An old-fashioned and occasionally good Hemingway adaptation: The Breaking Point

Michael Curtiz's The Breaking Point (1950) was an old-fashioned movie even in its time - seems a throwback to the big-screen melodramas of the 30s and less like the character-driven crime dramas of the 50s and beyond - but still worth watching, once anyway, for Curtiz's effective handling of the shipboard scenes in particular. The film - based on Hemingway's 1937 novel, To Have and Have Not (which was also filmed in the 30s) - is about a tough, decorated war veteran, Harry, who captains a charter fishing boat out of Newport, California, and who's facing serious financial troubles that threaten his marriage - leading him to take on some undue risks to earn quick cash. The best scenes are the underworld scenes: the visit to Mexico where the guy who chartered the boat loses big at gambling and stiffs Harry; the abortive smuggling of Chinese workers into California, the meeting w/ gangsters who want to charter the boat to escape following a race-track robbery, Harry's reckless heroism aboard the boat now under the control of the hoods. Far less effective are the domestic scenes and the scenes in which Harry flirts w/ (and ultimately resists) the sexy blonde who picks up rich guys in the marina. The family scenes in particular - with the long-suffering wife, the cute children, the neighboring black family (and, yes, it's always the black guy who dies - though Curtiz handles this well in the closing image of the film); some of these scenes, in fact most of the scenes in the film, seem to be after-dubbed in studio, giving the movie a slightly abstract look and unnatural pacing. I wonder how much of the occasional clumsiness comes from H's source dialog, and will probably read his relatively little-known novel to pursue that point.