The Breaking Point (1950) Dark, Sweaty Classic Noir Lost in the Shadow of Legends (Review)

Howard Hawks once told Ernest Hemingway that he could make a film out of his worst novel. He told him this whilst they were on a fishing trip together, and for the remainder of the trip they worked on the screenplay together. Despite Hemingway himself working on the script, the final product resembled very little of the original novel. The novel and film in question was To Have and Have Not – now considered by many to be one of the greatest films Hawks directed. Whilst the film was popular, it was also the first of four collaborations between Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, Warner Bros decided to produce another adaptation of the novel. This time it would be a much more faithful adaptation; with Michael Curtiz, most known for directing Casablanca, at the helm, it would be called The Breaking Point and would focus more on the crime aspects of the novel. 

Most notably different between the two films is their main thematic focuses; Hawks’ extracted the doomed romance at the heart of the novel and turned the whole film into exploring that, whereas Curtiz’s film focuses much more on the bleak and oppressive forces of capitalism working against a lone fisherman. Harry Morgan is a hard-edged, working class, a stoic individual who knows only one thing and that is fishing. He has spent his life, aside from serving in WWII, dedicating his blood and sweat to learning this craft and becoming great at it. Despite being a great fisherman, he still has a mountain of problems: the costs to keep his boat, get it running and make repairs are too high to be covered by the precarious income that fishing can bring. These financial burdens weigh on him not only as an individual but also as a father and a husband, as he is expected to bring in money to support his family. His wife tries to convince him to learn something new but his commitment to his profession and pride are too large to shift. 

Very quickly into the film, his decision to do a job for a shady lawyer triggers a set of events that put him on a fatalistic course that only seems to get darker and darker as he continues to go down that path. Morgan is portrayed to absolute perfection by John Garfield who feels like the only actor in classical Hollywood who could possibly perform this role. His character feels like the archetype for a Michael Mann protagonist, most notably James Caan in Thief. His own personal background as a working-class man alongside being entangled in the drudgery of the McCarthy communist hearings clearly left Garfield with a rage that has been quietly bubbling throughout his Hollywood career. The Breaking Point is an angry and cynical film that shows the absolute horror of being trapped financially in a system that simply does not care about you. The only way Morgan sees of feeding himself and his family is to work for criminals, the big problem is that they don’t care about him either. 

Alongside being trapped in a hellish economic system he is also trapped in a more personal way. He loves his wife and his kids but when he meets Leona Charles (Patricia Neal), a local freewheeling woman who seems to have nothing tying her down, he is tempted to reject the traditional family life he has always known. This meeting causes a love triangle to form, even resulting in a meeting between all three; both women discuss their own relationship with Morgan whilst he drunkenly watches from a distance without any real idea what is going on. There is also the slimy and sinister lawyer, Duncan (Wallace Ford), who sees Morgan’s financial problems and uses them to convince him into working various jobs. Both Neal and Ford do a terrific job balancing out Garfield’s steady and sombre performance by giving something much more menacing and dramatic.

Long-time Curtiz collaborator Ted McCord does cinematography for The Breaking Point (he would later go on to do The Sound of Music and East of Eden) and captures the melancholy of the port side town with astounding beauty. Visually it has all the classic motifs of a classic noir but everything is done with such precision and tact that every shot feels rewarding; the sun glistens on the eerie sea water, characters creep around in the hazy fog lights, sweat drips from people’s faces as the claustrophobic atmosphere of the boat sets in and the action is intense but never messy. Ranald MacDougall and Hemingway’s script is tightly paced with punchy dialogue, and it never shies away from the inherent cruelty born out of the ideology of the American Dream – surprising that this is included given the rigidness of the Hays code in the 1950s.

The Breaking Point is an absolute gem of a classic noir film, one that seems to have been lost by the sands of time. Most people who are familiar with the Hawks version might have never heard of this adaptation which is a crying shame. Curtiz pretty much delivers everything you could want from a film – incredibly good performances, a tight script that carries its themes with nuance and subtlety and some truly beautiful visuals. The Criterion restoration looks fantastic, with some interesting special features, and it is great to see them spend time releasing films that run the risk of completely escaping the film world. If you like film noir or want to watch something cynical and angry, then you should immediately check out this film.

Autumn’s Archive – The Breaking Point