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Friday, Jun 6, 2025
7 PM (97 mins)
BAMPFA
The Breaking Point
35mm Archival Print
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Introduction and Post-Screening Discussion
Imogen Sara Smith is a film critic and historian based in New York City and the author of two books, In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City and Buster Keaton: The Persistence of Comedy. She writes for Sight & Sound, Film Comment, Cineaste, Reverse Shot, and many other publications, and serves as editor in chief of NOIR CITY magazine.
John Garfield, Patricia Neal, Phyllis Thaxter, Juano Hernandez,
“Michael Curtiz brings a master skipper’s hand to the helm of this thriller, Hollywood’s second crack at Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not. John Garfield stars as Harry Morgan, an honest charter-boat captain who, facing hard times, takes on dangerous cargo to save his boat, support his family, and preserve his dignity. . . . Hewing closer to Hemingway’s novel than Howard Hawks’s Bogart-Bacall vehicle does, The Breaking Point charts a course through daylight noir and working-class tragedy, guided by Curtiz’s effortless visual fluency and a stoic, career-capping performance from Garfield” (Criterion Collection). Garfield would make one more movie after this; he died of a heart attack in 1952, at age thirty-nine.
FILM DETAILS
Screenwriter
- Ranald MacDougall
Based On
Ernest Hemingway’s novel To Have and Have Not
Cinematographer
- Ted McCord
Print Info
- B&W
- 35mm
- 97 mins
Source
- UCLA Film & Television Archive
Permission
- Park Circus
Additional Info
- 35mm print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Preservation funding provided by Warner Bros. in association with The Film Foundation and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
Event Accessibility
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Learn more about accessibility services at BAMPFA.