Still from 'He Ran All the Way'

1951 / 78 mins / b/w
Dir. John Berry / Sc. Hugo Butler, Dalton Trumbo / Cine. James Wong Howe
Cast: Wallace Ford, John Garfield, Shelley Winters
35mm print courtesy of Park Circus

Introduced by Stuart Weinstock, Adjunct Lecturer, Film Series Coordinator, Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies

“Dynamite Hits the Screen with Their Kind of Love!”

“[This movie is] about doom,” director John Berry explained late in his life. “That’s not coincidental.” A film about a desperate man in search of somebody to trust, He Ran All the Way is the product of a remarkable coalition of leftist filmmakers who would themselves become victims of the treacherous witch-hunts of the postwar era.

Berry (born Jak Szold) was named by fellow director Edward Dmytryk to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951 and relocated to France; writer Hugo Butler dodged a HUAC subpoena the same year and moved to Mexico; Dalton Trumbo was one of the original Hollywood Ten, here writing under the front of novelist Guy Endore, who was ironically soon to be blacklisted himself; Selena Royle, who plays Shelley Winters’ mother, was subsequently named in Red Channels and saw her acting career evaporate; and Norman Lloyd (born Norman Perlmutter), who appears as Garfield’s accomplice in the payroll heist, was similarly sidelined for much of the 1950s. 

This concentration of soon-to-be blacklistees was only possible because He Ran All the Way was an independent film, produced by leftist star John Garfield’s own Roberts Pictures (cofounded with Bob Roberts). Yet, of the talent he brought together for He Ran All the Way, few fell quite as far as Garfield himself (born Jacob Garfinkle), who, after refusing to name names before HUAC, was barred from future employment in Hollywood and died of a heart attack a year later. He Ran All the Way was his last film.