The Breaking Point (1950)

Film: The Breaking Point (1950)

Stars: John Garfield, Patricia Neal, Phyllis Thaxter, Juano Hernandez

Director: Michael Curtiz

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

One of the biggest debates in movies today is if there are too many remakes.  I'm in the camp of "yes, there are," and I think it'd take a lot to convince me otherwise, but it's worth noting that remakes were a new thing in the Golden Age too.  The transition from silent to sound meant a lot of silent films, especially literary adaptations, got remade on the big screen with dialogue, and even "talking" pictures started to get remade in the 1950's.  That was the case with The Breaking Point, a noir from 1950 (and John Garfield's penultimate picture), which was made into a much more famous film in 1944 by the novel's original title To Have and Have Not.

(Spoilers Ahead) If you're familiar with the Bogie & Bacall classic, you'll notice that while there are similarities, there are also a lot of key differences between the two (I've never read the Hemingway novel, so I honestly don't know which is more accurate to the book).  The film follows Harry Morgan (Garfield), who is a sport fisherman whose career is down-on-his-luck, with his wife Lucy (Thaxter) struggling to find a silver lining in their financial situation.  Harry starts to illegally smuggle men from Mexico into California to make ends meet, during which time he meets Leona (Neal), who clearly has the hots for him and is willing to throw a wrench in his marriage, even though Harry remains loyal.  As the film progresses, Harry's marriage gets on the rocks not because of him, but because of Lucy's jealousy over Leona's beauty, and Harry becomes over his head with crime, with his morally upright partner Wesley (Hernandez) dying during one of the getaways.  During the same getaway, it's strongly implied that Harry also dies, but the movie ends with his fate left hanging, with Wesley's young son standing on the dock, not realizing his father has died, all of the adults leaving him confused.

This was toward the tail end of Garfield's career, when he was being blacklisted in Hollywood due to the HUAC investigations into the actor (when he was basically killing himself through stress & overwork from the blacklist), but he loses none of the panache that made him a star.  Garfield, for those unfamiliar today (he didn't really star in a well-remembered classic, so his cache with film fans varies depending on how much you watch TCM) was basically a prototype for Marlon Brando & James Dean, and sadly would've hit a new vogue in the 1950's had he lived.  Combined with Neal, saucily portraying a femme fatale, and Thaxter, playing an increasingly manic housewife convinced her loyal husband will leave her for another woman (not realizing until it's too late that the bigger danger to her marriage is toxic masculinity in the form of pride, not lust), there's a lot of good stuff in The Breaking Point.

But it doesn't work the way it should.  This isn't a bad movie-there's too much good to knock it.  But it takes the best part of it (a truly fascinating love triangle where it's the "woman who wins" that is causing much of the issue with her insecurities) and backgrounds it for the back-half of the movie when we get into a series of boat chases that are kind of dull by comparison.  The crooks are interchangeable, and they totally underuse the talented Hernandez (just a year out from his landmark turn in Intruder in the Dust) as the moral backbone of the film.

1940's: Act of Violence, The Big Sleep, The Blue Dahlia, Blues in the Night, Brighton Rock, Criss Cross, Crossfire, Daisy Kenyon, Dead Reckoning, Detour, Fallen Angel, The Fallen Idol, Force of Evil, Gilda, High Sierra, I Walk Alone, I Wake Up Screaming, The Killers, The Lady from Shanghai, Leave Her to Heaven, Ministry of Fear, Moonrise, Murder My Sweet, Nightmare Alley, Out of the Past, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Raw Deal, The Reckless Moment, Ride the Pink Horse, Scarlet Street, Sorry, Wrong Number, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, They Won't Believe Me, Too Late for Tears, The Woman in the Window, The Woman on the Beach

1950's: Affair in Trinidad, The Asphalt Jungle, Beat the Devil, The Big Combo, The Big Heat, The Blue Gardenia, The Burglar, Cast a Dark Shadow, The Crimson Kimono, Gun Crazy, The Hitch-Hiker, House of Bamboo, In a Lonely Place, The Killing, Kiss Me Deadly, Murder by Contract, Night and the City, On Dangerous Ground, Pickup on South Street, The Prowler, Slightly Scarlet, Sudden Fear, Sweet Smell of Success, They Live By Night, While the City Sleeps

Neo-Noir: Blade Runner, Body Heat, Farewell My Lovely, Fargo, From Afar, The Long Goodbye, Night Moves, Nightcrawler