Taglines: A lonely girl — a man on the run and 72 hours that shock you with the impact of unleashed emotions.
He Ran All the Way movie storyline. Nick Robey is a two-bit hood, whose insecurity, superstitiousness and skitterishness make him an ineffective criminal. He lives with his slattern of a mother, who doesn’t care what happens to him, he in turn who feels the same about her. Nick and his associate Al Molin have planned a targeted mugging, their victim who will be carrying a large cache of cash for a payroll.
In the mugging gone wrong, Nick is forced to go on the run, he only remembering Al’s advice to blend into the crowd to avoid suspicion and thus capture. In blending into the crowd, Nick meets Peg Dobbs, a working class, inexperienced and thus equally insecure young woman who he, in wooing, believes he can use to his advantage.
In the process, Nick meets Peg’s parents and her kid brother Tommy with who she lives. Nick and each of the four members of the Dobbs family have to decide how far they will go with the other and / or risk to get out of their respective predicaments, Nick’s whose changes with time and the ever changing nature of the outcome of the mugging. The four Dobbs may end up at odds with each other, each who may have a different perspective of what is best for them as a collective.
He Ran All the Way is a 1951 American film noir crime drama directed by John Berry, starring John Garfield, Shelley Winters, Wallace Ford, Selena Royle, Gladys George, Norman Lloyd, Keith Hetherington, Bobby Hyatt, Clancy Cooper, Robert Karnes and Dale Van Sickel. The film was Garfield’s last, as accusations of his involvement with the Communist Party and a refusal to name names while testifying before the HUAC led to his blacklisting in Hollywood. He died less than a year later, at age thirty-nine, from coronary thrombosis due to a blood clot blocking an artery in his heart. During the film’s initial run, director John Berry and writers Dalton Trumbo and Hugo Butler were uncredited due to Hollywood blacklisting during the Red Scare.
Film Review for He Ran All the Way
A very thin thread of plausibility is stretched exceedingly taut in the new melodrama at the Paramount, Bob Robert’s “He Ran All the Way.” Telling a harsh and hacking story of a fugitive murderer who holes himself up in the drab apartment of a middle-class family whose members he terrorizes into keeping mum, this thriller depends for its impact upon the maintenance of belief that the family would go about its business and still keep silent — which is stretching it fine.
Beyond any question, Hugo Butler and Guy Endore have penned a shock-crammed script from Sam Ross’ mordant novel upon which the picture is based. From the first splattering scene in which the hero is roundly slapped by his own hateful ma, through a misfired stickup and subsequent hideout, brutality is piled upon surprise. John Berry’s driving direction is designed to force the punctuation of shock, with Franz Waxman’s music and sound tricks adding an apt cacaphony.Further, John Garfield’s stark performance of the fugitive who desperately contrives to save himself briefly from capture is full of startling glints from start to end.
He makes a most odd and troubled creature, unused to the normal flow of life, unable to perceive the moral standards of decent people or the tentative advance of a good girl’s love. And in Mr. Garfield’s performance, vis-a-vis the rest of the cast, is conveyed a small measure of the irony and the pity that was in the book.But, unfortunately, the basic assumption that the fugitive could so terrorize a home that its members would keep silent about his presence, even when away from it and him, appears far-fetched in the telling.
For all Mr. Garfield’s truculence and for all the displays of sweaty terror that Wallace Ford and Selena Royle present as the browbeaten heads of the family it hardly seems reasonable that one of them would not tell the police or someone of the killer’s whereabouts when allowed to go free. The device of having one hostage always remain at home is not sufficiently strong to render plausible the mute submission of members of the family when out on the street.
And likewise the morbific suggestion that the daughter of the family falls fitfully in love with this strange vagrant whom she innocently brings into the household is hard to take on the basis of what is shown. Shelley Winters does an earnest job of wriggling in and out of Mr. Garfield’s pliant arms and generally conducts herself in the manner of a young lady in a restless state of mind. But love on the basis of a pick-up at a public swimming-pool and the need of a violent man for comfort does not ring particularly true.
All in all, there is shock and grim excitement in this studiously horrifying film, but it soon assumes the loo k of sheer theatrics when it lays its assumptions on the line.On the stage at the Paramount are Juanita Hall, Cy Reeves, the Four Evans and Carmen Cavallaro and his band.
He Ran All the Way (1951)
Directed by: John Berry
Starring: John Garfield, Shelley Winters, Wallace Ford, Selena Royle, Gladys George, Norman Lloyd, Keith Hetherington, Bobby Hyatt, Clancy Cooper, Robert Karnes, Dale Van Sickel
Screenplay by: Hugo Butler, Dalton Trumbo
Production Design by: Harry Horner
Cinematography by: James Wong Howe
Film Editing by: Francis D. Lyon
Set Decoration by: Edward G. Boyle
Music by: Franz Waxman
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: United Artists
Release Date: June 19, 1951 (United States)
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