Streaming The Breaking Point Online

The Breaking Point (1950)iMDB Rating: 7.6
Date Released : 6 October 1950
Genre : Crime, Drama, Film-Noir, Thriller
Stars : John Garfield, Patricia Neal, Phyllis Thaxter, Juano Hernandez
Movie Quality : HDrip
Format : MKV
Size : 700 MB

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Fishing boat captain Harry Morgan charters his boat. Due to strained finances, he is none too careful as to whom he does business with. Real trouble erupts when Harry hires out his boat to transport four men who turn out to be criminals on the lam from a racetrack heist.

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Review :

Gripping, touching, beautiful, and a great story

The Breaking Point (1950)

Forget for a second that this is a Hemingway story, or that it was more famously and loosely made into a movie ("To Have and Have Not)" with Bogart and Bacall in 1944.

Here was have John Garfield playing with great realism a boating man who has hit hard times. Boat payments are due, and getting people to charter his boat has been hard. So he is tempted by an illegal run for some big money. And it goes badly. Then, to get out of that jam, he is drawn into yet another one, which goes even worse.

So this is really a story of a man against the odds. He's basically a good person, which we see in how he treats his partner, his wife, his kids. But it's partly because of those others that he feels he has to come through and make some money. In a way, this is what Hemingway's novel is all about--how a man copes with crisis. (This is always what Hemingway is about, in a way.) It's great starting material.

The two women in the story, made to look slightly similar, are key in a Hemingway kind of way, too, because a Hemingway man is essentially torn by love all his life. His wife is terrific in a simple, unexciting way, and when Patricia Neal appears very sexually hungry he at first is not interested. Neal's character is not quite a noir femme fatale, since she really wants nothing for herself, but is a distraction and siren.

The two of them are terrific. Around them are a whole swarm of characters, some with important roles and excellent character actors, but we really get inside the head of Garfield and we really feel the weirdly brazen and carefree intensity of Neal.

So why is this a forgotten film? For one, Garfield is a low key leading man. He always is. His effect is subtle. And Neal isn't a steaming hottie or an outrageous caricature like some leading (blonde) women in these crime films. And then, frankly, they don't totally have chemistry on screen, which is neither one's fault alone, and which isn't so inaccurate to the story.

The Bogart version is legendary partly because it's first, but mostly because it abandons the Hemingway plot whenever it feels like it in order to make a more compelling and openly entertaining movie. In that 1944 version, it is about effect and legend, and also about humor (with Walter Brennan as the sidekick, quite the comic relief). I suppose in the long view the Bogart kind of movie just has more resonance and distinction and aura. But this later one from after WWII is in some ways a better movie, and a better drama. That doesn't mean you'll like it more, but check it out. It's really good, seen on its own terms.

And about Hemingway? The book is great. You have to like his style and his manly view, but if you can adapt to that, read it. Easy reading, too. And he set the scene in the waters between Florida and Cuba, which is where he lived and fished. The Bogart version was set in the war, working for the French Resistance in Europe. The Garfield version was set (and shot) in California, with a trip to Mexico. A later version (1958) is set in Florida.

It's worth pointing out that "The Breaking Point" is by the director of "Casablanca," Michael Curtiz. And it's handled with the same expertise--great bar scenes with lots of coordinated things going on, expert editing and filming, just first rate storytelling. Recommended.