| Title | : | Body and soul, the story of John Garfield |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0688029078 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780688029074 |
| Format Type | : | Unknown Binding |
| Number of Pages | : | 288 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1975 |
Body and soul, the story of John Garfield Reviews
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A confounding biography of Hollywood’s first genuine Method actor, the busy adulterer and tragic HUAC victim, John Garfield.
Swindell’s portrait of his subject is essentially convincing: Garfield emerges as an uneducated man of instinctive genius and crippling insecurity, whose curious mixture of selfishness and selflessness was laid bare by the Communist witchhunt. But his book is extraordinarily light on quotes, and fairly often the author will end a paragraph by introducing some new idea that remains unexplored or even unexplained.
While the story ticks almost every box in terms of my interests – incorporating old movies, radical art and HUAC – the best biographies of modern subjects tend to lean on oral history. Swindell's approach, by contrast, keeps us at arms’ length, and fatally lacks the dynamism that characterised its subject’s work. The half-arsed edition from Echo Point is missing a page from its index. -
3.5
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Good bio of John Garfield. Also an interesting picture of the early 20th c. American theater world and the early movie industry. He had success but lots of heartache. Overall he was a beloved figure.
