Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Dirtylogy It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Jonah Abbott There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Freeman This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

tomsview He's abrasive, truculent and dangerous, but Garfield is also mesmerising in this powerful film.Based on a novel by Ernest Hemmingway, the story is about WW2 veteran Harry Morgan (John Garfield) who runs a charter fishing boat business that is sinking financially. The lack of money impacts on his long-suffering wife, Lucy (Phyllis Thaxter), and his friend Wesley Park (Juano Hernández).When he is ripped-off by a client in Mexico, Harry becomes involved with shady deals involving using his boat for people smuggling and eventually rescuing gangsters. Along the way, his loyalty to Lucy is tested when he meets party girl Leona Charles (Patricia Neal). Everything comes to a head in a battle on the boat, but the ending is a tough one with a particularly poignant last scene.I only saw this film recently when it turned up on TCM. I thought it must have some connection to Huston's "Key Largo" because both have a very similar shootout on a fishing boat at the end. However, the only connection is that Huston probably pinched the ending from Hemingway's novel – "Key Largo" is actually based on a play by Maxwell Anderson. Later I realised that I had indeed seen the other two versions that were made from Hemingway's novel. All three are superior films; the Audie Murphy version, "The Gun Runners", probably features his best performance."The Breaking Point" was directed by Michael Curtiz, and the style of the man who made "Casablanca" shines through.Harry's descent to the dark side is understandable in the context of the story; circumstances continually conspire to bring him down, and he is too trusting of people who are basically scumbags. Garfield was perfect in the role – Harry Morgan is a man who has the nerve to walk the line between the legal and the illegal. He was a war hero, and feels that his service to his country should have provided better opportunities now that the war is over.The script is smart and the dialogue crackles in the exchanges between Garfield and Patricia Neal. In fact, the lines are nearly as brilliant as were those for Bogart and Bacall in the first adaption of the story, Howard Hawks' "To Have and Have Not".Sunny coastal footage is balanced with dark, moody studio shots highlighting the dark and light of the story. This is a classy piece of work from a novel that seems able to stand any number of interpretations.

secondtake 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, Morgan, who has hit hard times. 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. Morgan's wife is terrific in a simple, unexciting way, and when Patricia Neal appears very sexually hungry, Morgan 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.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.This is actually a first rate movie. Part of the success depends on the writing-both Hemingway and the sharp, noir-influenced screenplay by Ranald MacDougall. Note that the photography is by the great Ted McCord (Sound of Music, East of Eden, etc.).The plot has some deeply personal aspects, both with Morgan's wife and kids as they barely scrape by and with the temptation of the sort of femme fatale played with a cool sharpness by Patricia Neal. And it has a serious crime plot with several angles that develop and disperse and develop further. It moves from dark night scenes to open water scenes to a faked fog ending (a flaw, visually, because you can tell it's just been processed for lower contrast even though the sun is out). The movie also has some aspects that strike me as socially relevant, starting with the smuggling of a group of Chinese people out of Mexico at the start and ending with the tragic dilemma of a little African-American boy left literally alone on a big open dock at the final fade. This last aspect (which I can't get specific about without spoiling something) points to one of the really big interpersonal parts of the film that is key, and that I wish had been developed just a hair more because it's so key.On my third viewing, I continue to like it a lot. See it.

Sam Sloan I didn't think there existed such a movie, but I was wrong, though earlier versions of this same story, Key Largo and To Have and Have Not also were pretty good. Nothing else Hemingway wrote really translated well to the big screen, not The Snows of Kilamanjaro, not For Whom the Bell Tolls, not The Old Man and the Sea, not The Sun Also Rises nor A Farewell to Arms. All movies from those novels are terrible bores in my opinion and if you look them up here in the IMDb, the ratings these movies got bear me out. But this movie with John Garfield playing luckless boat captain Harry Morgan with the two female leads played by Patricia Neal as the likable, attractive, world wise, cynical whore and Phylis Thaxter as his loving but insecure plain wife who loves him more than as she says she could love any other man on this earth were both terrific. So you want to see a really good movie with a story written by Ernest Hemingway and like me, you think no such thing exists? See this movie!

Robert J. Maxwell Garfield is the owner of a charter boat, The Sea Queen, and is having financial problems. His boat is taken from him and he has to support his wife and kids. So far, so Hemingway, more or less.It's not very Hemingwayish thereafter, although that doesn't matter much. Howard Hawks' "To Have And Have Not," was based on the same short novel as this film but didn't stick to the novel's plot either. Why should they? Who wants to watch movies about a one-armed fisherman who gets killed at the end? Garfield agrees to rent his boat for use in a getaway by some big-time robbers. He plans to capture them all and collect the reward that will get him out of hot water. But the thieves scramble aboard at an awkward moment and must shoot Garfield's buddy and helpmate, Juano Hernandez.The angry Garfield takes the boat to sea pursued by the Coast Guard, which plays the role in this movie that the stern and uncooperative cops play in most noirs. There follows an exuberant shoot out along the lines of "Key Largo." The performances are okay. Garfield is Garfield. Phyllis Thaxter -- I don't know. She's a little elegant for the part of the dutiful, loving, proletarian housewife. She was a judge's daughter, after all. Patricia Neal, a fine actress, is not essential to the story and is made up and garbed in an ungainly way. The gangsters are stereotypically nasty in their looks and behavior.The final gun fight is excitingly staged by the seasoned director Michael Curtiz and the set is mounted on gimbals that give the illusion of a small boat at sea -- a nice touch -- with hanging objects swinging from their hooks and deck chairs pivoting wildly on their stands. Another nice touch, not too sentimental: when the Sea Queen is towed back into port and the bodies removed and Garfield is taken to the hospital, the crowd on the pier disperses while some cop waves his hands and goes through the familiar routine -- "Move along. Nothing to see here." The pier quickly empties and in that desolate silence only one small figure is left in long shot -- Hernando's little boy, looking around, wondering where his father might be, not knowing that he's been murdered and his body dumped at sea.