header photo: Patricia Neal, John Garfield and Juano Hernandez
“if you believe I’m not workin’ hard all day,
Just step in my shoes and take my place …”
“Just Got Paid,”
ZZ Topp
Film noir is subversive in showing American war heroes
returning home, only to be denied the rights and opportunities they’d supposedly
been fighting for on far shores. Meanwhile,
they're tantalized by flush criminals and malign office-holders, often allied, one hand washing the other.
In The Breaking Point (1950), John Garfield is Harry Morgan,
hardworking captain of a rental boat, who descends to dealing with gangsters just to
keep his business viable amid regulations and a sputtering local economy. The moral compromises alienate his wife, played by Phyllis Thaxter, who tells him supporting his
family is “the real war.” Harry drifts
back to his wartime identity, a man good with a gun, but ultimately must pick a side. (Both this film and 1944’s To Have and Have
Not, the first Bogart-Bacall teaming, are loosely based on Ernest Hemingway's The Breaking
Point.)
Most criticism on the Red Scare dutifully avoids specific
films, except the few explicitly mentioned in primary sources surrounding the
Blacklist, but this is mere legalism. Chronically
divided, we’ve become obsessed with sticking to “proven facts,” as if all Americans
work in a courtroom before retiring to home laboratories (or vice versa).
The truth extends beyond proof, and any discussion that ignores this is timid and incomplete. In my opinion, the Hollywood Blacklist was provoked specifically by film noir, an inherently, insistently socialist genre. The alternative is to assume the U.S. Establishment could not tolerate the occasional advocacy film about farming (The Good Earth, The Grapes of Wrath, Our Vines Have Tender Grapes, et al.)
John Garfield had already made enemies with the leftist, classic noirs Body and Soul (1947) and Force of Evil (1948), about corruption in professional boxing and urban rackets, respectively (we could footnote the privation and adultery driving The Postman Always Rings Twice, Humoresque and Daisy Kenyon). The former pair were produced by Garfield’s own Enterprise Pictures; for the studios, at least, acting as his own producer was salt-in-the-wound.
Garfield’s
collaborators were later blacklisted: Robert Rossen (Body and Soul) and
Abraham Polonsky (both films). Polonsky
fled to Europe, but Rossen tried to save himself by naming names, only to die
embittered in 1966, age 57.
As the winds changed, Garfield, a premier star of the 1940s,
was subjected to withering pressure but refused to buckle. When he died of a heart attack at 39, in 1952,
friends blamed the anti-communist witchhunters.
As lawyers say, however, correlation is not causation: Garfield had a bout with rheumatic fever as a youth, which left heart damage.
Younger viewers, especially, might be interested to note that Garfield,
whose politics would be very liberal even today, felt no need to “play perfect.” (Compare Ethan Hawke’s character in Brooklyn’s
Finest, who punches out a fellow cop, as I recall, for making a racist comment
— at a late-night poker game — in his filthy basement.) Garfield’s Harry is indecisive
and morose, snaps at his wife and daughters, and ultimately, breaks his word (like
virtually everyone in this film).
And he disrespects other ethnicities, as when,
after an abortive smuggling run, he implies Chinese immigrants smell bad. (Garfield himself reportedly called Patricia
Neal “whore” on-set, as character traits spilled over into real life.)
I enjoyed looting the Criterion of The Breaking Point for the above details (and don't mean to ignore director Michael Curtiz, who so embodied the "well-made film" he seems anonymous), watching most of the elegant film twice to understand Harry’s too-simple motivation: he’s broke. I’ve lived a middle-class existence, taking the financial safety-net for granted.
Harry has a safety-net, too: friends and
loved ones who’ll stand by him. His way out is to realize he's not alone (an acquaintance of mine says, “If you don’t need help, you’re not trying hard
enough.”). There's no shame if his wife takes in piece-work, or if he can’t give his friend (Juano
Hernandez) steady employment. He’s a
decorated veteran, dammit.
Everyone has his battles (like the chronic fatigue that kept me from this blog for almost a year). Not everyone enjoys loyal friends. It may even be that war persists, in part, to give young men a bonding experience that stays with them for life, stiffening the spine.
At other times, mutual sacrifice takes a (more) peaceful form, as in a labor union. Even in a
solitary era that claims a "gig economy," union
membership can be as profound a bond as that between soldiers in war, or forged
during years of marriage.
In the case of an employee union, the consummation
is spelled S-T-R-I-K-E.