At a symposium that I recently attended, the speaker made the disheartening observation that most families in the United States are only an unexpected $500 debt away from economic calamity. This means that a car's transmission failure or a trip to the emergency room or a criminal fine is sufficient to destroy many people economically. Although I don't know the basis for the statistics, intuitively, this statement seems true to me. I recall my parents fretting about car expenses. When I was a child, I sensed that the failure or a washer or dryer, or a blown valve on the car's engine, might mean the difference between poverty and our normal middle-class existence. I recall that we ate lots of canned food -- slimy green peas and corn and, once a week, feasted on liver with onions, food that I loved but that was, I suppose, something from the bottom of the barrel. Of course, I made these anxieties a part of myself -- sometimes today, I get irrationally angry when food is wasted or at the purchase of bottled water (when our tap water is completely potable) and I reflexively shut off lights when I leave a room. Although I am reasonably prosperous and have lived through eras of excess, my sensibilities remain rooted, in large part, in lower middle class values -- or more honestly stated "fears" -- as they existed in the fifties. For this reason, Michael Curtiz' disturbing film The Breaking Point (1950) seems to me particularly resonant, its action fatalistic and impelled by anxieties with which I am intimately familiar.
Based on Hemingway's novel To Have and Have Not, the film resolutely denies the glamor with which Howard Hawks invested the same subject matter in his 1944 version Key Largo. Starring Bogie and Bacall, Key Large is an impressive entertainment, but it has almost nothing to do with Hemingway's novel and, certainly, doesn't explore the neo-realistic depths sounded in The Breaking Point. In many ways, the movie is classically film noir -- a sad sack loser is trapped in a web of fate that threatens to destroy everything that he cherishes; everyone is morally compromised and violence comes easy to the characters because they have killed people in World War Two and can't forget that experience. The veneer of civilization is very fragile -- the hero's lower middle class home and family is only a $500 dollar debt away from calamity. At one point, the hero feels sorry for himself. His wife blasts him for this self-pity -- 'you have to take care of your wife and your family. You have to put food on the table. This is your war.' The hero stoically agrees with this formulation, but, of course, he is fatally alone, "a man alone," he obsessively repeats, cast on his own slender resources which turn out, at every step in the story, to be inadequate to the challenge.
John Garfield plays Harry Morgan, a former soldier whose sole business asset is a fishing boat called the Sea Queen. Morgan is married and has two children and he lives in a small town somewhere near San Diego -- it's on the sea, the kind of place where people beach rowboats on the edge of canals that would be their front lawn in a more landlocked place. Morgan ekes out a living taking rich men on fishing expeditions -- he says he can "spot a marlin a mile away." But he's not making it. He's behind on the installment payments for his boat, can't pay the harbor fees, and increasingly desperate. Morgan takes a rich man and his vicious mistress (played by Patricia Neal as the ultimate bitch femme fatale) down to Ensenada in Mexico. The rich man absconds leaving his girlfriend and a batch of unpaid bills with Morgan. Morgan runs into a sleazy lawyer that he knows from his home town and is steered into participating in a human trafficking scheme. (The film is prescient about many issues that plague us today.) The people trafficked are Chinese and the smuggler notes that, after he gets paid, he doesn't care what happens to them -- suggesting casually that Morgan simply throw them overboard once he gets out to sea. The transaction goes wrong and Morgan ends up wrestling with the Chinese smuggler; a gun goes off and the criminal is killed. Morgan gets back home but finds that his boat is impounded -- the Mexican authorities are following up on the Chinese trafficker's crimes and his apparent murder. Morgan can't pay his debts, even though his wife takes up seamstress work and labors all night long -- this is humiliating to the tough-guy ex-combat vet. The sleazy lawyer posts a bond for Morgan's boat on the condition that he ferry some thugs who are planning a robbery at a race-track out to a get-away point west of Catalina Island. There's a heist scene somewhat similar to, and probably a model for, the race-track robbery in Kubrick's The Killing. The thugs flee the race-track and come to the harbor when Harry's best friend has unfortunately made an appearance to work on the boat. The thugs, who are cartoon gangsters, gun down Morgan's buddy. This sets the stage for a climactic and bloody shoot-out on the boat. (If the film has a weakness, it's the heist plot and the caricatured wise-guys, in their garish double-breasted suits, involved in that robbery.) The film's ending is quietly devastating -- Curtiz orchestrates one of the most tragic closing images in film history. Morgan's temptation by Patricia Neal is intertwined in this plot. Neal uses all of her wiles in an attempt to seduce Morgan away from his long-suffering wife. Morgan is bored and admits that "a man wants excitement now and then", but he remains (more or less) faithful to his wife. As the maimed Morgan is hauled off the Sea Queen, Neal pouts and walks away without a backward glance saying: "This is why I hate mornings."
Curtiz made, at least, seventy films in Hungary before he came to work for Warner Brothers in 1926. (He shot the pre-Technicolor two-color process features Dr. X and The Mystery of the Wax Museum, remarkably effective, if primitive, thrillers in the early thirties, before being promoted to A-List movies like Casablanca.) His direction is miraculously assured and effective. In a series of three or four shots in the hero's small house, Curtiz establishes the space, provides it with symbolic force, and introduces the members of the hero's family -- as well as their relationships with one another. This sequence is so brilliantly shot and edited with such consummate, whiplash precision that it is as thrilling, in its own way, as the action sequences later in the picture. The film is a master-class in classical movie-making; it's lucid and expressive in all respects. The reason that you never heard about The Breaking Point is that, just before its premiere, John Garfield was named as a Communist in Red Channels. Jack Warner was horrified and, quietly, dumped the film -- it was released with no publicity and, then, simply vanished. Garfield was hounded by the HUAC and died of a heart attack when he was only 39 years old. His performance, and that of all of the characters in the film, is exemplary. This is one of the greatest of all film noir, a movie that both defines and expands decisively the notion of the genre; indeed, the movie establishes a vital connection between film noir and the sort of neo-realism advanced by Italian directors like de Sica and Rosselini -- if you can, see it.
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