23 The Breaking Point (1950)

***^½
Country: US
Director: Michael Curtiz

"His screen career was noir-ish from the word go," Andrew Sarris writes of John Garfield and the doomed character he played in his first movie, Four Daughters, made in 1938 for Warner Bros. and directed by Michael Curtiz. Garfield plays a bitter and alienated young musician who commits suicide to save the naive girl who marries him from ruining her life, and some have cited his downbeat character as the first antihero in American film. Before leaving Warners seven years later, Garfield was cast in many roles similar to the one he played in Four Daughters. These were forerunners of the disaffected youths of films of the 1950s, misunderstood and unhappy young men controlled by outside forces, young men whose outwardly antisocial impulses seemed perpetually at war with their inner sensitivity. If for Garfield these roles were initially the result of typecasting and studio efforts to build a screen image, they nevertheless tapped something essential in his screen persona—a mixture of toughness and vulnerability—and the image of the angry and misunderstood young man stuck.

By the time Garfield's contract with Warner Bros. expired in 1946, his career was at its height. Right after leaving the studio, he co-founded a production company, Enterprise Productions, with the expectation of having greater artistic control over his career. He did make two films for Enterprise, the boxing picture Body and Soul (1947) and the film noir Force of Evil (1948), a box office failure whose reputation has soared in the years since its release. After Enterprise folded in the late 1940s Garfield eventually found himself back at Warners, being directed once again by Michael Curtiz, and playing an older version of the "noir-ish" screen personality developed at Warners early in his career—a rebellious man slowly being crushed by circumstances outside his control. The Breaking Point was the next-to-last film Garfield would make before his death in 1952 (a lifelong sufferer of heart disease, he was barely thirty-nine years old), and it gave him one of the best roles of his career.

In this film loosely based on Ernest Hemingway's novel To Have and Have Not (which in 1944 had been even more loosely adapted by Howard Hawks), Garfield is Harry Morgan, the owner of a charter fishing boat based in Southern California. Deeply in debt, he hires out his boat to a businessman for a fishing trip to Mexico and finds that accompanying the businessman is his younger girl friend, the attractive but rather common Leona (a blonde Patricia Neal), who immediately begins flirting with Harry. When the businessman abandons Harry in Mexico without paying, he is forced to accept the proposition of a shady lawyer to smuggle a group of illegal aliens into the U.S. From this point Harry's problems snowball until he finds himself involved with gangsters, robbery, and murder. At the end of the film Harry is held captive on his own boat by three murderous thugs and must use his wits to try to outmaneuver them in an onboard showdown that is sure to remind you of Key Largo.

There's little doubt that as good a film as The Breaking Point is—and it is a good one, probably the last film of this quality directed by Michael Curtiz, one of the most versatile and reliable of the Warners house directors of the thirties and forties—this is pretty much Garfield's movie. Harry Morgan, the character Garfield plays, is a former serviceman, a Naval officer in the Second World War who like many returning veterans came home with ambitious plans for the future. But Harry's plans for a fleet of fishing and charter boats haven't succeeded. He now finds himself eking out a living with his one boat while financial problems threaten to overwhelm him. No matter how much his wife urges him to give up the boat, he stubbornly refuses. Not only would that mean the end of his plans, but it would also mean a spiritual defeat. For Harry land means trouble; he feels truly at peace and in control of his life only on the water.

Garfield handles the tough, alienated side of Harry in a way that makes him seem an older version of the characters Garfield played in the forties. But Harry, while in many ways still the familiar Garfield loner battling the world, is more experienced and more settled. This is the only Garfield film I've seen in which he plays a family man. Harry has a wife (Phyllis Thaxter) and two young daughters, and the scenes with his family, especially the daughters, show a tender side that for Garfield seems completely new. Despite all the external pressures in Harry's life, he has an easy rapport with his wife and real affection for his daughters, traits that are shown in simple, homey scenes where he shares a joke with his wife or gives his excited daughters small presents he has brought from Mexico.

A basically decent guy, Harry finds himself compelled by circumstances to become involved with corruption while still trying to hold on to his moral center. That might seem a self-defeating thing to attempt, but it is exactly what Harry would do. "You do everything so hard," the sleazy lawyer played by Wallace Ford tells him. "You don't bend, you just break when the load gets too heavy." Not only must Harry face the temptation of crime as an easy fix to his financial problems; he must also face the personal temptation presented by Leona, who he keeps running into even after returning from Mexico, and who keeps throwing herself at him. There is friction in Harry's marriage, largely over the family's future, but it's also plain that Harry is experiencing a bit of what today would be called midlife crisis. He's an adventurous, active man, and his disappointment in his present circumstances and his dread of the future ("I wake up in the night sweating. I'm in trouble and there's no way out," he tells his wife) cause the anarchic side of his personality to respond to the appeal of Leona's overtures.

Patricia Neal plays Leona, and she plays her very well indeed. Even though her part is clearly secondary to Garfield's, The Breaking Point gives Neal one of the most interesting and psychologically complex of her early roles. Her delivery of the sexually insinuating dialogue is refreshingly tongue-in-cheek, almost a sendup of the film noir femme fatale. (At one point she teases Harry with Martha Vickers's signature line from The Big Sleep: "You're cute." "It's the way I comb my hair," he snaps back in that surly John Garfield manner.) Her Leona is so bold, impudent, and openly seductive towards Harry that her behavior appears almost ironic, yet ironic in a way intended to conceal her true feelings by mocking them. There's a lot more than attitude, though, in Neal's performance, which like Garfield's is built on the tension between her cynical exterior and her sometimes quite opposite inner emotions. She makes us see that like Harry, Leona is a disappointed person who doesn't feel in control of her life and is racked by fears for the future, and that she recognizes those feelings in common as a strong emotional connection between her and Harry.

In the end, Harry does experience an epiphany in which he realizes that being a loner against the world—the quintessential Garfield character in the quintessential Garfield situation—is a futile way to live. When Harry tells his wife at the conclusion of the film, "A man alone ain't got no chance," it signals an important evolution of the well-established John Garfield screen personality. It's an admission that even an individualist like this must connect with other people and the rest of the world to thrive. It's a shame we'll never be able to see how this gentler, wiser John Garfield might have developed. But what a tantalizing glimpse The Breaking Point gives of Garfield as a man taking first steps toward the kind of inner serenity possible only for someone at peace with himself and the world.

This post is part of the John Garfield 100th Birthday Blogathon hosted by the classic movie site They Don't Make 'Em Like They Used To. Click here for more information on the blogathon and a full schedule of posts.

18 Humoresque (1946)

***^½
Country: US
Director: Jean Negulesco


Joan Crawford has never been one of my favorite actresses of the Hollywood studio era. In the movies she made at MGM in the thirties, her driving ambition to be a movie star seemed to overshadow her acting. She always gave the impression of trying too hard—over-emoting in dramatic roles and too tense to be wholly convincing in lighter ones. And she never really seemed at ease playing the kind of upper-crust sophisticates who dominated MGM movies of the time. It didn't help that she usually got parts only after they were rejected by MGM's two biggest female stars, Norma Shearer (whom Crawford had doubled for early in her career) and Greta Garbo. Nor was she helped by being so often cast opposite flaccid leading men with whom she appeared to have little chemistry, actors like Robert Montgomery, Robert Taylor, Melvyn Douglas, or Franchot Tone (to whom she was married for several years). Still, there's no denying her popularity in the early thirties, when she was named one of the top ten box office stars for five years running.

Crawford's career was set back in 1938 when a group of theater owners included her on a list of stars they considered "box office poison," a list that also damaged the careers of Katharine Hepburn, Greta Garbo, Mae West, and Marlene Dietrich. She did make a comeback of sorts in The Women (1939), where under the direction of George Cukor she made a strong impression in what was really a supporting role as the gold-digging nemesis of the picture's genteel star, Crawford's long-time rival Norma Shearer. Then in 1941 she got a plum role in A Woman's Face after Garbo turned it down and, again under the direction of Cukor, gave an impressive performance—at least in the first half of the picture, where she played against the great German actor Conrad Veidt—as an embittered woman with a disfigured face.

But any expectations of better parts after A Woman's Face didn't pan out; after Garbo and Shearer retired, the best roles seemed to go to Greer Garson. After a few more undistinguished films, Crawford's time at MGM came to a humiliating end in 1943 when the obsessively profit-conscious Louis B. Mayer decided not to renew her contract. Quick to move forward, though, Crawford then signed a contract with Warner Bros. The reigning female star there was Bette Davis, who got first choice of the best pictures, and again Crawford found herself in the position of being offered leftovers after they were rejected by someone higher in the studio's pecking order. In fact, she got her first assignment at Warners after it was passed on not only by Davis, but also by Ann Sheridan and Rosalind Russell. The picture was Mildred Pierce, and it not only revived Crawford's career, but showed she really could act and, after twenty years in Hollywood and something like sixty movies, got her an Oscar as best actress.

She got her next two pictures at Warners after they were also turned down by Davis, Humoresque (1946) and Possessed (1947), which got her another Oscar nomination. (I wonder if her success in these films had something to do with the famous rivalry between Crawford and Davis, whose career at Warners was rapidly winding down). For my money, those three performances are the best of Crawford's career. But as much as I like her in Mildred Pierce—she really did deserve that Oscar—and as good as she is in Possessed, it was in Humoresque that Joan Crawford gave my favorite of all her performances.

In Humoresque she plays a rich socialite, Helen Wright, who fancies herself a patron of unknown artists and keeps a group of attractive, sycophantic young men hovering around her. At one of her salon evenings a gifted young violinist, Paul Boray (John Garfield), attracts her attention with his playing. After the nearsighted Helen asks one of her toy boys to fetch her eyeglasses so she can get a better look at Paul, the undisguised sexual interest on her face shows that as well as his talent, she is also fascinated by his brooding good looks and almost surly manner. At their first meeting, fireworks fly. She baits him about being conceited and he responds by insulting her musically, playing "Flight of the Bumblebee" to suggest that she is a dilettante less interested in art than in her image as a patron of the arts, and also perhaps to allude to her waspish temperament and bevy of young drones. Yet despite this rocky initial encounter, before long he has become her protégé and she is paying the bills to get him started as a professional concert musician.

Helen becomes increasingly infatuated with Paul, and he seems to return her feelings—to a point. As she grows more possessive and he finds his career taking off, cracks begin to develop in the relationship. As the power dynamic in the relationship begins to reverse, she becomes more clinging and he begins to look for ways to assert his independence. There's a wonderful scene in the film where she takes out a cigarette and waits for him to light it for her, and he pointedly turns his back on her and pours himself a drink. When she begins to see that Paul will never be as devoted to her as she is to him, that his object of devotion is his music, it's clear that this is a love affair fated to end badly.

The role of Helen Wright gives Crawford the opportunity to show everything she is capable of, and she does so using an artfully judged balance of intensity and restraint. Helen may be a socialite now, but when she tells Paul about her first two marriages, it's apparent that her current social position is the result of her third marriage to a wealthy older man whom she dominates completely. It's also apparent that she intentionally surrounds herself with men who pay court to her like an imperious queen but whom she can keep at an emotional distance. Paul's resistance to being controlled by Helen just makes him all the more attractive to her; as her husband tells her, Paul has "a touch of the savage" about him.

This is a woman accustomed to being in control, to using her allure, money, and influence as instruments of power. Suddenly she finds that these things don't work on Paul in their usual way. Worse, this cool, manipulative woman finds herself losing her own self-control as she becomes increasingly enthralled by her younger protégé. Helen may give the impression of being a self-contained, almost overly confident woman, but her inability to keep in check her sexual feelings for Paul brings to the surface her repressed vulnerability. She is in actuality a profoundly unhappy woman hiding her unhappiness behind wealth and booze, an insecure, emotionally unfulfilled woman who has built emotional barriers between herself and the rest of the world and now suddenly finds herself susceptible to the power of her own feelings. When she sees the possibility of happiness with Paul, she seizes the opportunity with such ardor that she ends up smothering it.

John Garfield, who was just entering the peak years of his career, may seem an unlikely match for Crawford, but his moody, strongly masculine presence is exactly what is needed to bring out Crawford's strengths. Crawford herself had such a forceful screen presence that she tended to overpower her male costars. That certainly isn't the case here with Garfield. Actually, the movie at first seems really more his story than hers, the first half-hour of the picture taken up with establishing his backstory before she even appears. Once she enters the scene, though, hers becomes the dominant presence. A movie whose focus at first seems Paul's conflict between his art and love quickly becomes the story of a woman who falls in love with a man who can never feel as intensely about her as she does about him.

Oscar Levant is on hand not only to play the piano, but also to serve as Paul's cynical, wisecracking friend and mentor, Sid Jeffers. The screenplay by Clifford Odets and Zachary Gold is filled with articulate, well-crafted dialogue, and Levant gets the most attention-grabbing lines. Sounding as if they might have been written for Groucho Marx, his quips are at times so clever that they almost threaten to divert attention from the main plot of the film. Then there is the music. As in many films of the forties, the combination of passionate symphonic music of the Romantic era and big emotions is an unbeatable one, and Humoresque makes the most of it, using the music to underscore the emotional tone at key points. (The film also makes good use of popular standards by people like Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, and the Gershwins, a particular standout being Crawford's drunken rendition of "Embraceable You.") The music almost becomes shorthand for Helen's sexual attraction to Paul.

One of the best sequences in the film happens during a big concert. As Paul plays the dramatic first movement of Lalo's Symphonie Espagnole, Helen sits alone in a box in the concert hall. Oblivious of the embarrassed and disapproving glances of his family sitting in the front row, she concentrates on him completely. Crawford plays her scenes in close-up without speaking a word, occasionally leaning forward or briefly closing her eyes or making the slightest movement with her lips. (At one point she seems to be muttering something, and I couldn't help wondering if it was "I love you . . . I love you.") Her performance is in the expressions on her face as she gazes at Paul as though hypnotized, with a mixture of adoration, lust, and surrender. Crawford's control of her facial expressions in these scenes is absolute and without even a suggestion of calculation, on a par with Garbo's in her greatest silent films.

Humoresque may deal with many issues—the class divide between Helen and Paul, Paul's conflict between the demands of his career and the emotional demands of Helen, the compromises necessary to establish a career in the arts. But when the focus of the film is Helen's feelings for Paul and Crawford is onscreen, it's impossible to take your eyes off her or direct your attention to anything but the emotions she projects. Hers is a presence saturated with that indefinable quality known as star power, but here grounded in real acting ability and for once transcending ambition with genuine feeling. I may have reservations about the totality of Joan Crawford's acting career, more that of a movie star than a real actress. But when a movie star is this good, it's easy to see why she was such a powerful screen presence for so long.

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• Body and Soul: A Knockout of a Movie

This post is part of the LAMB Acting School 101 event on Joan Crawford. To learn more click here.

0 Body and Soul: A Knockout of a Movie

I am not a fan of the sport of boxing. But I am a fan of movies, and in the history of cinema boxing has often been a subject dealt with directly or indirectly. The sport has been put to many uses by filmmakers: for sentimentality (The Champ, 1931), for laughs (Harold Lloyd's The Milky Way, 1936 and its remake starring Danny Kaye, The Kid from Brooklyn, 1946), to symbolize lost dreams (On the Waterfront, 1954), to indict racism (The Great White Hope 1970) and legal injustice (The Hurricane, 1999), to inspire in the aftermath of Watergate and Vietnam (Rocky. 1976), to explore the subject of euthanasia (Million Dollar Baby, 2004).

One of the first studios to exploit the genre was Warner Bros., the studio that specialized in pictures about working-class, blue-collar men and women and in gangster and crime films. It's not surprising that the studio introduced into its boxing movies the involvement of organized crime in the sport. Its early boxing pictures even featured mainstays of its crime films like Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart (Kid Galahad, 1937) and James Cagney ( City for Conquest, 1940). Along with gangsterism, the Warners boxing movies included many elements that became staples of the genre for the next twenty years: dirty tricks by opponents, rigged fights; manipulation of the boxer by managers, promoters, and racketeers; betrayal by the boxer protagonist of lovers, relatives, and lifelong friends.

In the 1940's and 1950's, many boxing movies were made in the tragic vein, movies that followed the rise of a talented young boxer from obscurity to celebrity and his fall precipitated by the corrupting effects of ambition, fame, greed, pride, and loss of values. One of the first of the movies in this vein, one that in many ways became the template for those that followed, was Body and Soul (1947), whose chief character, Charlie Davis, is played by John Garfield.

The marvelous opening sequence of the movie immediately establishes a noirish feel (in fact, it is considered a film noir by some) and presages the striking staging, photography, and editing of the rest of the film. In the middle of the night, an apparently deserted training camp with a makeshift boxing ring is shown from overhead. In a traveling crane shot, the camera moves to one of the buildings in the compound, through its window to the bed where a sleeping man lies tossing and turning, and stops on a close-up of his face. The agitated man is Charlie Davis (Garfield), repeatedly muttering the name "Ben" in his sleep before suddenly snapping awake. A nighttime drive into a large city follows, where Charlie visits his mother and his estranged girl friend Peg, and we learn that Charlie is scheduled that night to fight a young contender for the world boxing championship. When he arrives at the stadium that evening, he lies down to rest before the fight and dozes off. The film then, in the fashion of the 1940's, drifts into an extended flashback that tells the story of Charlie's life for the last fifteen years or so.

Charlie, it turns out, became a fighter not by choice but from necessity. His origins lie in the kind of working-class, melting-pot, Depression-era big city neighborhood found in so many Warner Bros. films of the 1930's such as Dead End. In those films poor young men often turn to crime to escape the poverty and economic hopelessness of their environment. Charlie's life, though, is not hopeless. His parents (who are clearly portrayed as Jewish, a fact made explicit later in the film) are the owners of a small candy store. Charlie is an aimless young man who wants neither to take over his parents' business nor to go to college as his mother urges him. Though he has a talent for using his fists, neither does he want to be a fighter as his best friend Shorty urges him, even after Shorty lures Charlie into demonstrating his pugilistic talent in front of a local fight promoter, Quinn (William Conrad).

It is only after his parents' store is destroyed and his father killed when gangsters throw a bomb into the speakeasy next door that he at last consents to a bout. While celebrating his first victory, he meets Peg Born (Lilli Palmer), an art student from Greenwich Village, with whom he begins a relationship. Charlie's rapid rise to the top is shown in a brief montage, and within a year he is rich, famous, and engaged to Peg. It is at this point that a gangster named Roberts takes an interest in him and offers him a Faustian deal: a chance at the world title, with a guaranteed win. The price Charlie must pay is high—allegiance to Roberts, demotion of Quinn, ditching Shorty, and postponing his marriage—but Charlie agrees to the deal. It is clear that he is now ruled by all those things that will inevitably lead to his downfall—ambition, greed, pride—and is prepared to betray both people and principles to get what he wants. As Shorty says to Peg about the new Charlie, "He's not just a kid who can fight—he's money. And people want money so bad they make it stink, and they make [him] stink."

The results of Charlie's decision are dire: tragedy for Shorty, estrangement from his mother, the replacement of Peg with a slutty night club singer (this femme fatale character another element imported from film noir), Charlie's coming more and more under the control of the racketeer Roberts, a hedonistic and reckless lifestyle that will eventually bankrupt him both financially and morally. The only thing in all this that seems to affect Charlie is the damage he causes to Ben (Canada Lee), the champion that Roberts matches him against. Roberts tells Charlie that he is to fight Ben for fifteen rounds to a guaranteed decision in his favor. What he doesn't reveal is that Ben has a blood clot on his brain and not only is unlikely to last fifteen rounds but may very well be killed. Ben is seriously injured in the fight and although he doesn't die is permanently damaged and must retire. Out of remorse Charlie hires Ben as his personal trainer. Ben is the one person Charlie remains faithful to, and his character is in a way a reminder both of the one remaining bit of Charlie that is incorruptible and of the human price of the game Charlie is involved in.

Besides its noirish touches, Body and Soul benefits immensely from several things that place it ahead of its subsequent imitators. Only two fights are actually shown in the movie, Charlie's fight with Ben and the fight with the young contender at the end. These fights are depicted in a way that influenced the visual style of boxing movies for years to come: with rapid cuts, almost blurry close-ups of the fighters slugging at the camera, low-angle shots from ringside, and brightly lit overhead shots of the ring. According to the Internet Movie Database, cinematographer James Wong Howe (one of the greats of the studio era) shot some of this footage by wearing roller skates while holding the camera and having an assistant push him around the ring.

Because so little of Body and Soul deals directly with the boxing matches themselves, the emphasis of the movie is much more on its Faustian theme and on the interaction among its characters than on sport, making the movie one more of theme and psychology than of action. The film is also very much a love story; in fact, the movie was originally titled An Affair of the Heart. Peg, Charlie's lover, is played by the German-born actress Lilli Palmer (who at the time was married to Rex Harrison), and she is most convincing and appealing in the role.

The movie also benefits greatly from its title song, which is played almost continuously for the picture's duration. Already well known when the film was released (it was especially associated with Billie Holiday, who had recorded it three times before the movie's release, the first time in 1940), it is a love song with a haunting melody and is as much a part of the movie as the theme song from Laura is of that film. When Charlie and Peg first meet, they dance to it as a lilting waltz. Later during a wild party at Charlie's swanky new apartment, it is arranged as an uptempo, jazzy dance number. The constant use of the song underscores the Faustian theme of the movie, as Roberts succeeds in controlling Charlie's body and attempts to control his soul as well. It also emphasizes the love story element by continually reminding us of the competition between Roberts and Peg for Charlie's body and soul. And it reminds us of Charlie's own internal conflict: Which will ultimately control him, his body (boxing and material success) or his soul (his few remaining principles and his enduring feelings for Peg)?

As well as being a love story, Body and Soul is also a potent character study. And the thing that anchors the movie most securely in the memory is the towering performance by John Garfield as that character, Charlie Davis. Garfield was ideally cast in the role. Born in 1913 to Russian immigrants, as a child he studied boxing and drama at a special school for difficult students. An experienced New York stage actor, he was apparently the actor Clifford Odets had in mind when he wrote the boxing drama Golden Boy. Garfield made his first movie, Four Daughters, in 1938 for Warner Bros., where he would remain for the next seven years. In that movie he plays a bitter and alienated musician who ultimately commits suicide to keep the naive girl who marries him from ruining her life by staying with him. Some have cited this performance, which earned him an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor, as the first portrayal of the anti-hero in American movies. (He received his only other Academy Award nomination, for Best Actor, for Body and Soul.)

While at Warners, Garfield, unable to serve in the armed forces during World War II because of a heart condition, co-founded the Hollywood Canteen for soldiers with his Warner Bros. colleague Bette Davis and served as the organization's vice president. Before leaving the studio, he was cast in many roles similar to the one he played in Four Daughters, a misunderstood and unhappy young man controlled by outside forces, a sort of prototypical version of James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. If these roles were initially the result of typecasting and studio attempts to build a screen image, they were aptly chosen, and the screen persona of the angry young man stuck. Reportedly, Garfield was even the first choice to play Stanley Kowalski in both the stage and screen versions of A Streetcar Named Desire.

Body and Soul was one of the first movies Garfield made after leaving Warners and was produced by Enterprise Productions, the independent production company he co-founded. At the time, Garfield was playing the best roles of his career: in Humoresque (1946), the last film he made at Warners, as the brilliant violinist who becomes the protégé of possessive Joan Crawford (in what for me is her finest performance); in the film noir classic The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) as the drifter who comes under the spell of seductive but deadly Lana Turner; in the Best Picture Oscar winner Gentleman's Agreement (1947) , directed by Elia Kazan, as Gregory Peck's Jewish friend; and the next year as a corrupt lawyer with mob connections in another film noir classic, Force of Evil (1948), directed by Abraham Polonsky, who wrote the screenplay of Body and Soul. All of these films are highly recommended.

As Charlie, Garfield projects the same cockiness of attitude as the young James Cagney, and with his breathy voice and New York accent at times even sounds very much like Cagney. But even though he plays Charlie with the same self-assurance as the young Cagney, his Charlie is still a young man adrift, unsure of what he wants from life. Garfield shows how this lack of a moral center leaves Charlie open to fill the vacuum with all the wrong things, the things that eventually corrupt him and alienate him from those who love him. And he shows how vulnerable Charlie is to being controlled by forces that would use him for their own ends and then discard him.

In the midst of Charlie's apparent success, Garfield manages to suggest the continuing dissatisfaction with his life that lingers just beneath Charlie's surface, his unease that his life has no center, his conflict and just a hint of regret about the course his life has taken, and the quiet desperation with which he relies on the broken fighter Ben as a kind of anchor. Late in the film, after the last day of training for the last fight, there is a sequence in the training ring between just Charlie and Ben. In this calm interlude, the two actors show amazing rapport, and Garfield makes the vulnerability and self-doubt Charlie has been concealing for most of the movie (except in some of his scenes with Peg) more apparent than at any other point in the film.

The movie ends with Charlie's final professional match, against the young contender for the world title. The promoter Roberts has suborned Charlie by promising him an easy defeat if he will throw the fight—on exactly the same terms he promised when Charlie fought Ben all those years before: fifteen easy rounds and a decision in favor of the newcomer. Of course, he doublecrosses Charlie as he did Ben earlier, and when Charlie realizes this well into the fight, he must face one last conflict: whether to accept Roberts's lucrative deceit or to rebel against it and reclaim his dignity while risking Roberts's considerable wrath. This gives the movie a tidy circular structure that may seem a bit pat, but that circular structure serves a valid thematic purpose by giving Charlie the chance to make a different decision this time, to atone for the past and irrevocably alter his future.

One last thing that should be noted is how many of those associated with Body and Soul later became victims of the witch hunts for Communists in the film industry that occurred in the 1950's. Abraham Polonsky, the screenwriter, Anne Revere, who played Charlie's mother, and Canada Lee, the African American actor who played Ben, were all blacklisted in the U.S. Polonsky and Revere didn't work again in the industry for years, although Polonsky did some writing using a front. Lee did star in the British anti-apartheid film Cry, the Beloved Country (1951) before he died in 1952. Garfield's daughter Julie has said that she believes the controversy about her father's politics and the prospect of being investigated by Joseph McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee caused the stress responsible for Garlfield's death from a heart attack in 1952, when he was barely 39 years old. The movie's director, Robert Rossen, survived HUAC investigation and continued to work in Hollywood, but only because he, like Elia Kazan, "named names."

Whether you are a fan of boxing or boxing movies or. like me, just a fan of good movies, Body and Soul is a film not to be missed. Its superior direction, writing, photography, and unforgettable performance by John Garfield place it well ahead of other movies in its genre.