Michael Curtiz

I will have more to say about the TCM March schedule presently but at the moment I just wanted to recommend Michael Curtiz's The Breaking Point (1950), the best of the three film versions of Hemingway's To Have and Have Not  and one of the best films of Curtiz and John Garfield, who died two years after it was made, at the age of 39, after refusing to name names before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.  Andrew Sarris cited Curtiz's Casablanca as an exception to the auteur theory but later changed his mind, though he never wrote about Curtiz again in detail.  There is little published about Curtiz in English, with the exception of Kingsley Canham's The Hollywood Professionals Volume 1: Michael Curtiz, Raoul Walsh, Henry Hathaway (The Tantivy Press, 1973), a book that does not even mention The Breaking Point, probably because the film was not available at that time.

The Breaking Point has much in common with Casablanca --they are both about struggle and loyalty --but it is also a pessimistic post-war film noir, about family and work and race, with a heart-breaking ending.  It can be seen in conjunction with the nine other Curtiz films on TCM in March:  Romance on the High Seas (1948), Four Wives (1939), The Sea Wolf (1941), The Sea Hawk (1940), Private Detective 62 (1933), The Key (1934), Kennel Murder Case (1933), Female (1933), Adventures of Robin Hood (1938).