The documentary traces Garfield's rise from a tough childhood on New York's Lower East Side through his vagabond youth and apprenticeship with the renowned Group Theatre to his Oscar®-nominated breakthrough as a film star in Four Daughters (1938). A forerunner to such tough-yet-sensitive rebels as Marlon Brando and James Dean, Garfield displayed what Lee Grant calls his "smoldering, somber, troubled street-guy kind of presence" in such hard-hitting films as Humoresque (1946) and Force of Evil (1948).
Garfield died prematurely at age 39 in 1952, a victim of a weak heart and, according to some of the documentary's interviewees, the stress of his unofficial blacklisting during the witch-hunt of the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Director: David Heeley
BW & C-60m.
by Roger Fristoe
