Glucedee It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

Billie Morin This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Beulah Bram A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

MartinHafer This is a biography of John Garfield that was made by Turner Entertainment. It talks about the life and career of John Garfield. It also, towards the end, talks about his problems during the Red Scare, as his left-wing politics were an excuse to hound him about communism. The film consisted of many interviews--most notably his youngest daughter--who really didn't know her father that well, as she was awfully young when he died at age 39. What a loss.The film was well-made and entertaining. Interesting and filled with many interesting facts and anecdotes. My only complaint, and it's a small one, is that the film was so short. But, so was his life...so perhaps this is fitting.By the way, if you wonder about Garfield's wife, she was alive in 2003 when the film came out but was suffering from Alzheimers--so she really was not available to participate in the film. She died a year later.

Neil Doyle JOHN GARFIELD was well used at Warner Bros. where he became a contract player in the late '30s, beginning with his much ballyhooed first film, FOUR DAUGHTERS ('38), sharing the screen with some of Warner's best contract players and stealing many a scene as the tough guy with a heart of gold.But to listen to this documentary, his Warner contract allowed him to do too many prison films. Actually, his street smart, chip-on-the-shoulder type of personality was what the public expected to see rather than having him stretch to be someone who could do a variety of other roles.After all, those tough guy prison films were what kept him so popular with the movie-going public during all those years at Warners. When he did "stretch," the accents proved too much for him to handle (as in TORTILLA FLAT and JUAREZ) and costume films were not his forte. The Brooklyn in his voice was always just beneath the surface, as was his tough guy attitude. It was the dangerous element in his personality that women loved. Aside from the prison dramas, he got to do a number of respectable war films (DESTINATION TOKYO, PRIDE OF THE MARINES) and films of social significance like GENTLEMAN'S AGREEMENT.Garfield's biggest disappointment was not getting a chance to do Clifford Odet's GOLDEN BOY on public and repeating that performance on film. However, he made up for it ten years later by starring in a B'way version, just a little too ripe for the role at that point. We get to see a glimpse of a TV scene from the play opposite Kim Stanley which at least gives an indication of how good his performance in that role probably was.As for the celebrities who talk about Garfield, that's the weakest part of the documentary. There's nothing particularly illuminating in any of the comments by Lee Grant, Joanne Woodward, Richard Dreyfuss, Norman Lloyd or any of the others who offer little insight into what made the man tick aside from his surface toughness as a result of a tough childhood in Brooklyn. Along the way he had help from someone at a school for troubled kids and developed an interest in the theater, soon a favorite with the Group Theater.Garfield deserves a better bio than this, but it does offer some generous film clips from a few of his best films and should please fans who want to know more about his emergence as a star.

Diosprometheus This is an adoring, mythological biography of John Garfield that offers little insight into the real man, his psychological complexities or his turbulent personal and political relationships that led to his downfall and his death. For example, one of its standard boilerplate story lines is that Warner's misused Garfield. This same tired story-line is used over and over in biographies of Bogart, Cagney, Davis, Robinson, Muni, Flynn, and dozen of other actors who worked for Warners. There is nothing original or insightful into these old half-truths.The fact is that actors are not necessarily the best judge of the materials they should be in. The fact is that the Warners did necessarily misuse its actors. Proof that Warners was not out of touch is that it managed to make a wealth of memorable classic films in the 1930's and 1940's, starring these so-called misused actors. If one accepts the story line, then one must presume that the studio made these films by accident.Often the point of using this trite story line in a biography is to make the actor a proletarian victim of the more powerful capitalistic forces in the studio and therefore, someone who does not have control over his destiny, or his fate, or who is not responsible for the decisions that he or she makes. That would seem to be the case in this simplified love poem to Julie Garfield.In this documentary, one does not get the real story of why Garfield lost his prize role in Golden Boy to Luther Alder, but instead a sugar coated one. The real story is much more interesting and pivotal in the career of Garfield, and had it been told would have made an much more interesting and meaningful biography. It would, however, have exposed much of what was covered-up in this documentary, and have undermined the final verdict of it, namely, John Garfield was a victim.The outright deceits of this documentary are too numerous to comment upon here, especially those of James Cromwell, who appears as a snotty self-appointed expert on a subject that is obviously miles over his head, nor does it bring up the fact that John Garfield perjured himself when he testified before the House Committee, and that is why he found himself in the deep muddy. His egregious perjuries had little to do with his alleged refusal to name names. Of course, these factoids would undermine the mythologizing that this documentary sets out to achieve.

gvb0907 Narrated by his daughter Julie, this film offers the standard take on John Garfield: great actor, social activist, victim of HUAC. Clips from many of his performances are shown, including some we don't see every day on TCM. Pretty much an adoring portrait, although there are a few references to Garfield's darker side. Was he a great actor? He was always quite good, but he had his limitations. He was generally better in film noir than the great outdoors and often stronger in supporting roles than in leads. The film makes an argument that Warner's frequently misused him, but he was hardly unique in this regard. In any case, he did some of his best work there (e.g.,"Pride of the Marines") before free lancing in the late 40s. Was he an activist? Yes, though not any more so than a number of people and probably less than some. His roots may have been in the Group Theater, but even there the real emphasis was on acting, not activism. The film doesn't spend too much time on this side of his life, which is just as well, though the leftist actors who are interviewed clearly warm to this theme and to the concept of his martyrdom. For all the talk about HUAC and blacklisting (Joe Bernard states flatly "the Committee killed him"), Garfield's acting career was at most only half dead when he died at 39. He'd just been on Broadway in "Golden Boy" and surely could have made a good living on the stage, which was always his first love. As for his film career, that was probably on the skids anyway by 1952. Noir and social realism were played out. Hollywood was entering a white bread era and Garfield's urban/ethnic grittiness didn't fit into a landscape dominated by Westerns, Biblical epics, Technicolor musicals, and romantic comedies. Had he lived he surely would have made a big comeback in the 60s and 70s. It's not hard to imagine him as Sol Nazerman or Hyman Roth, but it wasn't in the cards. In his last film, titled ironically "He Ran All the Way", he was allowed very little running. Rheumatic fever in the early 30s had damaged his heart and there may have been congenital problems as well (his son died of a heart attack at 41). Very likely he had been dying for years. Recommended primarily for Garfield's fans or for those completely unacquainted with his work. Others will find it little more than routine.