The character:	Harry Morgan
The actor:	John Garfield
The movie:	The Breaking Point (1950)

It’s not called The Breaking Point for nothing, you know? As anyone who’s ever watched a POW movie or a torture movie or an especially shrill children’s movie knows, we all have that breaking point. Anyone can be forced to meet that moment. (I should know. Some of my students coerced me into watching Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked, and I reached the breaking point where I audibly asked what I was watching about 40 minutes in.) What’s unusual about this movie is that the breaking point is not really about where Harry Morgan goes bad. If that’s the case, it happens early, and really, it happens often. He breaks when he begins to supplement his scanty postwar income with a criminal enterprise. He breaks when he looks more fondly at Patricia Neal than Phyllis Thaxter. Yet these are not the moments in the film which title it. The title of the movie refers to that point where Harry cannot stand the bad anymore. When he stops abiding it, he signs his own death warrant, but intends on taking some of his enemies along with him.

In 2026, the killing of Harry’s Black friend, Wesley (Juano Hernandez) would feel like a fridging. You can hear the critique now, that it takes a white man to lose his Black friend to the criminal element, to know that he was responsible for his death, to spur him into action. A Black man is a prop in this case and not truly a man. In 1950, when John Garfield’s career was on the block because of his Communist leanings, that scenario doesn’t sing out the same way. In 1950, it’s all too easy to believe that this blue-collar veteran would be able to look at Wesley and say that he was just help, or that his life was expendable because of his race. That isn’t what happens at all. Harry is forced to drop Wesley’s body into the ocean, robbing his son of a proper burial to mourn at, and the white man decides that his life is not worth more than the Black man’s. Therein is the breaking point, a breaking point based on decency.

There are such people in Minneapolis who have seen their own breaking point. Maybe it was back in 2020, during the George Floyd protests. Or maybe, as has been the case in so, so many incidences, it’s in the now. Such people have great courage, and so are capable of great deeds.

Harry Morgan might live if he let his arm be amputated, a doctor says. Harry turns the offer down. I suppose there’s some kind of masculine pride in it, although that seems a little ahistorical. Surely Harry would have known that there were men with amputations or severe injuries who could go on with their lives and make successes. I wonder if it doesn’t have more to do with the fact that he can no longer look his wife in the eye. Lucy was right all along, trying her best to speak sense into her husband, finding herself impotent in doing so for the first time in their married life. There is heroism in Harry, but just as it takes some tragedy to smoke it out of him, there is a truth in his need to hide from his best judge. Perhaps Arthur Miller saw this movie before he wrote up John Proctor.