Summer Under the Stars 2011 -- Day Five Review: The Breaking Point

When it comes to choosing which classic movies to watch, I often pick based on actors, first and foremost, and then on reputation; choosing films based on genre doesn't work for me. I may enjoy a screwball comedy like On Our Merry Way, but there are many screwball comedies I don't enjoy, even high-profile ones like Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday. The reverse is also true: I generally don't like musicals, but if I avoided them entirely, I would miss out on great films like Swing Time and Singin' in the Rain. There are a lot of factors that go into whether or not I end up liking a movie, but the genre of the movie is rarely, if ever, one of them.

I tried to keep this in mind when choosing a film for the fifth day of Summer Under the Stars, dedicated to John Garfield. I initially planned to pick the 1938 Michael-Curtiz-helmed Four Daughters, in which Garfield acts as the primary romantic interest in a story about four sisters, but changed my mind when I considered that he's hardly the main actor in Four Daughters, and that the reason I was favoring it over some of his bigger movies was because I didn't think of those movies as being my "type." I ended up picking The Breaking Point instead. Released in 1950, The Breaking Point was Garfield's second-to-last film (he died from chronic heart problems in 1952, at the age of 39), and the story, adapted from the Ernest Hemingway novel To Have and Have Not, follows a poor fishing captain who starts renting out his boat for criminal activities in order to make money to support his wife and daughter. Patricia Neal plays the woman who almost tempts the captain into having an affair, and Juano Hernandez, in a role very similar to the one he plays in Young Man with a Horn, is the captain's loyal best friend.

The Breaking Point is actually the second adaptation of To Have and Have Not; the first, released in 1944, stars Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall and only very loosely follows the plot of the novel. Hemingway himself preferred The Breaking Point and thought it was the best film adaptation of any of his works, but I'm not so sure I agree. The Breaking Point is a perfectly adequate film, well-acted and well-directed, but when it's all said and done and the credits roll, the final effect is less "Wow!" than "And...?" Something is missing, something almost intangible -- a certain uniquely cinematic rise and fall that, in great films, leaves you feeling like you just experienced something. Books can afford to slowly carry disparate plot points to a singular conclusion because our mind processes them differently than it does movies; what works on the page does not always work on the screen. The Breaking Point is a good film, but it's not a particularly memorable film, either.

As for Garfield, part of me wishes I had stuck with my initial choice of Four Daughters, not because I regret watching The Breaking Point or have any real reason to believe I would have enjoyed Four Daughters more, but because it would have afforded me a chance to see him play something other than a stoic tough guy. I like Garfield, but he's yet to really come alive for me because I've yet to see him use the charm and charisma that occasionally peeks out from his roles in movies like The Postman Always Rings Twice or Pride of the Marines. That may not be a fair expectation, but the truth is, though I've recognized the folly in choosing films based on "type," I'm just as guilty as everyone else of preferring actors who play characters I find personally appealing, and of searching for my type of people on screen as well as in real life.

Grade: B

(pic via here)

That's more like it, Johnny!