The Breaking Point (1950) review

Cash-strapped boat captain Harry Morgan (John Garfield), who lives with his wife Lucy (Phyllis Thaxter) and two daughters in Newport Beach, reluctantly accepts an offer set up by unscrupulous lawyer Duncan (Wallace Ford) to smuggle eight Chinese individuals into the United States which goes terribly wrong ... and then later on, he takes up one more deal to help gangsters who robbed a race track try to escape, and that is also a violent disaster.  This is yet another adaptation of Hemingway's novel To Have and Have Not, and although Garfield (in his second to last big screen role) isn't Humphrey Bogart and every line of dialogue tries way too hard to be "snappy" and "witty," it's a decent (if somewhat choppy) noir, and Patricia Neal is outstanding as the "free-spirited" (but dangerous) dame that Harry emotionally cheats on his wife with (even though it never becomes physical).  Keeping with Papa's obsession with "machismo," Morgan loses his arm (and is "symbolically castrated"), but his loyal spouse reassures him he's still "a man" to her ... and the final shot is unexpectedly sad, as the son of Harry's partner Wesley (Juano Hernández) is left without a father.