March 4, 2013

23 The Breaking Point (1950)

***½
Country: US
Director: Michael Curtiz

"His screen career was noir-ish from the word go," Andrew Sarris writes of John Garfield and the doomed character he played in his first movie, Four Daughters, made in 1938 for Warner Bros. and directed by Michael Curtiz. Garfield plays a bitter and alienated young musician who commits suicide to save the naive girl who marries him from ruining her life, and some have cited his downbeat character as the first antihero in American film. Before leaving Warners seven years later, Garfield was cast in many roles similar to the one he played in Four Daughters. These were forerunners of the disaffected youths of films of the 1950s, misunderstood and unhappy young men controlled by outside forces, young men whose outwardly antisocial impulses seemed perpetually at war with their inner sensitivity. If for Garfield these roles were initially the result of typecasting and studio efforts to build a screen image, they nevertheless tapped something essential in his screen persona—a mixture of toughness and vulnerability—and the image of the angry and misunderstood young man stuck.

By the time Garfield's contract with Warner Bros. expired in 1946, his career was at its height. Right after leaving the studio, he co-founded a production company, Enterprise Productions, with the expectation of having greater artistic control over his career. He did make two films for Enterprise, the boxing picture Body and Soul (1947) and the film noir Force of Evil (1948), a box office failure whose reputation has soared in the years since its release. After Enterprise folded in the late 1940s Garfield eventually found himself back at Warners, being directed once again by Michael Curtiz, and playing an older version of the "noir-ish" screen personality developed at Warners early in his career—a rebellious man slowly being crushed by circumstances outside his control. The Breaking Point was the next-to-last film Garfield would make before his death in 1952 (a lifelong sufferer of heart disease, he was barely thirty-nine years old), and it gave him one of the best roles of his career.

In this film loosely based on Ernest Hemingway's novel To Have and Have Not (which in 1944 had been even more loosely adapted by Howard Hawks), Garfield is Harry Morgan, the owner of a charter fishing boat based in Southern California. Deeply in debt, he hires out his boat to a businessman for a fishing trip to Mexico and finds that accompanying the businessman is his younger girl friend, the attractive but rather common Leona (a blonde Patricia Neal), who immediately begins flirting with Harry. When the businessman abandons Harry in Mexico without paying, he is forced to accept the proposition of a shady lawyer to smuggle a group of illegal aliens into the U.S. From this point Harry's problems snowball until he finds himself involved with gangsters, robbery, and murder. At the end of the film Harry is held captive on his own boat by three murderous thugs and must use his wits to try to outmaneuver them in an onboard showdown that is sure to remind you of Key Largo.

There's little doubt that as good a film as The Breaking Point is—and it is a good one, probably the last film of this quality directed by Michael Curtiz, one of the most versatile and reliable of the Warners house directors of the thirties and forties—this is pretty much Garfield's movie. Harry Morgan, the character Garfield plays, is a former serviceman, a Naval officer in the Second World War who like many returning veterans came home with ambitious plans for the future. But Harry's plans for a fleet of fishing and charter boats haven't succeeded. He now finds himself eking out a living with his one boat while financial problems threaten to overwhelm him. No matter how much his wife urges him to give up the boat, he stubbornly refuses. Not only would that mean the end of his plans, but it would also mean a spiritual defeat. For Harry land means trouble; he feels truly at peace and in control of his life only on the water.

Garfield handles the tough, alienated side of Harry in a way that makes him seem an older version of the characters Garfield played in the forties. But Harry, while in many ways still the familiar Garfield loner battling the world, is more experienced and more settled. This is the only Garfield film I've seen in which he plays a family man. Harry has a wife (Phyllis Thaxter) and two young daughters, and the scenes with his family, especially the daughters, show a tender side that for Garfield seems completely new. Despite all the external pressures in Harry's life, he has an easy rapport with his wife and real affection for his daughters, traits that are shown in simple, homey scenes where he shares a joke with his wife or gives his excited daughters small presents he has brought from Mexico.
A basically decent guy, Harry finds himself compelled by circumstances to become involved with corruption while still trying to hold on to his moral center. That might seem a self-defeating thing to attempt, but it is exactly what Harry would do. "You do everything so hard," the sleazy lawyer played by Wallace Ford tells him. "You don't bend, you just break when the load gets too heavy." Not only must Harry face the temptation of crime as an easy fix to his financial problems; he must also face the personal temptation presented by Leona, who he keeps running into even after returning from Mexico, and who keeps throwing herself at him. There is friction in Harry's marriage, largely over the family's future, but it's also plain that Harry is experiencing a bit of what today would be called midlife crisis. He's an adventurous, active man, and his disappointment in his present circumstances and his dread of the future ("I wake up in the night sweating. I'm in trouble and there's no way out," he tells his wife) cause the anarchic side of his personality to respond to the appeal of Leona's overtures.

Patricia Neal plays Leona, and she plays her very well indeed. Even though her part is clearly secondary to Garfield's, The Breaking Point gives Neal one of the most interesting and psychologically complex of her early roles. Her delivery of the sexually insinuating dialogue is refreshingly tongue-in-cheek, almost a sendup of the film noir femme fatale. (At one point she teases Harry with Martha Vickers's signature line from The Big Sleep: "You're cute." "It's the way I comb my hair," he snaps back in that surly John Garfield manner.) Her Leona is so bold, impudent, and openly seductive towards Harry that her behavior appears almost ironic, yet ironic in a way intended to conceal her true feelings by mocking them. There's a lot more than attitude, though, in Neal's performance, which like Garfield's is built on the tension between her cynical exterior and her sometimes quite opposite inner emotions. She makes us see that like Harry, Leona is a disappointed person who doesn't feel in control of her life and is racked by fears for the future, and that she recognizes those feelings in common as a strong emotional connection between her and Harry.

In the end, Harry does experience an epiphany in which he realizes that being a loner against the world—the quintessential Garfield character in the quintessential Garfield situation—is a futile way to live. When Harry tells his wife at the conclusion of the film, "A man alone ain't got no chance," it signals an important evolution of the well-established John Garfield screen personality. It's an admission that even an individualist like this must connect with other people and the rest of the world to thrive. It's a shame we'll never be able to see how this gentler, wiser John Garfield might have developed. But what a tantalizing glimpse The Breaking Point gives of Garfield as a man taking first steps toward the kind of inner serenity possible only for someone at peace with himself and the world.

This post is part of the John Garfield 100th Birthday Blogathon hosted by the classic movie site They Don't Make 'Em Like They Used To. Click here for more information on the blogathon and a full schedule of posts.

23 comments:

  1. As someone who has never cared much for "To Have and Have Not", I found "The Breaking Point" to be an exceptional surprise when I finally got around to seeing it. It may be my personal favourite of Garfield's movie, but I don't know that I agree that "this is pretty much Garfeld's movie". I think the women's roles are outstanding - very well written and played. I also think that the closing shot is the most heartbreaking ending of all.

    Excellent way to remember John Garfield on his centenary.

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    1. Caftan Woman, I do like "To Have and Have Not", but for me to compare it to this film is apples and oranges. They might be based on the same source and have certain things in common, but in all other ways they're very different films. "To Have and Have Not" seems to me very much a personality-driven Bogart-Bacall-Howard Hawks concoction. The people in "The Breaking Point" seem in contrast real characters (and I mean this in a good sense), and the plot seems more a unified story than a collection of memorable scenes inspired by the situations in a plot. Hope that made sense. Anyway, the two movies are so different in tone that I can easily see how people might feel quite positively toward one and not the other.

      When I wrote that this is largely Garfield's movie, I was thinking in narrative terms, of the way his character is the center of the movie, and the film's concerns are those that have to do with him. You're right that the women's roles, though smaller, are very well written and conceived, not the superficial characters you so often find when a film is told from the man's point of view.

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  2. R.D., I like the way you have placed this in terms of the evolution of Garfield's screen personality and your suggestion that here he is an older version of the characters he played in the 1940s. He definitely seems older and more battered by life in this, as he also does in the other Hemingway adaptation he made just before this one ('Under My Skin') - he is a father in that one too, but doesn't have a wife, and is in no way settled.

    I'm a big fan of 'To Have and Have Not', but love this film too and am impressed by how different the two loose adaptations of the same text feel - I have been meaning to read the book again (I read it many years ago but hardly remember any of it) and then go back to them again. It does give a different feeling that in this version Harry is a family man and torn between his wife and daughters and the temptation of corruption and easy money. I think both Phyllis Thaxter and Patricia Neal are excellent in this and like the way their characters are a lot more complicated than just loyal wife and temptress. Harry's friendship with Wesley, whom he betrays half by accident, is another strong element of the film and leads up to that ending, which I agree with Caftan Woman is heartbreaking. Must see this again soon.

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    1. Judy, it's always a challenge to decide what approach to take to a post, but Garfield seemed to have such a well-defined screen personality that it made sense to me to consider the film in terms of its place in his career. As Caftan Woman observed, the characters of the two women in the film are much more thoughtfully conceived than you'd expect of characters who are really secondary to the main star. I'm not a particular fan of Patricia Neal, but I do like her very much here. Not long after making this she abandoned Hollywood for the stage for several years because of the poor roles she was being offered, so maybe she wasn't entirely responsible for the inconsistency of her early career. I wanted to mention in the post how good Phyllis Thaxter was in a role that could easily have been superficial but certainly wasn't. This is usually a thankless kind of role, but she and the writers defined her character in a way that made her quiet steadiness a good complement to Garfield's more forceful personality and a good contrast to Neal's more extroverted but in a way pathetic Leona.

      That last scene took me by surprise. I hadn't seen the film in a while and had forgotten about it. It could have been deleted and probably nobody would have noticed. But its inclusion added another dimension to the plot, a poignant reminder that if by luck things turned out well (so to speak) for Garfield and his family, the same wasn't true for others in the film.

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  3. Wonderful post, R.D.! I've never caught up with this film (perhaps due to its reputation as inferior to its infinitely more famous cousin TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT) but after all the raves I've been hearing for it during this blogathon, plus your review, I'm really excited to check it out. I imagine it follows the downbeat trajectory of Hemingway's original novel much more closely than the Hawks' film. Your remarks about getting a rare glimpse of the softer, familial side of Garfield were interesting, and it does make one contemplate where the actor would have gone next if he had lived (and been able to get work).

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    1. Jeff, thank you. I haven't read the Hemingway novel, which most seem to think is his least interesting. His compact, stripped-down writing style works better for me in short stories than in longer works. I imagine the Hawks film departs from the novel pretty significantly. I've read some people who assert that he tried to turn it into his version of "Casablanca," and I can see why they would think this. I found it most interesting to think of how the film showed Garfield the rebel settling uncomfortably and not entirely willingly into middle age. I suspect, though, that if he had lived, he would like James Cagney still have found himself typecast as the rebel of his youth. But who knows--like Bogart he might have snagged a role completely against type and gotten the Oscar I think he should have had for "Body and Soul."

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  4. Well I am right there with Caftan Woman! I very much dislike "To Have and Have Not," (I guess I'm not the only one they will run out of the CMBA for that sacrilege!) It was only my love for Garfield which caused me to watch "The Breaking Point," and I must admit, my expectations were low. To my utter surprise, I completely and totally loved it, and it became my all-time favorite Garfield film. (The 1958 Audie Murphy version, "The Gun Runners", is my 2nd favorite version of the story, leaving "To Have and Have Not" to occupy last place.)

    And, oh, Caftan Woman is right about that final scene...so heartbreaking as the little boy waits for his daddy.

    In Garfield's bio it says that "Hemingway considered The Breaking Point to be the best screen adaption of any of his novels." Also, "He said that Harry Morgan as written had never become anything beyond an idea, but that John Garfield made Harry a person." I love the way Garfield brought Harry to life!

    I love the tender scenes with the girls and the playfully romantic scenes with Thaxter. Not often we get to see that side of John Garfield.

    This is a terrific addition to the blogathon. Thank you so much for participating!

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    1. Patti, a great comment about Hemingway liking this the best of any adaptations of his novels, and also that he liked the way Garfield fleshed out the character. I hadn't heard that before. Those family scenes are really quite startling to find in a John Garfield movie, and the way he related to his wife and girls in that gruff-sensitive manner seemed very natural and convincing.

      It's interesting to note that about the time he made this movie, he was offered the part of Stanley Kowalski in "A Streetcar Named Desire." (Warners wanted a star and not a newcomer for what they must have considered a risky project.) In his autobiography, Elia Kazan, who was a long-time friend, speculates that Garfield made an unreasonably huge salary demand because he really didn't want to do that kind of role any more.

      It was a pleasure to participate in the blogathon. You chose a wonderful subject in Garfield, who deserves to be remembered better than he is. It should definitely help spread the word about this actor who although molded by Warners in the tough-guy tradition of Cagney and Bogart still managed to be unique. His work seems ahead of its time and still fresh.

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  5. Great review (and count me among those who are not fans of To Have & Have Not). It's a sad tribute because we never got to know how much better he could have been if he'd only had the chance.

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    1. FlickChick, thank you. Actors seem to have an easier time making the transition on screen from youth to middle age than actresses. Still, Garfield's image was so much that of the youthful rebel that it's problematic to speculate what direction his career might have taken had he lived. I can't imagine James Dean playing middle-aged parts or settling into character roles! Yet this film makes me think that if Garfield had been able to avoid being blacklisted, he might have made a really interesting transition to roles calling for greater maturity.

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  6. RDF: I've never see this. Like you, I don't recall ever watching a film where Garfield played a family man--so this film might be a revelation. It would also be interesting to see Neal play a blonde! She is without a doubt one of the most overlooked actresses of her generation. As always, a terrific post.

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    1. Kim, thanks so much. Seeing Garfield as a family man WAS a revelation for me. Typically, his tough and tender sides were at war, but in the end the tender side dominated because of romantic love. Here, though, he's several years past that basic situation, and it allows all sorts of plot twists that wouldn't have fit into a movie where the emphasis was on redemption by romantic love. Patricia Neal's film career was spotty for me, the high points being, of course, "A Face in the Crowd" and "Hud." She was also very affecting in "The Subject Was Roses." One of the roles she played on Broadway was Maggie the Cat in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (she replaced Barbara Bel Geddes), and I've always thought, as good as Liz was in the movie version, Neal would have been terrific, with her low voice and natural Southern accent.

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  7. R.D., Your description of Garfield's screen persona couldn't be more accurate or eloquent. I recalled, when you referred to his character type as a forerunner for what followed in the '50s, that he had been everyone's first choice for the role of Stanley Kowalski when "A Streetcar Named Desire" was originally mounted on Broadway.

    The casting of Patricia Neal was inspired. There certainly is "a lot more than attitude" in her portrayal of Leona (thinking of Bacall, as you might guess). And she and Garfield together onscreen are a potent combination.

    I can understand why Hemingway liked this adaptation - "Breaking Point" is gritty and downbeat and human. Most screen versions of his work were very much "Hollywood movies," whereas he was preoccupied with expressing what was "true" (writing is nothing, "all you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed").

    This is such a fine piece in every way, R.D. - so glad you chose "Breaking Point" for the Garfield blogathon.

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    1. Eve, thank you very much indeed. Writing on the film gave me the chance to watch it again (I'd seen it only once) and closely enough to be reminded what an excellent movie it is. Elia Kazan did write that Garfield, who of course was a trained and experienced stage actor, was expected to star in "Streetcar" when it opened on Broadway. I don't recall why that didn't happen, maybe because his screen career was hitting its peak at the time and with his contract at Warners expiring and his new production company, he decided to stick with film.

      Patricia Neal IS excellent here and her performance not really like any other I've seen her give. She seemed so well-suited to the part and so inspired by it that it's a shame she didn't get this kind of part more often. As I said earlier, she's not a particular favorite of mine, but I think that has more to do with the poor quality of many of her roles (especially the earlier ones) than with any deficiencies in her acting or anything off-putting about her screen personality (although it's hard to like characters like the one she played in "Breakfast at Tiffany's").

      Michael Curtiz might not have been considered an auteur by the more intellectual critics, but this film, like many of his, has extra little touches that strictly speaking aren't necessary but add lots of flavor and in some cases (like the hair-dying episode and that haunting last shot) a real shot of poignancy.

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    2. R.D., About "Streetcar," Irene Selznick wrote that it didn't work out with Garfield because his demands were too great. I have to wonder what he thought when he saw what the role did for Marlon Brando (and what Brando did with the role).

      I like Patricia Neal very much in this film, "A Face in the Crowd" and "Hud." I suspect in her early days the studios didn't quite know what to do with her. She went on to have tremendous challenges, both emotional and physical, over the decades - yet still had a long career. And a Best Actress Oscar.

      By the way, I love the hair-dying episode in "Breaking Point," a wonderful touch.

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  8. R.D. - Sorry I am late in getting here, but its been a busy couple of weeks. Anyway, I caught this film a while back on TCM and was pretty much blown away by it. I think it ranks up there close to his best films (Force of Evil and Body & Soul). I love your description of his two sides, he's a family man yet he's still the alienated character he played in so many films. However, as you note he has matured with his realization that "a man alone ain't got no chance." A terrific engaging post.

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    1. John, you're not the only one late in getting to all the posts in the Garfield blogathon. A family medical crisis has prevented me from doing this, but I am now slowly making headway. I'm glad so many people have commented on what an undervalued gem this film is. Garfield is one of my favorite classic movie actors. For me his greatest period is from "Pride of the Marines" through "Force of Evil," a period of only about three years and seven films, but what a period! Then after a brief pause he did this wonderful film, which I too think ranks up there with his best. Like the best actors and actresses of the studio days, he was able to stretch into unexpected places and still keep the core of his screen personality, which gave both variety and continuity to the characters he played.

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  9. I have not seen this film, but I am really intrigued by your description of Garfield's and Neal's performances.

    Great review! You always write thoughtful - and thought-provoking - posts.

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    1. Silverscreenings, thanks so much for the compliment. The film was released on DVD a couple of years ago and is well worth catching if you can locate it. It's also available on YouTube in its entirety, and TCM does show it but not often.

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  10. Please add me to the list of classic movie fans, who have not yet seen what sounds like a great film. I would love to see Garfield, play a family man, who makes the terrible mistake of joining up with gangsters..

    I'm also a huge fan of Patricia Neal's and enjoy watching almost everything she has performed in.

    Thank you for introducing me to the film, The Breaking Point.

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    1. Dawn, "The Breaking Point" wasn't my first choice for the blogathon, but my first choice was already spoken for. Patti encouraged me to write on this one, and now I'm glad I did. I found that it actually improved on rewatching, and I'm so glad to have been able to spread the word about it. Anyone interested in John Garfield and his work--and to judge from the response to Patti's blogathon, he's much more popular than I imagined--should check it out.

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  11. I need to see this one. Your review certainly made me want to see it, and as a Garfield fan it sounds like a must.

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    1. Filmboy, it's not easy to locate but certainly worth the effort. I forgot to mention that the version on YouTube, which I watched to refresh my memory because I couldn't get hold of a copy in time for the blogathon, has Spanish subtitles, but I didn't find they interfered.

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