All John Garfield wanted was to own a small fishing fleet. First, he has to pay off the only boat he has. Stores have stopped giving him credit. The deposit Ralph Dumke paid him for his next voyage only covered the gas he’ll need to take this customer on a fishing trip to Mexico. Garfield is a man financially underwater and one who may find himself permanently and physically submerged if he doesn’t handle a dicey situation well. As he puts it, “No sooner I get my head above water, somebody is pushing it under again.”
That’s a great line, and among an abundance of them in 1950’s The Breaking Point. That is a very appropriate title. Pretty soon, this rather mild-mannered war veteran will himself tested by gangsters who want him to smuggle men from Mexico into the U.S.
Perhaps the biggest threat is Patricia Neal as a surprisingly effective femme fatale. She even bleached her hair blond for this, something I didn’t think could work, but she wears it well. And this is a character that should be not just blond, but a bottled one. When we first see her, she’s Dumke’s arm candy for the trip. To fight temptation, Garfield responds coolly to her flirtations. Later, she will marvel at this man, who still remembers he’s married when he’s around her.
He very well should, as Phyllis Thaxter is the extremely supportive spouse back home. Thaxter sees his frustration and, as much as she wants him to fulfil his dream he’s had since fighting in the war, she wishes he would find some other occupation that wouldn’t drain the life out of him.
That almost becomes a reality when Dumke bails on Garfield and Neal, leaving him without the hundred bucks he needs to leave the port and her without cash for a hotel room. As he puts it to her, “If I can’t scramble it, then we all have to learn Spanish.”
The funds arrives courtesy of that smuggling gig I mentioned earlier. Victor Sen Yung makes an offer to take to eight men into the U.S. at $200 a head. If I was in Garfield’s shoes, my concerns would not be allayed by such statements from him as “When they leave here, I don’t care what becomes of your passengers.”
Things do not go well, though Garfield and Neal get back into the country. Unfortunately, the smuggled men are found by the Coast Guard and one of them ratted out Garfield as their ride. His boat impounded, he is unable to take on work and the film becomes more of a domestic drama.
Thaxter goes to rescue Garfield from the bar where he is drowning his sorrows, finding him and Neal seated together at a table. At first, she is cold and catty to Neal until she clarifies she is no threat to the marriage, extending this olive branch: “We don’t have to go on like this.” After that, the tenor of the conversation changes, to Garfield’s drunken confusion: “Why is it I never understand what people are saying in these kinds of places?”
Stil, Thaxter is so bothered by this encounter with Neal that she dies her own deep brown tresses blond. The horrified reaction of her daughters to their change is simultaneously sad and hilarious. Garfield reacts much more kindly, even responding enthusiastically. I was surprised the film shows us a couple which is clearly sexual active, given how sexless most housewife roles on the screen were at the time. It seems that the era somehow had largely scorn for those were unmarried getting it on, and shame for those were doing so and married.
Neal’s role is also interesting, but still largely consisting of the elements one expects of the femme fatale. It is a bit uncertain whether she really fancies him all that much or if it is just the challenge of a man who is happily married: “Usually when a man tells me he loves his wife, it ends up with ‘but…’” There is a some great banter between she and Garfield, especially in Mexico, as he tries to stay away from the temptation. There they are at a bar with cockfighting in a back room, when he wanted to drink alone. Him: “Don’t you like cockfights?” Her: “It’s a lot of trouble for an egg.”
Then bigger trouble arrives when oily lawyer Wallace Ford gets Garfield’s boat out of impound. This is the same man who was the connection for the smuggling operation that went afoul in Mexico. Garfield wants nothing to do with the Ford, yet finances force him to take the next gig the lawyer offers, to take on a fishing expedition a group of obvious gangsters who want to go to a part of the ocean which Garfield observes as having no fish. It is obvious this is something much worse than the smuggling deal, and you know Garfield and Ford are fools to accept the job. It is telling to see both men have a conversation about it while dropping coins into illegal slot machines that will obviously never pay off.
More realism creeps into this film than in a great deal of such far of the time. Garfield’s family lives in a clearly low-income area, where the neighbors are always at laundry lines and nosing into each other’s business. He stumbles home drunk and a little girl, who has obviously seen much of this from various neighborhood men in her few years on the planet, gleefully points and exclaims, “He’s loaded!”.
She’ll get cold cocked by one of his otherwise adorable daughters, played by Sherry Jackson and Donna Jo Boyce. They are startingly real in their behavior, descending on the bag of presents Garfield has brought for them as they were panthers and the bag was full of bunnies.
Relations between Black and White housed in close proximity in such an environment feels natural. Garfield’s first mate is Juano Hernandez, and their relationship scans far more like genuine friendship than that of employer and employee. Although the script doesn’t use him much, it does give Hernandez insight and some solid lines. As regards Dumke: “Never did like the guy. Smiled too much.”
There is a great deal to like in The Breaking Point. It is especially a showcase for Garfield, and I enjoyed it far more than the more widely loved The Postman Always Rings Twice. Unfortunately, the movie died a quick death at the box office after he was summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee and refused to give names. His own life ended shortly thereafter, only completing one more picture before dying of a heart failure at the age of 39.
Dir: Michael Curtiz
Starring John Garfield, Patricia Neal, Phyllis Thaxter
Watched on Criterion Collection blu-ray