In Dust  he plays Joe Bell, an angry young man in and out of jail and work farms. 
(His main crime seems to be riding freight trains.)  At Joe's latest "residence", the overseer is a tad psychotic and also takes a dim view of daughter Mabel's interest in young Joe.

Mabel (Priscilla Lane) believes   in Joe, though, and they plan on getting married as soon as he serves his sentence.  However, when old Pop tries to stop them he's knocked down in the ensuing scuffle and pronounced dead.  Joe and Mabel have to take it on the lam, but they're young and in love, they can ride the rails together....you get the idea.

The only problem is Joe eventually gets caught, and poor Mabel is forced into a difficult decision.  In writer Robert Rossen's original treatment, both Joe and Mabel were shot and killed, but in 1939 that kind of resolution was not in the cards, and instead we have a courtroom scene with the triumph of American ideals, etc.  Hooray!

Humoresque (1946) is a bit of a departure for Garfield: he plays Paul Boray, violin virtuoso, who catches the eye of wealthy society patroness Mrs. Helen Wright (Joan Crawford.)  Mrs. Wright likes to sponsor young talent; she also has some serious problems, alcoholism being only one of them.

Written by Clifford Odets and directed by Jean Negulesco, Humoresque  is lush and luxuriant film noir, if there is such a thing.  As Paul's pianist the ascerbic Oscar Levant is on hand with his trademark dry comments ("I think I'll go home and write a song: 'If I Had a Million Dollars Would I Talk to You?' ").  The cast also includes J. Carroll Naish as Boray's father and Paul Cavanagh as the neglected Mr. Wright (is that name a pun?)
There is surprising chemistry between Garfield  and Crawford -- as Garfield's Boray bluntly puts it: "We're like two wrestlers looking for a hold."  And what is there about Joan Crawford that lends her so well to playing women with neuroses? ("I was married twice before, once to a cry-baby and then to a caveman -- between the two of them I said good-bye to my girlhood.")
Garfield's brooding intensity works very well in his role as the driven young musician, and this is Crawford at her best, post-flapper but pre-gargoyle, her sculptured face mirroring all of her trauma and conflict.

Garfield is Tommy Gordon, a small time gangster sent to prison where he runs up against stern warden Pat O'Brien. O'Brien sets about some rehabilitation efforts that gradually begin to make an impression on Tommy. That is, until Tommy's girl Kay (Ann Sheridan) is seriously hurt in a car wreck. Although still unsure of Tommy, the warden agrees to let him out to visit Kay, on the grounds that Tommy will return on an 'honor system.'

But at Kay's apartment the couple is confronted by Tommy's lawyer, who turns out to be the one responsible for Kay's injuries. The two men fight - and Kay shoots the lawyer.

Tommy takes the blame for the shooting, and must decide whether to keep his promise to the warden and return to prison - knowing full well that he will face a murder charge.

with Ann Sheridan and the long arm of the law

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"The Fallen Sparrow" is good early film noir - the moody darkness, the camera angles, the sense of unease and uncertainty...
Garfield is a Spanish civil war vet who's just been released from the hospital and returns to his old neighborhood in New York City. Seems his boyhood pal, to whom Garfield had sent a battle trophy - a flag from one of Hitler's personal regiments -  has had an "accidental" and very fatal fall from an apartment house window....and the flag has disappeared.
Not buying the 'suicide' verdict the police are handing out, Garfield sets out to solve the mystery. He's hampered by several factors - not the least of which is he's never fully recovered from the physical and psychological torture he got in a Fascist prison camp.
He's also up against some really nasty characters, led by the sublimely evil Walter Slezak. And then there's the beautiful damsel in distress (Maureen O'Hara) - except - whose side is she really on...?
It's a strange and restless film; particulary memorable is a scene where Garfield goes frantically about the room, turning up music on the radio, gulping a drink, trying to drown out what he thinks are the sounds of his Fascist captors coming for him again.
In a 1943 review, The New York Times called 'Sparrow' an "uncommon and provocatively handled melodrama."

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"Pride of the Marines" tells the true story of Al Schmid,
a Philadelphia working man who joins the Marines after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, is blinded by a grenade blast, and goes through the traumatic adjustment to his disability.

Garfield very much wanted to make this film, feeling it was important to show a 'regular guy' triumphant over highly irregular circumstances.
Pre-war scenes with Al's erratic courting of wife-to-be Ruth (Eleanor Parker) are amusing - Ruth is understandably exasperated by Al's macho attitudes - but Al comes around eventually. Garfield is breezy and devil-may-care - he rear-ends the car belonging to Ruth's date for the evening: "Didn't you see him?" Ruth cries. "See him? I hit him, didn't I?" Al responds.  
All this playfulness heightens the contrast of the scenes at the front lines. In an age when war movies were highly patriotic morale-boosters and always showed American servicemen as fearless, invincible heroes, "Marines" has some startling realism that somehow slipped by the censors.  A sequence just prior to the grenade blast that injures Al is truly chilling: it is night in the jungle, Al and his buddies are in a foxhole. The unseen enemy is tauntingly calling "Marine tonight you die Marine tonight you die" over and over. In tears, Al fires off short machine gun bursts, sobbing desperately, "Why can't I shut you up - why can't I shut you up!"
Garfield's performance throughout the film is one of his very best - infusing his character in the early scenes with a carefree cockiness, followed by bitterness and anger at his helplessness as he comes to terms with his blindness.

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"He Ran All the Way" was Garfield's final film. His performance is one of his finest. He's Nick, a small-time thug ("You think slow Nick - you move fast, but you think slow.") who commits murder during a burglary, then takes a family hostage, hiding out in their home. Garfield effectively portrays Nick's ambivalence - terrorizing the family yet at the same time, lonely, wanting to belong, hungry for the affection he sees them display for one another. It's a poignant portrayal of the eternal outsider, destined to never grasp the decency and peace for which he yearns.

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Taken from a Hemingway story called "My Old Man," "Under My Skin" has Garfield as a crooked jockey who spends most of his time womanizing and otherwise enjoying the fruits of his ill-gotten gains.

His young son doesn't know Dad's throwing races for dough and idolizes him. Eventually, Garfield tries to go straight but it doesn't quite work out - there are some powerful crooks who'd prefer not to lose their lucrative scam.

The New York Times reported that Hemingway's story "has been pretty well doused with antiseptics," yet Garfield does give a strong performance as a man who in more ways than one, just can't win.

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"Body and Soul" was a landmark film for Garfield - his first independent production upon leaving Warner Bros. His performance as pro fighter Charlie Davis would garner him an Oscar nomination for Best Actor, only one instance of the praise heaped upon the film.
Garfield's Charlie is a slum kid, determined to be a success. The only thing he can do better than anyone else is fight - so he signs with a promoter and it isn't long before he's at the top.
He's engaged to marry the lovely, sensible Peg (Lilli Palmer) and all appears to be just dandy - until Charlie's success and fame begin to go to his head; his greed for more power and more money begins the downhill domino effect on his life and on those closest to him.
The gritty photography by ace camerman James Wong Howe is a particular standout, and adds much to the realism of the fight scenes. Garfield also went against racial prejudices and cast the fine black actor Canada Lee in a pivotal role.