John Garfield

He arrives with his hat on. In Four Daughters (1938), his first film, John Garfield plays Mickey Borden, an orchestrator sent for by the family's lodger, and he sits down at the Lemps' piano without being asked and tells them the fates have had it in for him since birth. He lights a cigarette. He speaks faster and lower than anyone else in the house, with the pauses in the wrong places, and Michael Curtiz's camera, which had been contentedly admiring the sunshine, keeps drifting back to him. We sat forward. The film had spent half an hour asking us to like it; Garfield made us watch it.

Where that came from is no mystery. He trained at the American Laboratory Theatre and came up through the Group Theatre and Broadway in the 1930s, and he brought their habit of going at a line rather than delivering it, which next to the studio's other leading men sounded like someone actually talking. Warner Bros signed him in 1938 and spent the 1940s putting him in war films and film noir as the brooding working-class man, on the margins or led astray. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), Body and Soul (1947) and Force of Evil (1950) are the ones people mean when they say his name, and the drifter, the boxer and the crooked lawyer are all cousins of Mickey Borden.

What he did that others of his period did not was let the toughness leak. The chin goes up and the eyes do something else, and the films that use him best are built around that gap. Curtiz, who directed him three times, saw it first. The cost was that Warners kept him in the same cynical suit for years, whatever he asked for, and in the middle films there is a sameness, the same shrug, the same wounded sneer, which is the studio's failure more than his.

He set up his own production company in 1946, and his last film, He Ran All the Way (1951), came out of it. He was dead the following May, at 39. Begin with Four Daughters, and begin at the piano; if the first scene does not make you sit forward, the rest of him is not for you.