Noirs at their best can be proletariat passion plays, and none came sweatier, meaner, and more eloquent than John Berry’s HE RAN ALL THE WAY (1951; May 23 at 7 pm, with Cy Endfield’s Try and Get Me). The politics are on the surface — Berry, star John Garfield, and fronted scripters Dalton Trumbo and Hugo Butler were all fellow-traveler HUAC casualties, and the film seethes with second-class-citizen fury. In one minute flat we understand Garfield’s nowhere guy (living with boozy-tramp mom Gladys George, who when Garfield shoots a cop tells the police, “Get him? Kill him!”), as, after a bad heist, he corners himself in the family flat of a young Shelley Winters and dad Wallace Ford. Berry owned a wrecked career, but this honey reveals an ambitious, truth-telling sensibility of which Hollywood was then and is now in dire need. (After it was released, Berry left America for a 13-year exile, and Garfield died of a heart attack.) The film is as rich in visual expression, thematic frisson, and acting beauty as any movie of the ’50s (Winters hits notes of guileless, sympathetic reality here I don’t remember seeing in other noirs), and there’s no canned happy ending to spoil the purity of its gloom.
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