Review of The Breaking Point

SPOILERS-- Based on Hemingway's To Have and Have Not, the story was first brought to the screen in 1944 starring Bogart and Bacall, and was partially adapted for Key Largo (1948), again with Bogart and Bacall. This version has not been as available as other Garfield films, but finally has re-surfaced. It is much closer to the novel, than the '44 version, although the latter is an excellent film, largely due to the two leads. In this version, Garfield plays a WWII Navy vet who only knows how to do one thing well, and that is be a skipper. He desperately loves his plain, but faithful wife, and adores his two small girls, but is frustrated with his inability to provide for them adequately chartering his boat to tourists. He sort of gets involved with "good-time girl" Neal, and additionally, through the machinations of crooked attorney Ford, with transporting some illegal Chinese immigrants (resulting in Garfield killing a middle man who pulls a gun on him), as well as some gangsters who rob a race track and need someone's boat to help them escape. Caught in a moral dilemma, Garfield's character attempts to redeem himself by overpowering the gangsters and receiving the reward money, but it doesn't quite end like he planned. (The scene where Garfield's shipmate, Juano Hernandez, in a very smooth performance, gets gunned down by a gangster, is sudden and vicious enough to jolt one's nerves.) The second-to-last scene with Garfield and Thaxton, as the latter tries to convince her husband that his shot-up arm needs to be amputated or he will die, is a high point in both of their careers. (A shame that Garfield would be pass away in less than two years after the film's release, the victim of blacklisting.) And in an unusual ending motif, the last we see is a slow tracking shot of Hernandez' little boy, waiting at the docks for the father who will never come back...8 out of 10*s.