Deception (Irving Rapper, 1946)

Bette Davis, Paul Henreid, and Claude Rains in Deception

Cast: Bette Davis, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, John Abbott, Benson Fong. Screenplay: John Collier, Joseph Than, based on a play by Louis Verneuil. Cinematography: Ernest Haller. Art direction: Anton Grot. Film editing: Alan Crosland Jr. Music: Erich Wolfgang Korngold.

The highlight of Deception is a scene in which Claude Rains, as the imperious composer Alexander Hollenius, invites his ex-mistress Christine (Bette Davis) and her new husband, the cellist Karel Novak (Paul Henreid), to dine with him at a fancy restaurant before Novak is to play Hollenius's new concerto. While Christine and Karel stew, both eager to get the composer's approval so the cellist can make a career break, Hollenius plays the epicure, constantly rethinking the menu and the accompanying wines and keeping the couple from their goal. It's Rains at his best. In fact, he's the chief reason for seeing this somewhat overproduced melodrama, with its sometimes laughable skirting of the Production Code's strictures on sex. Would a worldly European like Novak really be so terribly shocked to find that Christine had been Hollenius's lover? Would Christine really be so determined to conceal the secret that she'd kill for it? Davis pulls out all of her mannerisms -- she disliked the film -- while Henreid struggles to rise above his usual passivity as a leading man overshadowed by his leading lady.

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.