The New Pictures

The Breaking Point (Warner) is the latest turn in the cinematic fortunes of Ernest Hemingway's 1937 novel, To Have and Have Not. The Warners used the title in 1944 for a movie that launched the career of Lauren Bacall and pretty much let the Hemingway story alone. Then, in 1948, they borrowed one of the novel's episodes for the climax of Key Largo. At last the studio has made a film of the book itself. The result is an expert piece of hard-boiled cinema.

Producer Jerry (Johnny Belinda) Wald and Scripter Ranald MacDougall have taken plenty of liberties, but that should not offend Hemingway fans who recognize that To Have and Have Not is one of the master's lesser works. The script reshuffles characters and incidents, creates new ones, even switches locales (from the Florida keys and Cuba to the California coast and Mexico). In reshaping the novel, it softens some cutting edges. But the story is still tough, violent and essentially true to the book's central figure: a rugged individualist, desperately down on his luck.

Harry Morgan (John Garfield), a rough & ready veteran of PT boats, scrounges a living for his wife (Phyllis Thaxter) and two daughters by chartering his cruiser for fishing trips. Apart from his boat (which is not paid up) and a talent for spotting marlin half a mile off, he has nothing "to peddle but guts." When a client runs out on his bill, leaving Morgan broke in a Mexican port, he starts peddling guts.

Through a crooked shyster (Wallace Ford), he makes a deal with a smuggler to carry eight Chinese into the U.S., runs into a double cross that forces him to kill the smuggler and dump his passengers onto a Mexican beach. Then Morgan's troubles multiply until they drive him into a much riskier scheme: to pilot a getaway boat for four ruthless holdup men and kill them for the reward money before they can fulfill their plain intention of murdering him.

Director Michael Curtiz sparks The Breaking Point's slambang action with realistic, underplayed sequences of growing tension. Besides stinging melodrama, the film offers some unusual dividends. Its love story involves the hero with--of all people--his wife, and it is played with a passion that U.S. movies never seem to find in married couples who have school-age children. In the other woman (Patricia Neal), who gets nowhere with Morgan, the script fashions an acid, quip-studded portrait of a smart tart on the make.

The Breaking Point sheds high credit on both sides of the camera. Much of its quality stems from Cinematographer Ted (Treasure of Sierra Madre) McCord's fine photography of sun-baked waterfront and open sea. All the players are in top form. In his meatiest role in years, Actor Garfield gives one of his best performances, and Actress Thaxter is memorable as a housewife bowed down by drudgery, poverty and fear.

Eye Witness (Eagle Lion Classics) sends a brassy U.S. defense lawyer to England on a tough murder case, and then watches him stumble through a baffling maze of provincial customs and courtroom procedure. The plot is predictable, but Producer Joan Harrison and Director-Star Robert Montgomery wring some wry chuckles from their bull-in-the-china-shop situation, and keep the story moving at a lively clip.

In his efforts to clear a wartime buddy charged with murder, Lawyer Montgomery shocks the village of Lesser Hamilton by filching a bobby's bicycle, and outrages the Lord High Sheriff of Milkshire by tossing off a glass of rare old sherry in one gulp. Under the disapproving glare of a wigged and powdered judge (ably played by Felix Aylmer), Montgomery brings

Perry Mason tactics into the quiet of a British courtroom, and almost gets his vital evidence thrown out.

In spite of a pat, oversweet ending that leaves the hero with cheers ringing in his ears and a girl swinging on his arm, Eye Witness, with its sly spoofing of stuffy British and bumptious American manners, is pretty good fun.

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