Mickey Borden (John Garfield): I wouldn’t win first prize if I were the only entry in the contest.
Ann Lemp (Priscilla Lane): Mathematically speaking, I think you’d stand a fine chance.
Mickey: You think they’d let me win?
Ann: Who?
Mickey: They.
Ann: Who?
Mickey: The fates, the destinies, whoever they are that decide what we do or don’t get.
Ann: What do you mean?
Mickey: They’ve been at me now nearly a quarter of a century. No let-up. First they said, “Let him do without parents. He’ll get along.” Then they decided, “He doesn’t need any education. That’s for sissies.” Then right at the beginning, they tossed a coin. “Heads he’s poor, tails he’s rich.” So they tossed a coin… with two heads. Then, for a finale, they got together on talent. “Sure,” they said, “let him have talent. Not enough to let him do anything on his own, anything good or great. Just enough to let him help other people. It’s all he deserves.” Well, you put all this together and you get Michael Bolgar.
— “Four Daughters”
If things had turned out differently, Jules Garfield — as the former Julius Garfinkel, a working-class veteran of the New York City streets and the Group Theatre was then known — might have made his film debut in “Having Wonderful Time,” reprising his 1937 Broadway role of Chick Kessler. But the suits at RKO decided Arthur Kober’s very Jewish summer-camp comedy needed to be de-ethnicized to serve as a vehicle for Ginger Rogers, and Garfield’s male lead, renamed Kirkland, went to a partrician Hollywood scion whose acting style and physicality could not be more different than Garfield’s. Ironically, Garfield would later reprise screen roles created by Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in a pair of remakes.
Garfield, it turned out was lucky indeed. He instead made his screen debut with a critically praised, Oscar-nominated, attention-grabbing role in Michael Curtiz “Four Daughters. At the age of 25, he achieved a level of stardom that, at the time, still eluded fellow New Yorker and Warner player Humphrey Bogart (who, unlike, the character he often played, came from a priviliged background) after eight years in Hollywood.
Renamed John Garfield at the insistence of Jack Warner — more sensitive to anti-Semitism than any of Hollywood’s other founding fathers — the artist born as Jacob Julius Garfinkel received sixth billing for his first film, which is less known today than Curtiz’s other classics like “Casablanca,” “Mildred Pierce,” “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” “The Adventures of Robin Hood” or even the other picture he received a Best Director Oscar nomination for that year, “Angels With Dirty Faces.”
The hard-driving Hungarian is justly celebrated for his range. But it’s still surprising to see one of the studio’s top director turn in one of his best pieces of work with this funny, touching and superbly crafted piece of Americana derived from a Fannie Hurst weepie. It recently appeared in a beautifully remastered DVD edition from the Warner Archive Collection that shows off Ernest Haller’s glamour photography (often several stops brighter than Curtiz’ norm) and the director’s signature tracking shots.
Three of the four sisters are played by actual sisters who were under contract to Warner — Lola Lane, a former wife of Lew Ayres who had been playing mostly tough dames on screen since 1929 (but is treated much more sympathetically here) and her younger siblings, Priscilla and Rosemary, singers who had both joined the studio with 1937’s “Varsity Show.” A fourth sister (the Iowa-born sisters birth name was Mullican) in show business was screen tested, but the role of the eldest sister went to Gale Page, a Warner contractee who somewhat resembled the Lanes.
The setting is a ficticious city in upstate New York that’s big enough to have a (never seen) “music foundation” where the sisters’ single father, played as a slightly disheveled professorial type by Claude Rains, works. The disarming opening scenes are roughly divided between the family performing musically together and the sisters interacting among themselves and their stalwart beaux, played by Warner stalwarts Jeffrey Lynn, Frank McHugh and Dick Foran.
Garfield turns up half an hour into the movie, as a cynical pianist who composer Lynn has enlisted as an orchestrator. He has a wonderful first scene with the eightysomething character actress May Robson (as Rains’ sister) who feigns outrage at his insolence. Then Garfield encounters Priscilla Lane, as youngest and prettiest sister Anne, who by this point has become Lynn’s de-facto girlfriend.
Not many actors — certainly not Eddie Albert, who was considered for the part of Mickey and turned up in two sequels — could deliver the speech at this top of this column (the superb screenplay is credited to Lenore Coffee and Julius Epstein), which Garfield delivers while playing the piano and with a cigarette hanging from his mouth.
Garfield said he modeled the character of Mickey on the composer-actor Oscar Levant, with whom he later acted in his last film under Warner contract, the remake of the Hurst weepie “Humoresque.” (Reportedly their mutual pal Clifford Odets’ script includes material from his unused draft of “Rhapsody in Blue” — Garfield very much wanted to play George Gershwin, but Jack Warner, always wary of letting his Jewish actors play Jews, gave the role to Robert Alda).
Mickey, who mistakes Ann’s maternal interest for something more, is crushed when Ann and Jeffrey Lynn announce their engagement. But when she realizes that the announcement brings pain to eldest sister Page (who has been nursing her own roaring crush on Lynn), Ann impulsively elopes with a delighted Mickey.
This sets the stage for a major tragedy. Neither she nor Mickey is happy with their married life in a Manhattan walkup (at a 59th St. address that, if it existed, would be in the middle of the East River). They’re so poor she’s forced to pawn a braclet from Lynn to buy a train ticket for a Christmas visit upstate.
Arriving for the festivities, Ann and Mickey discover that nothing romantic has developed between the older sister and Lynn — and worse, Ann is still in love with her former suitor. Realizing he can never make Ann happy, Mickey makes the ultimate sacrifice. Curtiz stages his suicide-by-auto so adroitly that it was reproduced virtually verbatim in Gordon Douglas’s much-inferior 1955 remake “Young at Heart.” Frank Sinatra, who had the Garfield role in this version, reportedly refused to show up for the first day’s shooting unless his character ultimately recovered and got Doris Day.
“Four Daughters” opened at Thanksgiving 1938 at the prestigious Radio City Music Hall (instead of Warners’ flagship, The Strand) accomplied by newspaper ads in which Jack Warner described the picture as the apex of his career. It did such healthy business that the studio remarkably contrived to bring back all 10 principal cast members (all conveniently under contract) for a followup, “Daughters Courageous,” that arrived just six months later, to coincide with the celebration of the forgotten Daugher’s Day.
Because Garfield’s character had died at the end of “Four Daughters,” he couldn’t appear in an actual sequel, but he got top billing this time playing a similar character — a fisherman’s layabout son whose fatalism arouses the sympathy of Priscilla Lane, once again tempted to dump the unfortunate Jeffrey Lynn (a playwright this time out). Garfield is again a charming and compelling presence, even if his character (a Portugese-American named Lopez) is forced to play an accordion in one scene.
Based on a play that would be remade more faithfully three years later as “Always in My Heart” (with Walter Huston and Kay Francis), “Daughters Courageous” actually centers on the Claude Rains character, a charming, silver-tongued scalawag who returns to his home in Carmel, Calif. twenty years after abandoning his four daughters and their mother, played by the superb Fay Bainter (they would be re-teamed the following year for “White Banners”).
Rains receives an initially frosty welcome from his family since the girls have just given their long-divorced mom their blessing to remarry a prosperous businessman (Donald Crisp) who is very generous with the daughters and their beaux. But Crisp rightly worries that Rains is clever and loving enough to win over the girls, and perhaps his fiancee as well. There’s an especially charming scene where Rains coaches Page, an aspiring actress, casually mentioning at one point that he had spent some time with the Group Theater.
Even better are the long dialogue exchanges between Rains and Garfield. Though the older man recognizes his own wanderlust in Garfield, he initially gives his blessing to plans for the young man to elope with his youngest daughter. But then his ex-wife, who remains determined to marry Crisp if only for the family’s sake, asks Rains to spare Priscilla the same pain of abandonment that she has suffered.
The ending is truly five-handkerchief stuff, as Rains and Garfield boarding a train together with forced bonhomie, presumably never to see the women they love again.
It’s very much to the credit of Curtiz and the writers (Julius Epstein and his twin brother Phillip, who also worked on “Casablanca”) that this retread turns out to be nearly as good as “Four Daughters.” Never before available on home video, it’s available in a crisp new DVD transfer that shows off James Wong Howe’s immaculate cinematography. You can order it either singly or as part of a collection that includes “Four Daughters” and its two proper sequels with the exact same cast (minus Garfield), directed respectively by Curtiz and William Keighley.
Warners capitalized on its new star by rushing him through six 1939 releases and four in 1940, many of them films that felt like hand-me-downs even if they weren’t technically remakes. Among the Garfield titles at the Warner Archive is his eighth, a very close re-do (complete with stock location footage) of Curtiz’ “20,000 Years in Sing Sing” (1933), a classic prison drama starring Spencer Tracy and Bette Davis.
“Castle on the Hudson” was directed by Russian-born Antole Litvak, an underrated stylist and superb wrangler of actors who was Oscar nominated for “The Snake Pit” (1948). Garfield, who contemplated going on suspension to avoid playing another criminal after the likes of “Dust Be My Destiny” (with Priscilla Lane) and “They Made Me a Criminal” (opposite a miscast Rains) consented to play a cocky crook who discovers his political connections cut no ice with the reform-minded warden (Pat O’Brien) when he lands a stretch in Ossinging.
Following in the footsteps of not only Tracy but Cagney and Bogart, Garfield brings his own inmitable persona to the Warner staple of the wise guy who learns the meaning of self-sacrifice. When girlfriend Ann Sheridan is reported near death, O’Brien allows him to return to the city — where Sheridan plugs fatally plugs crooked lawyer Jerome Cowan (who in turn is trying to kill his former client Garfield). Guess who returns to Sing Sing and takes the rap on Death Row?
Burgess Meredith, another candidate to play Mickey Borden in “Four Daughters,” makes a memorable appearance as a cum-laude college graduate who leads an aborted prison break.
Garfield and Litvak were happier with “Out of the Fog” (1941), based on a Group Theater production by Irwin Shaw that had starred Franchot Tone on Broadway. Garfield seems to be enjoying himself as a philosphoical small-time crook who is trying to extort protection money from a pair of working stiffs (Thomas Mitchell and John Qualen) whose fishing boat he threatens to torch.
Of even greater concern to Mitchell is that his bored daughter — second-billed Ida Lupino, terrific in a role created by Sylvia Sidney on Broadway — seems more interested in Garfield than her hard-working beau, played by the inevitable Eddie Albert.
Filmed by the great James Wong Howe (on a remarkably elaborate simulation of the Sheepshead Bay waterfront) from an intelligent adaptation by Robert Rossen, Jerry Wald and Richard Macauley, “Out of the Fog” is a memorably poetic fable that has aged well.
Next week, I’ll look at four other Garfields from the Warner Archive Collection — “Tortilla Flat” (1942) and “The Fallen Sparrow” (1943), both made on loanout to other studios, and two of his best, “Pride of the Marines” (1945) and “The Breaking Point” (1950).
Today’s WAC releases include a pair of 1942 Kathryn Grayson vehicles directed by the great Frank Borzage: “The Vanishing Virginian” with Frank Morgan and “Seven Sweethearts,” co-starring Van Heflin. Also new are remastered DVD editions of Roy Rowland’s “The Romance of Rosy Ridge” (1947) starring Van Johnson and debuting Janet Leigh and Richard Thorpe’s “Athena” (1954) starring Jane Powell, Edmund Purdom, Debbie Reynolds and Vic Damone. The latter is presented in full stereo with three deleted musical numbers.
“Notorious,” “Rebecca” and “Spellbound” are set to make their Blu-ray debuts as part of the “Alfred Hitchcock Premiere Collection” on Oct. 11. Also new to the format from Fox/MGM are “West Side Story” (Oct. 18) and “Tora! Tora! Tora” due for release on Dec. 6, a day before the 70th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack.
