By David in TN
Friday, July 24, 2020 at 5:37:00 P.M. EDT
TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at 12:30 a.m. and 10 a.m. ET is The Breaking Point (1950). John Garfield starred for his favorite director, Michael Curtiz (Yankee Doodle Dandy 1942, Casablanca 1943, etc.). Phyllis Thaxter plays Garfield's long-suffering wife. Patricia Neal is the femme fatale, with Juano Hernandez as the faithful friend and Wallace Ford as the crooked lawyer.
As we said previously, Eddie Muller’s choices this year leave something to be desired. This time he’s recycling a film shown on Noir Alley in 2017. Last week Eddie promised a “new intro and outro.” We can guess what that will be like.
N.S.: I don’t recall if I’ve ever seen this picture, which was one of Julie (Julius) Garfinkle’s last, but I’ve read so much about it, I feel as if I had.
A couple of years ago, I saw the Howard Hawks/Bogie version, To Have and Have Not (1944), with Lauren “Betty” Bacall in her first role, and Walter Brennan.
When I was first drawing up my list of the hundred greatest pictures, To Have was on it, with a question mark. The greatest thing about it was burned into my memory: Walter Brennan’s performance as Eddie, Bogie’s dipsomaniac first mate.
Eddie had to be based on a real man; he pops up in numerous Hemingway stories, most notably the posthumously published, The Islands in the Stream, which I read circa 1979, but whose movie version I have yet to see.
In one of his greatest performances, Walter, as he is simply known in the Stix household, stole the show, and he was just as good as I’d remembered him. (However, the picture had a ridiculous, contrived ending.)
And yet, he wasn’t nominated for Best Supporting Actor.
I consider Walter to have been the greatest character actor of them all, better even than Thomas Mitchell, Karl Malden, or Lee J. Cobb.
I suspect that, after he won three Oscars (1937, 1939, and 1941), that Hollywood decided that he’d won enough, just as it had after Spencer Tracy won in consecutive years for Captains Courageous (1938) and Boys Town (1939).* I don’t even know how Walter won his third Oscar, for playing Judge Roy Bean, and stealing the show from “Coop,” in Willi Wyler’s The Westerner (1940).
And he somehow slipped in for a fourth nomination for Hawks’ Sergeant York (1941), as a country preacher. (I started watching it on The Late Show one night, when I was about 13, but fell asleep about a half-an-hour in.)
Walter also deserved a nom for John Sturges’ Bad Day at Black Rock, a modern “chamber Western” (tension like that of a round being already in the chamber, and ready to go) whose story takes place over the course of less than 24 hours. He played the town doctor and undertaker in a one-dog town, a deeply cynical man who changes for the better.
It's one thing to play a do-nothing cynic, and another altogether to play a hero. But to play a man who is inspired to change from one to the other, and to do so credibly, is one tall order for any actor. But Walter pulled it off.
It didn’t hurt that he had some excellent lines, and another ugly old mug, Spence, to play off of.
The picture also had one of the great rogues’ gallery of heavies—Robert Ryan, Lee Marvin, and Ernie Borgnine.
*Except for the first couple of years, and one or two war years, the Oscars have always been awarded the year after their respective pictures were released.
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2 comments:
I had no idea that Walter Brennan was a great actor--never heard of Brennan described in that manner.All I saw him in was "The Real McCoys"--and I associated him with,Edgar Buchanan type supporting actors,ever since.
I do a lot of impressions of famous people--Walter Brennan is an easy one--and one of my best.But I had zero clue of his acting ability.
--GRA
TCM's Film Noir of the Week is on hiatus during August for Summer Under the Stars.
After I watched The breaking Point I viewed the Blu-Ray of Don Siegel's The Gun Runners (1958), another version of the Hemingway story with Audie Murphy playing the same basic character Garfield played.
John Garfield was one of the greatest actors who ever lived and was convincing. Audie Murphy was actually something like the character in real life, but was often wooden. Siegel said Audie couldn't do much with the love scenes.
One scene Audie Murphy could do better than John Garfield. That's when he takes an M1 Carbine and kills the bad guys.
Audie Murphy's latest biographer, Baylor University American History lecturer, David A. Smith wrote:
"In many ways The Gun Runners was a standard Audie Murphy performance. In a review of his acting ability, typical of the sort that always sought to shine a positive light on his performances, one critic explained that 'while it can't be claimed that he helps a dramatic situation, it can be claimed that he never has hurt one.' It was faint praise, but perhaps the only kind the film warranted. As was by now typical, the action sequences were the only time he really appeared to forget that he was acting. He could still summon his charming smile, and in this film he turned in a creditable job of portraying a man who was helplessly aware that he was getting deeper into a situation that was over his head. In playing that kind of part, Murphy was not really acting at all; it was a feeling he knew all too well."
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