Little Big Man: John Garfield Triumphs in
Anatole Litvak’s Out of the Fog
· by Alan Khon*
Star John Garfield convincingly delivers worldly truths on two distinct but
unified levels in the 1941 film Out of the Fog,
directed by Anatole Litvak. The film is an adaptation of Irwin Shaw‘s play The Gentle People written for
The Group Theater in New York, whose opening night cast on January 5, 1939
included Elia Kazan, Martin Ritt, Lee J. Cobb, Sam Jaffe, and Sylvia Sidney.
Shaw and Robert Rossen penned the film’s screenplay. There is certainly no
mistaking its political stance.
Garfield’s visceral acting and
Shaw and Rossen’s forceful screenplay compel us, perhaps against our will, to
accept Jacob Goff as an amoral, compassionless chiseler (the poisoned look in
Goff’s eyes when he is called “chiseler” is captured beautifully by James Wong
Howe’s trenchant camerawork). He is a little man, ordinary in his own
beginnings, self-created, sparing nothing in his quest for power. He is a thug
with an inside “full of rocks,” who carelessly flicks lit cigarettes to the
ground and sets wooden boats on fire to watch them burn with the glee of a
spoiled brat. His armamentarium of pain includes menacing sneers, verbal
threats, slaps, punches, a rubber hose inflicted on a resistant “client’s”
back, and a brandished gun. Unlike Garfield’s other film characters, Goff grudgingly
exposes a smidgen of vulnerability only when his mission is directly
threatened.
Goff taps into and reflects
the disenchantment that underlies the lives of the locals in Sheepshead Bay,
Brooklyn (with the exception of George, the good-hearted, ambitionless
auctioneer who naively believes that life will be “just swell” for his girl
Stella and him, if only she would marry him.)
Goff sets himself apart,
neither seeking from nor providing genuine kindness to others. Follow him from
foggy dock to smoky restaurant — all exterior scenes are shot as nighttime
and/or washed-out fog — and after a while you just want to spit at his forceful
puss.
Goff is the product of an
education in “the break rods and pool rooms and beer halls and bread lines of
the big (American) cities.” He traveled a lawless, shadowy road to the Bay, in
parallel with the film’s main characters, who lived their entire lives doing
other than what they really wanted to do. This is something Goff claims to have
broken free from, but he is dead wrong.
As he introduces himself to Stella, played straightforwardly by Ida Lupino, Goff smells more than her violet perfume as she walks by. He senses her
frustration at not knowing what she wants — except to leave Brooklyn — for he
has already walked many dark streets in her shoes. He tells her exactly what
she wants to hear, and does all of the things that George never does for her —
buying her orchids, taking her to a fancy nightclub. Goff has given Stella hope
for a new life. She has been waiting to be conquered, not coddled.
The interplay between Stella
and Goff is stiff, lacking the magic and eroticism of Bogie and Bacall, for
Stella and Goff understand but never articulate that their relationship lacks
true depth. There is only the cheap excitement, the intrigue, and the imminent
danger in Goff’s lifestyle that perverts Stella’s otherwise sensible nature and
feeds Goff’s ego.
Goff’s attempted domination of
these ordinary people — his deterministic worldview jousting with their
perceived free will — is referred to as “the strong tak(ing) from the weak.” It
is a parasitism that reflects the greed at the core of America’s capitalist
system. Goff’s successful loan sharking is just another name for the
“installment” plan, a scheme that the character Jonah ironically claims makes
“every man in America … a king.” When Jonah and his friend Olaf are forced by
Goff at gunpoint to pay protection money for their small fishing boat — aptly
dubbed the “Enterprise III” — they are signing for a loan of which they will
receive not one penny. Goff congratulates his clients, bragging, “There’s no
telling where this corporation is going to go.”
The better life that these
ordinary men hope for cannot exist within Goff’s leeching economic system.
Everyone is trapped. Legal action is shown to be useless. The sun shines for no
one in this world.
Clearly, Goff thinks too much
of himself, and it is not lost on Shaw and Rossen that Goff is but a middle man
in a bigger system whose success — I beg to call it that — can be made possible
only through his dependence on people who “work for a living.” With no
authentic power, and lacking the basic ability to tread water — strikingly
ironic in the film’s maritime milieu — Goff is confirmed a pawn as he drowns in
an economic system that punishes those who think themselves greater than it.
Out of the Fog is not a story of good triumphing over evil. The film’s ending was
co-opted by censors who would not allow Jonah and Olaf to strike a blow to kill
Goff. Divine intervention was permitted, but it strips the fishermen of the
power to determine their own destiny.
Viewed through the prism of
World War II, Goff assumes a related symbol as the unforgiving force of
European fascism, again intimidating the “gentle people” by scaring them into
inaction. The townspeople speak of “escape,” “freedom,” and of “wanting peace,”
but the roads to these destinations are barricaded.
Stella is young and decent,
yet eager to grab onto the merry-go-round, paint her face and catch Goff’s
sickness, even at the expense of betraying her incredibly tolerant and loving
father, Jonah. She allows herself to be brutalized through her primitive
attraction to Goff; she announces to her father that Goff’s rough and tumble
lifestyle is “a disease I want to catch.” At her core, Stella shows who we all
have the potential to become.
Olaf is a simple man with the
soul of a baby, innocently wishing that evil would just disappear so that he
could continue to find contentment in fishing, and dream his and Jonah’s dream
of buying a bigger boat on which to sail for sunny, Caribbean waters. He
acknowledges that heroics may be required to defeat the fascist in the midst,
but discourages others from such action. Olaf is too timid to strike a mortal
blow. What’s the use, he shrugs?
After absorbing a beating by
Goff, Jonah innately understands that continued passivity would bring ruination
to his family and village. His only option is to renounce their failed
innocence, and to take action to overcome the evil, outside force. Jonah will
fight for what he feels is right, for it is natural — “the law of the jungle” —
to do so. He will resist the enemy and its “planes and bombs and men with guns
in their pockets.” Jonah plans and is party to Goff’s death.
As Goff, Garfield — the
progressive, the true common man whose miserable fate it was to be destroyed
through the Hollywood Blacklist travesty — reveals the depravity and fantasy of
Depression-era capitalist society as he condemns all fascist forces at play in
a world at war.
