Amidst the great tube strike of 2025, a small cohort came together for the first Dailiesclassics, a new subsection of DAILIES, a group seeking to curate film screenings for film lovers to connect, discuss and celebrate cinema. Tomisin Adepeju, filmmaker and founder, opened the evening, recounting his first viewing of John Berry’s He Ran All The Way (1951) and his inability to discuss it with anyone – simply because so few people have seen it. Starring John Garfield and Shelley Winters, the film has largely fallen into oblivion due in part to Garfield and many of the crew’s alleged association with the Communist Party. Dalton Trumbo wrote the script based on Sam Ross’ novel weeks before his jail term – friends Guy Endore and Hugo Butler made some revisions while he was incarcerated and were credited as the scriptwriters. Before the premiere however, Butler and director Berry were subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) and subsequently removed from marketing materials. But it was no doubt Garfield who suffered the most. Accused of party membership, he testified before HUAC two months before He Ran All The Way was scheduled to open, but was “greylisted” from Hollywood and died less than a year later at the age of 39 – it is thought that the mental toil of the film world, as well as his friends and family turning their backs on him, was largely behind his premature death.
There is no consolation in Garfield’s story – but perhaps He Ran All The Way, a noir with elegance, tact and genuine philosophy behind it, is a good place to start. Nick Robey (Garfield), unemployed and still living with his mother, botches a robbery with his friend, resulting in a policeman’s death. Attempting to lose himself in the crowd, he ends up at the local swimming pool, where he meets Peg Dobbs (Winters), a young bakery worker who quickly becomes smitten with him. He accompanies her home and meets her family, but when the manhunt for him grows wider, takes them hostage so that he may escape safely.
Perhaps one of the first home invasion movies, He Ran All The Way is tense and genuinely harrowing, a fantastic contrast with Adepeju’s opening short film choice, Liam White’s Housewarming, in which new home owner Saskia (Charley Clive) is interrupted mid-unpacking by a stranger (Barry Ward), who used to live in the house and has not been made aware by his (supposed ex) girlfriend that this is no longer his home. Dark, chilling, it is only after the film that the dreaded sense of invasion creeps over, as Saskia grapples with the loss of privacy and safety in the dark corners of her now alien home. He Ran All The Way is perhaps a little more overt, but nonetheless, the pairing is gloriously appropriate. Robey, like the stranger, does not belong, and their character clashes with the interior – an unnerving silence settles, and nothing looks the same anymore. During a post-screening interview, Adepeju and fellow filmmaker Naqqash Khalid discussed the physicality of Garfield’s character and acting, his panicked brush of his fingers through his hair, the clutching of a curtain in fear. Garfield is truly excellent as a paranoid killer on the loose, but what becomes apparent is that Robey is not so much a cold-blooded criminal as he is a boy who has never been loved – son to a woman who does not care what happens to him, he is confronted with a certain sadness watching the Dobbs family, kind-hearted people who look out for and love one another (Wallace Ford and Selena Royle are excellent as Peg’s terrified parents, particularly Ford who must grapple with the emasculation of not being able to protect his family in the 50s). More specifically, it is in her younger brother Tommy (Bobby Hyatt) that Robey finds his foil, and a scene in which the boy hits him repetitively, to which Robey says, glassy-eyed, “go on, kid” is particularly heartbreaking to watch. He Ran All The Way is full of ambiguities – in other words, it is difficult not to feel deeply for Robey, and even more difficult still to recognise that a romantic relationship with Peg is doomed. From the very beginning, it is blurry as to whether his interest in her is self-preservation or the beginning of a terse love – despite this, as an audience we are enamoured by them as a couple (and a handsome one, at that), and desperately long for a redemption arc for Robey, or a Bonnie & Clyde U-turn that will cement them as soulmates. Unfortunately for us, He Ran All The Way doesn’t sugarcoat anything – like its history, it is dark, twisted and full of upsets.
