make

mine raspberry...'

(Northridge, CA: The Center for Telecommunication Studies California State University, 2002), 324. 78 Polonsky, "Body and Soul," 58.

77 I P a g e He then shoves down the fountain lever and soda spurts; the sudden sound of the soda punctuates

Charley's rapid delivery. Polonsky's shooting script describes Charley's face at this moment as

"hard with humiliation and fury."79

Charley's ultimate humiliation occurs when the welfare woman arrives to interview

Anna, much to his surprise. After the woman asks his mother a few questions, Charley kicks her out, "Tell them we don't want any help! Tell them we're dead!" Charley and Anna stand face to face after the welfare woman leaves. His body remains fixed opposite his mother, as he begins to point to Shorty emphatically:

Charley: Shorty! Shorty, get me that fight from Quinn. I want money... [shouting

furiously] You understand? Money! Money!

Anna: No I forbid! I forbid! Better buy a gun and shoot yourself.

Charley: You need money to buy a gun.

Charley runs upstairs onto the roof, followed by Peg. He says to her, "I don't want any handouts.

You think I like the idea of waiting for the world to decide what to do with me?" From this moment, Charley fully rejects for himself the ambitions and values (education, night school) of his mother and the fate of his father.

Charley's Jewish Father Figure

As I discussed in the previous chapter, the Jewish father, as depicted in the early Jewish melodramas, could not find a place for himself as a figure of authority within the Americanizing

Jewish family. In most of the early Jewish melodramas, the father exhibits passivity in the face of the (largely economic) realities of American life. As depicted in those early silent films, the

79 Polonsky, "Body and Soul," 51.

78 I P a g e role of the Jewish father in the Old World was traditionally tliat of scholar while the mother took

care of the practicalities of family life.

In Body and Soul, the father, David, is played by Group veteran Art Smith (perhaps most

memorable as the meek agent of Humphrey Bogarfs Dix Steele in Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely

Plage.) In his one scene in the film, David explains how he ended up with a candy store in the

"jungle" of the Lower East Side, "Do you think I picked the East Side like Columbus picked

America? It was possible to buy the candy store with a small cash down payment." Although

possessing pragmatism, his lack of militancy differs from his son. While insisting to his mother

that he wants to be a fighter and make something of himself, Charley states that he does not

"want to end up like pa." Charley refuses to accept such passivity for himself.

As opposed to his wife Anna, who willfully has her own expectations of her son and

expresses them ("Twenty years ago, I wanted to move to a place so our Charley would grow up a

nice boy and learn a profession. But instead, we live in a jungle so he could be a wild animal."),

David lacks such vision—or is perhaps just more skeptical—and quietly supports his son's

ambitions to be a fighter by giving him a few dollars to buy boxing equipment. But his support

of Charley's boxing career seems to go against his berter judgment—when Shorty runs into the candy store and tells Charley about Quinn's intentions to promote him as a fighter, David's conceraed expression matches that of his wife. David's accidental murder, at the end of this scene, is the final blow in his slow defeat by the harsh realities in which he and his family live.

Toward the end of Body and Soul as Charley is immersed in the moral dilemma of whether to throw his last fight, he is confronted by Shimon, a Jewish neighborhood grocer on the

Lower East Side. With dark curly hair, an ironic tone in his voice and a trace of a Yiddish accent, he resembles a more common Jewish character type; Shimon is played by Yiddish Theatre actor

79 I P a g e Shimen Rushkin. The Jewish grocer comments how "over in Europe, the Nazis are killing people like us—just because of their religion. But here Charley Davis is champeen." Among the various meanings of this moment, Shimon is addressing the significance of håving a strong militant

Jewish fighter—a Samson—in the face of the millions of Jewish victims of Nazi persecution.

In his very interesting essay, "Monarch of the Millions," Peter Stanfield examines the attraction among left-wing Jewish writers and directors to the boxing film genre. These artists, he argues, played a major role in developing the Hollywood postwar boxing genre that began with the success of Garfield's Body and Soul and lasted until the very early Sixties. Stanfield suggests that, among the various reasons for their interest in this film genre, "Jewish boxers offered a more legitimate figure with which to counter the stereotype of the effeminate, scholarly, artistically inclined Jew."80 The Jewish boxer—and Garfield's embodiment of it—offered an alternative to the passive image of the Jew. Stanfield goes on to suggest that by offering a proletariat boxing hero and recreating the ethnic working class environment in which such characters inhabited, these successful, assimilating Jewish writers were redeeming themselves in masculine, ethnic and class terms.

It is interesting to note that Garfield starred as the son, Ralph Berger, in the Group

Theatre's 1936 original production of Odets' Awake and Sing. With Garfield serving as a sort of ego ideal for the playwright, Odets insisted on the handsome and youthful actor as the affirmative voice of the play.81 Ralph Berger defines himself in relation to the figures that

80 Peter Stanfield/TVlonarch of the Millions" in "Un-American" Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklisted Era, eds. Frank Krutnik et al., 79-96 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 87-88.

81 Swindell, Larry, Body and Soul: the Story of John Garfield (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1975), 67-68, 80-81.

80 I P a g e surround him. At the start of the play, Ralph is a romantic who warms up to the sociahst ideals of his grandfather, Jacob. But over the course of the play, Ralph becomes deeply aware of his

grandfather's limitations. As Jacob advises his grandson:

Do what is in your heart and you carry in yourself a revolution. But you should act. Not

like me, a man who had golden opportunities but drank instead a glass of tea.

Ralph's father, Myron, also acknowledges himself as a failure who lacked even Jacob's visi on,

"The moment I began losing my hair, I just knew I was destined to be a failure in life... and when

I grew bald, I was."83 Ralph responds to his father's failure in life, "Let me die like a dog if I can't get more from life."84 At the play's conclusion, in the face of his mother's internalization of

American bourgeois values, his father's passivity and sense of defeat and his grandfather's sui eide, Ralph Berger decides to turn his grandfather's socialist ideals for a better world into action. Odets' play chronicles Ralph's movement away from mere romanticism toward conviction and action: after Jacob's death, Ralph proclaims in the final moments of the play:

' Awake and sing,' he said. Right here he stood and said it. The night he died, I saw it like

a thunderbolt! I saw he was dead and I was bom! I swear to God, Fm one week old! I

want the whole world to hear it—fresh blood, arms. We got 'em. We're glad we're

living.85

Similarly, over the course of Body and Soul's narrative, as the youthful fighter discovers in himself the values that his mother honors—the values of his secular Jewish upbringing, the

82 Clifford Odets, Waiting for Lefty and Other Plavs (New York: Grove Press, 1993), 78.

83 Odets, 86-87.

84 Odets, 100.

85 Odets, 100-101. values that are in his heart— such Jewish militancy becomes realized through Garfield's

characterization of Charley Davis. As Polonsky defines Body and Soul as the world of "want, poor New York Jews, the Enlightenment, and Utopian Socialism, the life of Reason haunting the glorious future," he goes on to say that "Odets, of course, was an electric part of this literary movement, and his plays were their enchanting vision, but Garfield was the star for the whole world, the romantic Rebel himself."86

Charley's Jewish Mother

As discussed in the last chapter, the 1920s Jewish family melodrama depicted the mother as the main voice of authority within the Jewish family. Body and Soul builds on the American

Jewish family dynamics portrayed in those early films. With Charley 's father absent, the mother is not only the main figure of authority within the family, but comes to embody the Jewish home and its values for her son. She, along with Peg, comes to represent an alternative to the individual social mobility that Charley sees as the only way out of the ghetto. In one particular scene, she describes how people like her son should weather the Depression, "Times are hard. It's not easy for a boy to get an education nowadays. But if his friends encourage him, if he goes to school and gets an education, if he makes sacrifices..." Not only does she emphasize here the importance of pursuing an education and becoming a professional but also the important collective influence of friends and community. In Body and Soul, the Jewish mother encourages in her son an alternative to the competitive and aggressive capitalism of American society. The first montage depicting Charley's success as a fighter is rather striking in its emphasis not so much on Charley's success but on the fighters he knocks to the ground. Shot after shot shows

86 Abraham Polonsky, "Introduction," 7. Charley's opponents falling down. The sequence even shows close-ups of trains rushing along

tracks—a convention in American films of that era often signifying success—with superimposed

images of beaten fighters falling to the ground. At the end of this montage, the camera presents

the point-of-view of one of Charley's boxing opponents, as it falls to the ground after Charley's

punch. This sequence emphasizes not only the violence that paved the way for Charley's success

but also refers to an earlier comment made by Anna coneerning the brutality of the sport: after

Charley wins his first amateur bout, his mother inquires, "And the other boy, did you hurt him

good, champion?" This montage's emphasis on the fallen fighters reflects the concern that Anna

articulates in that earlier scene. In moments such as these, one can suggest that, despite their

understanding of what motivates Charley, the filmmakers are morally aligned with the Jewish

mother.

Abraham Polonsky and actor Anne Revere build on the positive aspects of the Jewish mothers in films like Borzage's Humoresque and The Jazz Singer. As discussed earlier, in films

such as His People and The Jazz Singer. the mother provided a more humane alternative to the rigid orthodoxy of the Jewish Old World patriarchal tradition. But generally speaking, what defined these earlier Jewish mothers was their adaptability to the New World and their love and hope for their children. In the hands of the left-wing filmmakers Polonsky and Robert Rossen,

Body and Soul develops the Jewish mother' s secular and humane values. At the same time, Anne

Revere injects the Jewish mother figure with a quiet stoicism, unyielding in her core values.

When Charley insists on being a fighter, she responds emphatically, "So fight for something, not for money."

Unlike many of the earlier silent films as well as the 1946 Humoresque. in Body and

Soul, there is never the sense of the mother living only vicariously through her son's talent and

83 I P a g e career. There is a strength to Anna that is not solely invested in her son. When Charley achieves success as a boxer and suggests that his mother give up the candy store and move uptown to "a decent place," she responds, "I live in a decent place, Charley." This provides a contrast to the earlier Jewish melodramas where the mother often moves in with her successful son. Anna has a sense of who she is and what she stands for, which is not necessarily defined by her son's ambition.

While immersed in the corrupt boxing world and morally compromised by his success as a prizefighter, Charley's alienation from home is first represented in the film with a beautifully handled scene between Charley and his mother. With Ben's death keeping him awake the night before his final fight, Charley drives from the training camp in the country to his family's tenement home on the Lower East Side. When we first see Anna Davis, she is by the stove preparing tea in the foreground of the right side of the frame. At the opposite end of the shot,

Charley enters the door. As they both acknowledge each other's presence, he stands still in front of the door frame. The camera holds them both in a long shot, expressing the large space between them, a space held in check by Anna's painful restraint on her emotions. When Charley opens the door, Polonsky's shooting script describes "a twist of feeling" gathering in his mother's "features, [causing the cup and saucer to shake] in her hand." Charley also appears torn: in this scene, he wears a long coat that is too large for film and helps his body appear stiff, but his greeting of "heilo ma" is spoken, as described by the script, as if he were "a small boy again."87 Anna places down her cup and saucer but misses the table, causing the china to crash on the floor. This momentarily breaks the stillness and resistance in both of them. Charley rushes to help her pick up the pieces and takes this opportunity to look into her eyes, trying to connect

87 Polonsky, "Body and Soul," 19. 84 I P a g e with her. But she reluctantly tums away, resisting him. Anna gets up and sits at the kitchen table

as Charley stands behind her. Both of their bodies remain rigid: "what do you want Charley,"

Anna asks softly. "Ben died," Charley answers succinctly. Then Charley begins to speak

emphatically, with a slight trembling in his voice, "I couldn't sleep ma. I thought maybe I—"

Anna's body and face remain frozen: "Peg is sleeping here," she answers.

As Anna remains seated at the table, Charley puts his hands in his pockets and wanders

into the back bedroom. Charley begins to speak about Ben with a slight tremble in his voice, "I

couldn't stand it up there, Ma, after they took Ben away. I couldn't sleep, so I came down. I had

to find a place where I could lie down." (At this point in the film's narrative, we do not yet know who Ben is. But Charley's desperate flee from the training camp toward home in hopes for a place "where he could lay down" after "they took Ben away" reflects the significance of the

African American boxer as a surrogate for the family and community from which Charley has alienated himself. In turn, Ben as a family surrogate will help articulate the nature of Charley's relationship to his family: i.e., Anna embodies Charley's instinctive alliance with other social outsiders.)

As Charley looks around the back room, Anna slowly joins him as her shadow alerts him to her approaching presence. The film suddenly switches to her visual point-of-view as Charley feels confronted by her gaze, "I didn't mean all those things I said to Peg. You know that." He now appears much smaller, dwarfed by the empty space in the frame. This shift in point-of-view, which is accompanied by a musical strain, reflects not only Charley's acknowledgement of why his mother is so cold to him but also exemplifies the respect and identification the film provides the Jewish mother.

85 I P a g e Peg arrives a few moments later. Charley tries to embrace her as they stand in the backroom but she collapses onto the bed and cries. Then, while still showing Peg and Charley in the back room, the camera adjusts itself to have the mother's presence dominate the frame. "Go away Charley. Go away," Anna says, as if speaking for Peg's collapsed body. This moment establishes the connection between Peg and Anna, reflecting not only the solidarity between them but, for Charley, their equal embodiment of home, the world he has left behind.

This scene also makes an effort to show the pain that Anna feels as she denies her son "a place to lie down." After Charley leaves his family's apartment, the film cuts to Anna watching, through the window off the kitchen, her son drive away. Her body is east mostly in silhouette.

The film's decision to show her visual point-of-view as she is being film ed from behind, subtly allows the audience to identify and intimately connect with the Jewish mother during this emotionally painful moment.

Peg and the Jewish Mother

Peg Bora was initially conceived as a girl from Brooklyn, but when Jewish German actor

Lilli Palmer was chosen for the role (with the encouragement of Albert Maltz and Ring Lardner

Jr. who wrote her first American film, Fritz Lang's Cloak and Dagger)88, the background of the character was changed: now Peg became a "classy old-world dame" who grew up travelling around Europe before coming to America with her family and settling in Highlandtown.

88 Swindell, 209.

89 Lilli Palmer, Change Lobsters and Dance (New York: Warner Books, Inc., 1975), 175.

86 I P ag e Peg's precise ethnicity is rather ambiguous. But often in these early Hollywood depictions of Jewish immigrant life, the ethnicity of the Jewish son's girlfriend is not a major issue, as these films often encouraged assimilation and intermarriage. As we also see in Body and Soul and the 1946 Humoresque. the real importance in these Jewish family melodramas is the ability of the girlfriend (Jewish or not) to coexist with the Jewish son's family. And in Body and Soul, the bond between Anna and Peg is rather emphatically based on shared values. Anna is impressed that Peg's father was a druggist ("A professional man," the Jewish mother responds with a smile), that she is studying to become an artist and is encouraging Charley's attending of night school. What fmally clinches Anna's approval of Peg is the latter's similar modest background and sense of humility. As Peg speaks of herself and her family:

We're very poor, Mrs. Davis. We've always been poor. My father scraped and scraped,

and when prohibition came he sold some of the bonded medicinal whisky, you know,

without prescription... Oh they arrested and fined him, and I got fed up anyway, so I

came to New York. We're nothing fancy.

As I mentioned above, the film depicts the solidarity between Peg and Anna, and, for Charley, they come to equally embody the warmth, as well as the values, of home. In a lovely moment toward the end of the film—the morning Charley has returned home after feeling lonely and alienated at a wild party thrown in his uptown apartment—Anna is teaching Peg how to make

90 In his essay on Body and Soul, Mark Rappaport suggests that Jewish identity in American film was often concealed but sometimes offered itself to be decoded. Despite the nåme of Peg Born sounding Irish, Rappaport argues, Jewish audiences were invited to read Palmer's Jewish background—which led the actor to flee Germany in 1933—onto her character, "the audience is encouraged to go along with the fiction that Peg is Irish, while knowing that Palmer isn't. Peg, Irish or not, is the nice Jewish girl who always sticks by her guy and even has his mother's approval." Mark Rappaport, "The Candy Store that Dåre Not Speak its Nåme" in Abraham Polonsky' s Body and Soul: The Critical Edition. ed. John Schultheiss, 7-10 (Northridge, CA: The Center for Telecommunication Studies California State University, 2002), 331. 87 I P a g e " potato pancakes (although the food is only specified in the script, not in the film). Charley has finished shaving and Peg walks over and kisses him. He closes his eyes, "more," he playfully demands. Peg then purs a piece of the potato pancake in his mouth. "You approve," she asks. He kisses her and says, "Y'know, that's a taste that never leaves your mouth." This momenfs

Murring of the nourishing ethnic food based on Anna's recipe and the nourishing kiss from Peg helps reflect the latter's vital embodiment, in Charley's eyes, of the Jewish home.

Perhaps a product of the film's mature dealing with family relations as well as its wish to present the immigrant working class community as a positive alternative to the moral compromises associated with assimilation and social mobility, the characterization of Peg reflects a rather significant break with the Jewish family melodramas of the past: the film openly associates sexuality with the nice Jewish girlfriend.91 (This is an especially rare occurrence for

American Jewish cinema, especially in light of those films from the 60s and 70s where more open sexuality and/or sexual confidence is associated mainly with a non-Jewish girlfriend, emphasizing the possibility of sexual freedom only in the world outside the Jewish home and community.) As I discussed in the previous chapter, the early Jewish melodramas never raised the issue of the sexual desires and desirability of both the Jewish son and his girlfriend. Such an issue would become problematic in terms of the strong Oedipal relationship berween the mother and son, and would perhaps undermine the film's clean resolution. But in Body and Soul.

Charley and Peg's openly sexual relationship is even briefly referred to in the opening sequence discussed above. When Charley walks into the back bedroom of his mother's apartment, he sees

Peg's stockings and slip lying on the bed. He reaches to pull them toward him but restrains

911 tend to disagree with Rappaport and Garfield biographer Swindell's simplifying of Peg and Alice into the good girl/bad girl duality. The character of Peg, with its rich and nuanced performance by Palmer, transcends such a trapping. See Rappaport, 331 and Swindell, 209. 88 I P a g e himself. Looking for a place "to lie down," a place of comfort and security, it is clear that he longs for the closeness of Peg's body.

Like Helen Wright, Peg is also provided with a sexualized gaze. Through her citing of the

William Blake poem and her sketch of Charley, we are privileged to her subjective view of

Charley's physical attractiveness, vulnerability and innocence. (It may be worthwhile to note here that boxing films often have an opportunity to deal—however briefly or covertly—with the issue of female sexuality, as the sport consists of the spectacle of two half-naked men.)92

The Jewish Working Class Family and Other "Nobodies"

As Charley immerses himself in the competitive world of boxing, Peg also comes to embody an alternative to the values which threaten to corrupt Charley. After the first montage sequence signaling Charley's meteoric rise as a boxer, Shorty expresses to Peg his concern for the now-successful fighter:

You know what Charley is, what they're making him? A money machine, like gold

mines, oil wells, ten percent of the US mint. They're cutting him up a million ways.

You're the only one left, Peg...the only one. He won't listen to me. If you don't hold

onto him, it's goodbye Charley Davis. Marry him, Peg, but do it now.. .now.

Shorty hopes that marriage to Peg will ground the uprooted Charley.

The ideolbgy of Charley's Jewish working class roots is expressed by a remark made by

Peg. Dnmk and slightly tipsy, she whimsically describes herself, Anna and Shorty:

We're all nobody. Do you know who nobody is? Nobody is anybody who belongs to

somebody. So if you belong to nobody, you're somebody.

92 See Stanfield, 82 89 I P a g e Peg's comment here, as written by Polonsky, perhaps recalls John Latouche and Earl

Robinson's "Ballad for Americans," the anthem of the Popular Front—more specifically, its

lines such as "Fm the everybody who's nobody,/ Fm the nobody who's everybody." In the song,

the "everybodies" are the "'etceteras' and the 'and so forths' that do the work." But they are

"nobodies" because they are disempowered under capitalism. Similar to the song's evocation of

the collective ("the nobody who's everybody"), Polonsky sees the working class outsiders of

Body and Soul as "somebody" when they belong to other "nobodies." In essence, what Polonsky

is articulating here is a community of American outsiders who become "somebody" collectively.

Peg makes this remark in response to the glamorous nightclub singer, Alice, when the latter is asked who she is. "Fm nobody," Alice answers, as she reverently touches Peg's mink coat that Charley purchased for her. Through gestures and reflective comments such as these, the film states rather explicitly that Alice's social mobility is dependent on her håving successful men around who can provide her with mink coats and other artificial trophies of social status.

She sees herself as a "nobody" who will become "somebody" when she is attached to a successful man, a man defined as successful by the capitalist system. Alice remarks, "It's lucky to be around lucky people."

As Charley becomes successful, he wins Alice's attention. But toward the end of the film, as Charley plans to fight for the last time and bets on himself to lose, Quinn and Alice verbally spar:

Alice: The boy's [Charley's] going to make a snootful of dough.

Quinn: He'll go through it in a year with your help.

Alice: That gives me a year, Quinn. What about you?

90 I Hage Quinn: FU find myself aiiother mug. They come and they go... but I stay. Thafs the

reason you should listen to me, baby.

Alice: Don't you ever get tired?

Quinn: No. I got no time for pride. He could have had the whole world. So he leaned over

sideways and grabbed you.

[Quinn angrily grabs Alice's arm]

Alice: Nobody grabbed me. I grabbed him.

Quinn: Sure baby... all love and a yard wide. But every time he's low down, he's gone to

Peg. And he's not going to feel so high after this fight.

Alice: I don't care where his heart is... only the money.

Quinn: What about me.. .how I feel?

Alice: Don't romance me, Quinn. You're getting old.

Quinn: You could use a new paint job yourself.

Both Alice and Quinn, like Charley, insist on their invincibility in the face of the capitalistic boxing system that is destroying them body and soul and making them disposable. The verbal jabs back and forth between Alice and Quinn resemble a boxing match as individual survival in this destructive world requires fighting.

The film implicitly demonstrates Charley and Alice's similar precarious social positions within American patriarchy and capitalism. The social mobility of both Alice and Charley is dependent upon their successful marketing of their bodies (she is a comodification of female sexuality and while he becomes a commodification of male toughness). In fact, one can interpret their recognition of their similar precarious social positions as part of their initial flirtation.

Halfway into the film, after Roberts has convinced the successful fighter to postpone his

91 I P a g e ' marriage to Peg, we see Charley at his training camp. A shot from Charley's point-of-view

shows his hands beating a punching bag, while the bottom of the frame reveal Alice's legs as she

sits and watches him train. Charley begins punching the bag more aggressively as he takes note

of Alice's presence. He then walks to a punching bag that hangs from a tree, where Alice joins

him:

Alice: Last few weeks got tough, don't they Charley?

Charley: Yeah.

Alice: Fm beginning to feel the strain myself.

Charley: You're over-trained.

Alice: So are you.

Charley: Maybe.

Alice: Awful edgy...You don't want to overdo it.

Charley: Neither do you.

Alice: What have I got to lose?

Charley: What have you got to win?

Alice: Everything.

Later in the scene, as Charley begins to practice sparring, Alice, grinning, begins to quietly

chant, "Kill 'em, Charley. Kill 'em!" The scene then dissolves into the boxing match between

Charley and Ben with a shouting and cheering audience, among which Alice is now screaming,

"Kill 'em Charley. Kill 'em!" The film then shows us a close-up of Peg as she sits in the

audience: she is horrified and flinching. The contrasting reaction shots between the two women reflect their respective relation to such a competitive and violent world. Like Charley, Alice understands the need for violent and bloodthirsty competition within the world they are trying to

92 I P a g e ascend. The character of Alice helps the film further articulate the aggressive individualism and

emotional isolation that is required in the boxing business world. In the quote cited above, when

Quinn tries to both goad and win her by predicting that Charley will probably go back to Peg

"when he gets down," she responds without flinching, "I don't care where his heart is...only the

money." She appears to accept the emotional emptiness of these sexual relationships with

socially-climbing men. In the latter montage sequence, Charley is shown cheating on Alice with

various other women. Alice then angrily confronts Charley for this, to which he responds by

giving her a mink coat.

Charley also insists on his independence and invincibility in the face of the promising but

corrupt boxing world, which is succinctly epitomized with a beautifully written exchange of

dialogue between Charley and Shorty. Charley resists interference from Shorty as well as his

family as they wam him of the corruptness of Roberts. A concerned Shorty warns Charley of his vulnerability with Roberts assmning ownership of his boxing career:

Shorty: You can tell us [Shorty and Quinn] what and when, but you can't tell Roberts.

Charley: But the champ can!

Shorty: Not if he gives away his right arm.

Charley [åbruptly pulling his arm away]: ...It's my arm, isn't it?

Charley responds to Shorty by claiming his illusory sense of impenetrability and independence from everyone: his friends, family and Roberts.

When Roberts successfully encourages Charley to postpone his engagement to Peg

("Keep your mind on the fight," he advises), Roberts is in effect encouraging Charley's emotional (and perhaps moral) independence. For Roberts, like the capitalistic world represented through Alice, there are only business relationships, not emotional ones that value human life. As

93 I P age Ben says to Roberts, "People don't count with you, do they?" (Later on in the same scene,

Roberts compares owning boxers to owning racehorses.) And when Charley introduces Shorty

as his friend, Roberts responds, "For how much?" In fact, Roberts—and the competitive and

aggressive business world that defines him—destroys human relationships. "Everybody dies," is

Roberts' rationalization for his exploitation of people. Similarly, after håving enjoyed success within Roberts' world, Charley is able to rationalize—and deny responsibility for—tlie fatal injuring of Ben as well as Shorty's death by insisting that they were only accidents. While

Charley can rationalize his relationship with Roberts as purely business, Peg articulates the association with Roberts in more human terms: she refuses to continue her relationship with

Charley if he does not quit his lucrative boxing career, "I can't marry you. Thafd just mean marrying [Roberts]."

After Peg leaves Charley, the second montage sequence occurs. Not only does this sequence show Charley fighting, we also see him living a high life and thereby accumulating large debts: he bets on horses, buys expensive jewelry, goes to nightclubs and parties, makes love with Alice as well as other women. All this causes Charley to become increasingly in financial debt to Roberts. In the earlier montage sequence, showing his success before signing with Roberts, he still maintains a connection to Peg as we see a shot of them speaking to each other on the telephone. On the other hand, this latter montage emphasizes Charley's loneliness and emotional isolation: among shots that depict his glamorous life and celebrity, we see him walk down empty streets and eventually stand longingly in front of Peg's tenement building. She is part of his former community that is closed off to him so long as he competes in the corrupt boxing world. The next scene shows him visit Ben and offer him a job as his trainer: "I need someone I can trust," Charley says to him. He seeks out Ben to fill in for the loss of moral

94 I P a g e guidance and support that was provided by Peg, his mother and Shorty. He seeks the comfort and

council of a fellow outsider.

Ben's death plays a rather significant role in Charley's own political and social

awakening.93 We are told earlier in the film that too rnuch anger or excitement is detrimental to

Ben, who is now suffering from a blood clot. Toward the end of the film, while at the training

camp, Ben encourages Charley to not accept Roberts' demands for the fixed fight and knock out

the opponent to whom he is supposed to take a dive. Roberts hears this and emerges from inside

the cottage, "I told Quinn to dump you months ago. He said Charley wanted you. Well, Charley

doesn't want you anymore." Ben angrily insists, "Let Charley tell me..." But Charley says

nothing in Ben's defense and, instead, looks at the ground. In his final moments, Ben yells and

punches his fists in the air, "against an imaginary foe," as the shooting script describes94, in

defiance against Roberts:

You double-crossed me before. Now Fm through, done, washed up. I don't scare easy

anymore... You don't tell me how to live... I don't scare anymore, I don't scare

anymore... Got to take it... always sold out.

Ben, in a fury detrimental to his blood clot, dies in these final few moments of revolt.

Our knowledge of Ben and the circumstances of his death now allows for a new reading of the filrri's opening shot, which is repeated after the fighter's death. Now the moving crane shot connecting the hanging punching bag to Charley's nightmare and cry of Ben's nåme certainly

93 Michael Rogin discusses how Charley's education requiring Ben's death problematizes the Black-Jewish solidarity that the film endorses. Despite the integrity that the film provides the characterization of Ben, Rogin sees this film as not entirely able to transcend some of the regressive contemporary conventions concerning African-Americans in Hollywood film. See Rogin, 211-220. 94 Polonsky, "Body and Soul," 142.

95 I P a g e suggests the bag as metaphorically linked to the image of a lynched African-American. In his original script, Polonsky describes the punching bag in silhouette as "[swinging] slowly in the wind like conscience from a gibbet."95 In a later interview, cinematographer James Wong Howe said that the opening shot "was intended to be symbolic of a hanged man."96 But interestingly,

Howe describes the hanged man as Charley, not Ben. Perhaps the descriptions provided by

Polonsky and Howe, along with the opening shot's reappearance after Ben's death, can all speak for Charley's increasing identification with the fate of the now-dead Ben.

Charley's ultimate decision to renege on his deal with Roberts and not throw his last fight picks up on the angry rebellion that Ben futilely fought in his final moments. Davis finally makes this choice at one precise moment in the film: Roberts' deal with Charley consisted of him losing by a "clean decision"; but during the twelfth round, Charley sees that Quinn and Roberts are cueing for the opponent to knock him out. As Charley is being prepped for the next round, he quietly but angrily tells Quinn, "You sold me out, you rat. Sold out...like Ben." This is a crucial moment in terms of Charley's awakening. He is now beginning to fully understand his and Ben's similar roles and potentially similar fates within the corrupt boxing system: like Roberts betrayed

Ben by not håving Charley go easy on him during their fight in the ring, the boxing manager is now telling Charley's opponent, Marlowe, to violate the agreement for a decision.97 We then see

95 Polonsky, "Body and Soul," 17.

96 Quoted in editor Schultheiss' endnotes to Polonsky's script as it appears in Abraham Polonsky' s Body and Soul: The Critical Edition. ed. John Schultheiss, 7-10 (Northridge, CA: The Center for Telecommunication Studies California State University, 2002), 188.

97 Paul Buhle and David Wagner write that Charley's "decision not to throw the fight is rooted in his dawning comprehension that he is fighting not only for himself but for Ben and for his neighborhood and for everyone else the system has ground down." Paul Buhle and David Wagner, A Very Dangerous Citizen: Abraham Polonsky and the Hollywood Left (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), 115. 96 I Pag a tight close-up of Charley as the water from the sponge being wiped against his forehead drips heavily down his face, "Fm gonna kill him. Fm gonna kill him," he mutters intently. The

original script describes Charley at this moment as "relaxing"98: perhaps this refers to his final resolution to the moral dilemma that is tearing him apart.

The Jewish son's communal responsibility

While celebrating assimilation and social mobility beyond the Lower East Side, the

Jewish melodramas of the twenties often paid tribute to the immigrant community left behind.

As discussed in the previous chapter, Borzage's Humoresaue lovingly recreates the Jewish immigrant audience for which Leon performs. And the Jewish son asserts that no concert "for the crowned princes of Europe" is as important to him as the one for his former community from the

Lower East Side. In Frank Capra's The YoungerGeneration(1929). the Jewish father and daughter, feeling the oppressive loneliness and emptiness of high society, happily return to the more vital, though poverty-stricken, Lower East Side. Body and Soul goes one step further and articulates the political and social necessity of allegiance to this ethnic working class New York neighborhood.

Toward the end of Body and Soul. Ben expresses his love for the hero worship among the people in his disenfranchised home neighborhood. "It always felt so great after a win," he exults,

"Walking down Lennox Avenue, kids all crazy for you, and proud... a champion of the world for the whole world to know." This is another moment that emphasizes how Ben serves as Charley's emotional link back to the immigrant neighborhood as well as a reflection of the Jewish boxer's repressed sense of responsibility toward his outsider roots. Ben's casual remark comes at a

98 Polonsky, "Body and Soul," 148

97 I P a g e • significant moment in the film. The previous scene, set at his mother's home on the Lower East

Side, has Charley confront his own sense of responsibility toward his Jewish community when

Shimon emphasizes how "over in Europe the Nazis are killing people like us—just because of

their religion."

This scene with Shimon the grocer is rather crucial in that it allows one to read Charley 's

act of rebellion against Roberts as his reclaiming of his Jewish roots. The opening line of the

contemporary review of the film in the Yiddish daily, Der Tog, describes how '"dos pintele yid'

[meaning the Jewish spark or the quintessence of one's Jewish identity] grows in the heart of a

corrupted 'champion' when he hears about millions of Hitler's Jewish victims in Europe."99 This comment suggests that Charley's moral awakening perhaps reflects the Jewish consciousness that many American Jews began to feel after the war in light of the revelations concerning the destruction of European Jewry at the hands of the Nazis. 10°

But obviously, Charley's decision to win the fight more broadly signifies the reclaiming of his moral roots as well as his sense of communal responsibility and ethnic working class solidarity. In f act, Charley's initial unplanned punch against Marlowe is dramatically punctuated with a shot of Peg, an embodiment of Charley's emotional ties toward home, who now cheers and screams.

"Everybody dies"

After his win, Charley is confronted by Roberts:

99 N. Sverdlin, "The Career of a Jewish Prize-Fighter Pictured in the Movie 'Body and Soul'," Der Tog. November 11, 1947. (translated for this paper)

100 Rosenthal, 25-28,104.

98|.Page Charley: Get yourself a new boy. I retire.

Roberts: What makes you think you can get away with this?

Charley: Whatta you going to do, kill rne? Everybody dies.

Charley's ultimate response to Roberts—"Everybody dies"—refers not only to what Roberts often says to rationalize his exploitation of people, but to the specific scene when we first hear

Roberts utter his characteristic line:

Roberts: You thinking about Ben, Charley? Everybody dies... Ben... Shorty... Even you.

Charley: Whafs the point?

Roberts [casually]: No point. That's life. You go in there and just box that kid for fifteen

rounds, Charley, like we agreed. Nobody get hurt. Nobody get knocked out. You'U lose

by a clean decision. You'11 get your money, and we're squared away. You know the way

the betring is, Charley. The numbers are in. Everything is addition and subtraction. The

rest is conversation.

Roberts' casual tone as he explains how the upcoming fixed match will take place emphasizes it as routine business. But his instructions are sandwiched by two significant lines that articulate

Roberts' money-based worldview: everything is pre-determined and there is no room for human will, possibility and creativity. Charley's revolt against Roberts' business plans is capped by his turning Roberts' phrase back on him. Most significant here is the often-cited line, "Everything is addition and subtraction. The rest is conversation." Discussing this line of dialogue, Brian Neve argues that for Polonsky, "language is both determined—that it frequently disguises and obscures reality—and free, a form of revolt against how the world works. Money talks, but so,

99 I Page poetically and sometimes subversively, do individuals."101 Charley, in this final line, reclaims his

identity from the exploitative capitalistic world defined by Roberts.

101 Brian Neve, Film and Politics in America: A Social Tradition (London: Routledge, 1992), 134. "100 I P a a e Epilogue

The worldview of Anna Davis (and shared by Peg) in Body and Soul is similar to that of another famous Jewish mother of the era, Molly Goldberg, as played by Gertrude Berg in the hit radio and television show that she wrote and created, The Goldbergs (1929-1955). Set in a Bronx tenement, the show involved the daily lives of the Goldberg family and a caring Molly mettling in the lives of her neighbors. George Lipsitz described the communal atmosphere of The

Goldbergs:

Molly and Jake Goldberg, their children Rosalie and Sammy, and Molly's uncle David

all lived together in a crowded Bronx apartment building filled with working class Jews

like themselves. During every episode, neighbors and relatives passed through the

Goldbergs apartment. They carried on conversations by shouting through windows and

yelling into dumbwaiter shafts. The Goldbergs met their friends on the streets, they

shared night-school classrooms and Lewinsohn Stadium concerts with the extended

network of their neighborhood, and problems like a leaking roof or a defective elevator

immediately became group concerns.102

Expressing the values of camaraderie and interdependence—as well as humility—that defined the progressive spirit of this Jewish mother, the 1950 movie version of The Goldbergs ends with

Molly and her husband, Jake, getting into bed and going to sleep. He tells her of a grand business scheme he has in mind. Th en before turning off the light, Molly answers, "Jake, we

102 George Lipsitz,. Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 39. 101 I P age don't want to conquer the world, we just want to live in it." The Goldbergs shared Body and

SouFs emphasis on urban ethnic working-class social collectivity, spawned by the Gr eat

Depression and further nurtured by Roosevelt's New Deal and America' s entry into the Second

World War. Lipsitz writes that "in the 1930s, cultural ideals based on mutuality and collectivity

eclipsed the previous decade's individualism."103 But this era was nearing its end by 1947, when

Bodv and Soul was first screened to enthusiastic audiences.

In April 1951, John Garfield was called before the House on Un-American Activities

Committee. He denounced Communism but evaded naming names; when asked by committee representatives "about a specific organization, event or person, [Garfield] would then back-pedal,

dodge the question or play dumb."104 He refused to admit that he knew any known Communist.

Garfield was not personally a member of the Communist Party, but his wife and many of his friends were, and the actor did support various progressive rallies and strikes that were supported by the Communist Party. The committee, as well as anti-communists around the country, were not satisfied and Garfield was not cleared by any of these groups. The stress that Garfield endured during these hearings, and subsequent public renunciations of the actor, exacerbated a heart condition that he acquired as a young man.

John Garfield's pre-mature death in 1952 dramatizes the significant ideological turning point in American society at the time. Left-wing scholars, such as Thorn Andersen, continue to see the actor's life and death reflecting the hopes, achievements and demise of left-wing populist

103 Lipsitz, 42-43.

104 Robert Nott, He Ran All the Way: the Life of John Garfield (New York: Limelight Editions, 2003), 280.

102 I P a g e culture during the 30s and 40s. The Right aimed to use the anxieties of the emerging Cold War to turn back the pro-labor and pro-working class gains of the Roosevelt era. It attempted to stifle the attempts at creating a more militant, organized labor movement, as well as silence any culture that would support such values as working class solidarity and celebrate collective opposition to the emerging corporate culture.

J. Hoberman refers to the 1953 remake of The Jazz Singer and sees it as reflecting the

Jewish community's desire to pass as wholly American in the wake of the execution of the

Rosenbergs.106 After the Second World War, with the increasing disappearance of Jewish urban neighborhoods, fewer and fewer Jewish men would be aligned with, supported by, or defined by a sense of collectivity as celebrated in Bodv and Soul or The Goldbergs.107

In most of his films from Thev Made Me a Criminal to Bodv and Soul and up until his last film, He Ran All the Way (1951), Garfield feels lost with out the support and definition of a larger community. In the fifties, that sense of camaraderie is no longer an option. Two of

GarfiekTs last films, The Breaking Point (1949) and He Ran All the Way. will depict his screen character's alienation from the isolated nuclear family.108

1 Thorn Andersen, "Red Hollywood" in "Un-American" Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklisted Era, eds. Frank Krutnik et al., 225-263 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 257-9. 106 J. Hoberman. Vulgar Modernism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 68

107 In 1955, the last season of The Goldbergs had the family move to the suburbs.

108 See Red Hollywood. Dir: Thorn Andersen and Næl Burch, 1995. Here, Andersen and Burch suggest that He Ran All the Way dramatizes the early Fifties' dissolution of working class solidarity in favor of the protection of the nuclear family.

103 I Page In being the first Hollywood leading man to use method acting in his performances, and because

of his brooding depictions of social outsiders, Garfield is often seen as precursor to Marion

Brando, who would reflect such alienation and bitterness for audiences of the fifties. It is often cited that Garfield was first considered by director Elia Kazan for the role of Stanley Kowalski in the stage version of A Streetcar Named Desire.109 There are also unproven—and unlikely— rumors that Garfield was early on seen as a possibility for the Terry Malloy role in On the

Waterfront (1954).110 The latter film anticipates how the Garfield persona, that of the bitter proletarian hero, was redefined into the more generic "fifties everyman" as Kazan's film shows the working class alienated hero being redeemed personally rather than as part of a group.111 In many ways, writes Brian Neve, On the Waterfront suggests links to the Warner films of the thirties as well as the work of the Group Theatre such as Awake and Sing and Golden Boy, both of which, as I discussed in the previous chapters, play ed key roles in articulating Garfield' s screen persona. But the key difference between most of GarfiekTs characters and Terry Malloy is the latter's alienation from any defined social world as the depiction of any supportive collective is deeply fragmented.

109 See Nott, 222.

110 Nott, 296-297. ni Brian Neve writes that Terry Malloy (Brando) in On the Waterfront is "broadened into a kind of fifties everyman by his bitterness about lost opportunities." Brian Neve, Film and Politics in America: A Social Tradition (London: Routledge, 1992), 196. 112 In contrast to that of Charley Davis in Body and Soul, Neve argues, "the social significance of Malloy's rebellion is more debatable given his isolation." Neve, 196.

104 1 Pa-e Works Cited

Andersen, Thom. "Red Hollywood." in "Un-American" Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklisted Era, edited by Frank Krutnik, Steve Neale, Brian Neve and Peter Stanfield, 225-263. New Branswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2007.

Antler, Joyce. You Never Cali! You Never Write! A History of the Jewish Mother. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Brownlow, Kevin. Behind the Mask of Innocence. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990.

Buhle, Paul. From the Lower East Side to Hollywood: Jews in American Popular Culture. New York: Verso Books, 2004.

Buhle, Paul and Dave Wagner. Radical Hollywood: the Untold Story Behind America's Favorite Movies. New York: New Press, 2002.

—. A Very Dangerous Citizen: Abraham Polonskv and the Hollywood Left. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001.

Ceplair, Larry & Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community. 1930-1960. Garden City, N.Y. : Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1980.

Crowther, Bosley. "A Man Who Means to Make a Dent," New York Times. December 18, 1938.

Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: the Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. London, New York: Verso, 1998.

Erens, Patricia. The Jew in American Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.

Eyles, Allen. "Films of Enterprise: A Studio History." Focus on Film (April 1980): 25.

Friedman, Lester. Hollvwood's Image of the Jew. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1982.

Gabler, Neal. An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. New York: Crown Publishers, 1988.

Garfield, John and Canada Lee. "Our Part in 'Body and Soul'." Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life. January 1948. 105 I P age Goldman, Herbert G. Jolson: The Legend Comes to Life, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Hoberman, J. Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film Between two Worlds. New York: Museum of Modern Art: Schocken Books, 1991.

—. Vulgar Modernism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991.

Hurst, Fannie. Humoresque. New York: P.F. Collier & Son Company, 1920.

Nott, Robert. He Ran All the Way: the Life of John Garfield. New York: Limelight Editions, 2003.

Lipsitz, George. Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990.

Merwin, Ted. In Their Own Image: New York Jews in Jazz Age Popular Culture. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2006.

Mosher, John. "They Made Him a Star." The New Yorker. January 28 1939.

Neve, Brian. Film and Politics in America: A Social Tradition. London: Routledge, 1992.

Odets, Clifford. Waiting for Lefty and Other Plays. New York: Grove Press, 1993.

Palmer, Lilli. Change Lobsters and Dance. New York: Warner Books, Inc., 1975.

Polonsky. Abraham. "Body and Soul." in Abraham Polonsky's Body and Soul: The Critical Edition. edited by John Schultheiss, 7-10. Northridge, CA: The Center for Telecommunication Studies California State University, 2002.

—. "Introduction." in Abraham Polonsky's: Body and Soul: The Critical Edition. edited by John Schultheiss, 7-10. Northridge, CA: The Center for Telecommunication Studies California State University, 2002.

Rappaport, Mark, "The Candy Store that Dåre Not Speak its Nåme." in Abraham Polonsky's Body and Soul: The Critical Edition. edited by John Schultheiss, 7-10. Northridge, CA: The Center for Telecommunication Studies California State University, 2002.

106 I P a g e Roddick, Nick. A New Deal in Entertainment: Warner Brothers in the 1930s. London: BFI Publishing, 1983.

Rogin, Michael. Blackface. White Noise. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

Rosenthal, Samuel. Golden Bovchik: Star-Audience Relations between John Garfield and the Contemporary American Jewish Community. Masters diss., The Annexberg School for Communication University of Pennsylvania, 1993.

Schickel, Richard. Elia Kazan: a Biography. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2005.

Sklar, Robert. City Boys: Cagney. Bogart. Garfield. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Stanfield, Peter. "Monarch of the Millions." in "Un-American" Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklisted Era, edited by Frank Krutnik, Steve Neale, Brian Neve and Peter Stanfield, 225- 263. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2007.

Sverdlin, N. "The Career of a Jewish Prize-Fighter Pictured in the Movie 'Body and Soul'." Der Tog. November 11,1947. (translated for this paper)

Swindell, Larry. Body and Soul: the Story of John Garfield. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1975.

Valenti, Peter. "Body and Soul in the Forest of the Night: Warner Bros. Meets HU AC." in Abraham Polonsky's Body and Soul: The Critical Edition. edited by John Schultheiss, 7-10. Northridge, CA: The Center for Telecommunication Studies California State University, 2002.

Weber, Donald. Haunted in the New World: Jewish American Culture from Cahan to The Goldbergs. Bloomington, In: Indiana University Press, 2005.

—. "The Limits of Empathy: Hollywood's Imagining of Jews ca. 1947." in Kev Texts in American Culture. edited by Jack Kugelmass, 91-104. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003.

Young, Jeff. Kazan on Kazan. London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1999.

"The Current Cinema: A New Face and Some Old Stories," The New Yorker. August 27, 1938.

107 I Pag e Filmography

Air Force, dir: Howard Hawks, Warner Bros. Pictures, 1942.

Angels With Dirty Faces. Dir: Michael Curtiz, Warner Bros. Pictures, 1938.

Body and Soul. dir: Robert Rossen, Enterprise Productions, 1947.

The Breaking Point. Dir: Michael Curtiz, Warner Bros. Pictures, 1949.

Castle on the Hudson, dir: Anatole Lirvak, Warner Bros. Pictures, 1940.

Destination Tokyo, dir: Delmer Daves, Warner Bros. Pictures, 1943.

Dust Be My Destiny. Dir: Lewis Seiler, Warner Bros. Pictures, 1939.

The Fallen Sparrow. dir: Richard Wallace, RKO Pictures, 1943.

Force of Evil. dir: Abraham Polonsky, Enterprise Productions, 1948.

Four Daughters. dir: Michael Curtiz, Warner Bros. Pictures, 1938.

Gentleman's Agreement, dir: Elia Kazan, Twentieth Century Fox, 1947.

The Goldbergs (a.k.a. Molly). Dir: Walter Hart, Paramount Pictures, 1950.

He Ran All the Way. Dir: John Berry, Roberts Pictures Inc., 1951.

His People. Dir: Edward Sloman, Universal Pictures, 1925.

Humoresque. dir: Frank Borzage, Cosmopolitan Pictures, 1920.

Humoresque. dir: Jean Negulesco, Warner Bros. Pictures, 1946.

Hungry Hearts. Dir: E. Mason Hopper, Goldwyn Pictures Corporation, 1922.

The Jazz Singer. dir: Alan Crosland, Warner Bros. Pictures, 1927.

The Jazz Singer. dir: Michael Curtiz, Warner Bros. Pictures, 1953.

The Life of Jimmy Dolan. dir: Archie Mayo, Warner Bros. Pictures, 1933.

On the Waterfront. Dir: Elia Kazan, Horizon Pictures, 1954.

Pride of the Marines. Dir: Delmer Daves, Warner Bros. Pictures, 1945. 108 I P a g e Red Hollywood. Dir: Thom Andersen and Noel Burch, 1995.

Rhapsody in Blue. Dir: Irving Rapper, Warner Bros. Pictures, 1944.

The Sea Wolf. Dir: Michael Curtiz, Warner Bros. Pictures, 1941.

They Made Me a Criminal. dir: Busby Berkeley, Warner Bros. Pictures, 1939.

Till the End of Time. dir: Edward Dmytryk, RKO Pictures, 1946.

The Younger Generation. Dir: Frank Capra, Columbia Pictures Corporation, 1929.

Cavalcade of Stars. DuMont Television Network, 3 June 1950.