Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 08/11/19

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Sunday, August 11, 2019

The Breaking Point (Michael Curtiz, 1950)

John Garfield and Patricia Neal in The Breaking Point

Cast: John Garfield, Patricia Neal, Phyllis Thaxter, Juano Hernandez, Wallace Ford, Edmon Ryan, Ralph Dumke, Guy Thomajan, William Campbell, Sherry Jackson, Donna Jo Boyce, Victor Sen Young. Screenplay: Ranald MacDougall, based on a novel by Ernest Hemingway. Cinematography: Ted D. McCord. Art direction: Edward Carrere. Film editing: Alan Crosland Jr. Music: Max Steiner.

If the setup, an honest fishing-boat captain forced into some intrigue he really doesn't want to get mixed up in, sounds familiar, that's because The Breaking Point was based on Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not. And that had been the basis for a much looser adaptation (it mostly just kept the title) by Howard Hawks, with the aid of screenwriters Jules Furthman and William Faulkner, in 1944. But here, instead of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, we get John Garfield and Patricia Neal -- considerable actors both, but striking no sparks and teaching no one how to whistle. The New York Times's ineffable film critic Bosley Crowther much preferred The Breaking Point, calling the Hawks version a "feeble swing and a cut at Ernest Hemingway's memorable story of a tough guy" whereas director Michael Curtiz and screenwriter Ranald MacDougall "got hold of that fable and socked it into a four-base hit." Crowther's baseball metaphors aside, it's possible to admire the professionalism of Curtiz's direction and the adherence to a downer ending for Garfield's Harry Morgan, while still feeling that in their film Hawks, Furthman, Faulkner, Bogart, Bacall, et al. knew and displayed a lot more about the Hemingway virtue of grace under pressure.