The Breaking Point (Warner Bros., 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Later on in the evening my husband Charles and I watched a YouTube video of the 1950 film The Breaking Point, which I’d missed on a recent Eddie Muller “Noir Alley” presentation on Turner Classic Movies but wanted to catch up with on an occasion when I could share it with Charles. The Breaking Point is the second film version of Ernest Hemingway’s novel To Have and Have Not, which was originally published in 1937. In 1939 director Howard Hawks was on a fishing trip with Hemingway and told him he could make a successful movie out of Hemingway’s worst book. “Which one is that?” Hemingway asked. “To Have and Have Not,” Hawks replied. Hawks bought the film rights for Warner Bros. and in 1944 actually made the movie, though he and his writers – William Faulkner, Jules Furthman, Cleve F. Adams and Whitman Chambers (the last two uncredited) – remodeled it almost completely and turned it into essentially a reworking of Warners’ previous hit Casablanca. About the only elements of To Have and Have Not Hawks kept in his movie were the central character – Harry Morgan, a fisherman who leases out his boat for charters – and the opening scene, in which Morgan’s latest client runs out on him without paying. In 1950 screenwriter Ranald MacDougall, riding high at Warner Bros. after the success of his Joan Crawford vehicles Mildred Pierce and Possessed, sold Jack Warner on the idea of remaking To Have and Have Not and this time actually using Hemingway’s novel, or something close to it.

MacDougall also desperately wanted John Garfield to play Harry Morgan, despite Jack Warner briefly considering such other actors as James Cagney and Errol Flynn, and for his female leads he cast Phyllis Thaxter as Lucy, Morgan’s long-suffering wife and mother of his two kids (Sherry Jackson and Donna Jo Boyce); and Patricia Neal as Leona Charles (mistress of the customer who stiffed Harry and left him high and dry financially), a classic film noir femme fatale but drawn this time as a more complex and at least slightly more sympathetic character than usual. After Morgan gets stiffed on the fishing trip, he accepts a seedy deal offered by American attorney Hannegan (Ralph Dumke) to traffic undocumented Chinese immigrants for a coyote named Mr. Sing (Victor Sen Yung, turning in a powerful performance as a villain, quite different from his obnoxious role as Number Two Son in the Sidney Toler Charlie Chan movies at Fox). Alas, Sing not only insists on accompanying his charges as Harry smuggles them, he tries to cheat Harry out of the money and starts a gun battle with him. Sing gets killed and – in a plot twist that rankled Charles – Harry dumps his body overboard without bothering to check for a wallet to recover the money he was promised. Then Harry insists on putting the eight Chinese men he was supposed to be smuggling ashore in Mexico instead of bringing them to the U.S. Nonetheless, he’s reported to the U.S. Coast Guard, whose agent, Rogers (Edmon Ryan), insists on confiscating his boat. Unable to make any money and threatened with foreclosure on it from its mortgage holder, Morgan tries once he gets the boat back (temporarily) to make money off it by charters.

When he can’t, and in order to make some money his wife Lucy starts doing a job at home sewing sails (at this point Charles joked that the film had turned into the 1926 La Bohème, in which Mimì – played by Lillian Gish – took in sewing work and did so much it hastened her death from tuberculosis), Harry accepts a job offer from crooked attorney F. R. Duncan (Wallace Ford) to smuggle five robbers in his boat after they rob a racetrack. Duncan gets killed during the robbery, as is Harry’s Black first mate, Wesley Park (Juano Hernandez). Harry has prepared by hiding various guns on his boat which he intends to use to kill the robbers before they make it to their rendezvous point – only there’s an all-out gun battle in which the robbers are all killed but Harry is seriously wounded and is left unconscious. Harry needs to have his left arm amputated as the only way to save his life, and since he’s unconscious his wife Lisa has to give the doctors the required permission to operate. Apparently in Hemingway’s novel Harry Morgan loses his arm early in the story, not at the end as in the film. Also in the novel Harry has two crew members, both of them obnoxious white racists who throw around the “N-word” a lot (as does Harry himself), and it was MacDougall’s idea not only to combine these two characters into one but to make him Black – and to end the film with a sorrowful close-up of Wesley’s son (played by Juano Hernandez’s real-life son Juan) as yet unaware that he’s going to be facing life without a father.

Since I watched The Breaking Point I’ve seen Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” intro and outro as well as an interview he did with director Alexander Payne about it, and Muller and Payne hailed it as a masterpiece and bemoaned that it isn’t better known, apparently because of a legal skirmish between Warner Bros. and the Hemingway estate that kept it off the screen for decades. I think my husband Charles liked it better than I did; I found it the sort of movie that had quite striking individual moments but didn’t gel for me into a truly moving story. My main problem with The Breaking Point – and I’m not sure whether I should blame Ranald MacDougall or Ernest Hemingway for this – is that the writers larded so many miseries on John Garfield’s character it’s no surprise he reached the titular breaking point. Also during the movie I was convinced that Patricia Neal was playing the wife and Phyllis Thaxter the “other woman,” and it was more than a bit surprising when I looked at the imdb.com credits and it was the other way around – though at least I give Neal quite a bit of props for playing decidedly against her usual typecasting and making a legitimately complex, multidimensional woman out of what could have been just another cardboard villainess. (There’s even a scene between her and Garfield in her beachfront cabaña to which she’s lured him and they get as far as a kiss before he decides not to go the extra-relational route and stay exclusive to his wife instead.)

The Breaking Point was Garfield’s next-to-last movie and his last at Warner Bros., where he’d become a star in the film Four Daughters (1939). He insisted on Michael Curtiz as his director because Curtiz had helmed Four Daughters and a number of Garfield’s other early hits, but he was also about to get caught up in the Hollywood blacklist. When Garfield’s name turned up on a list of suspected Communists in Hollywood, Jack Warner instantly responded by slashing the promotional budget for The Breaking Point, resulting in the film flopping. Garfield wrote an apology for his entire political past called – inevitably, given that in his most successful film, Body and Soul (1947), he’d played a boxer – “I Was a Sucker for a Left Hook.” Then he went to New York for his final film, He Ran All the Way (1951), in which he played a gangster on the run who falls in love with Shelley Winters, an innocent young girl who has no idea who he is, and he died of a heart attack while in bed with a woman other than his wife. I’ve written about Garfield before, noting that he was the first Method actor who became a movie star – anticipating Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando and James Dean (and three of the four died young; Brando was the only one who lived into old age) – and though Warner Bros. tried to mold him into a gangster type, he played those roles quietly and subtly whereas previous Warners gangster stars like Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney had snarled and chewed the scenery through them. Garfield’s daughter Julie apparently told Eddie Muller that The Breaking Point was Garfield’s favorite of his own films, but to me it still seems like a movie better in its parts than as a whole.