Tagged: Ship’s Captain
John Garfield in The Breaking Point
John Garfield as Harry Morgan in The Breaking Point (1950)
Vitals
John Garfield as Harry Morgan, cynical charter fishing boat captain and Navy veteran
Newport Beach, California and Ensenada, Mexico, Spring to Summer 1950
Film: The Breaking Point
Release Date: September 30, 1950
Director: Michael Curtiz
Wardrobe Credit: Leah Rhodes
WARNING! Spoilers ahead!
Background
One of the most intense and talented actors of his generation, John Garfield was born 110 years ago today on March 4, 1913 in New York’s Lower East Side. His birth name was Julius Garfinkle, with Julius added as a middle name that resulted in his nickname “Julie” among friends and family.
Garfield delivered many excellent performances during his too-brief life and career, eventually citing his personal favorite to be in his penultimate film The Breaking Point, a more faithful retelling of Ernest Hemingway’s novel To Have and Have Not than the popular and stylish 1944 adaptation starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.
Lushly photographed and set against the docks of Newport Beach, The Breaking Point stars Garfield as self-described “boat jockey” Harry Morgan, a World War II veteran who makes a living for his supportive wife and daughter by chartering his fishing boat, Sea Queen, that ferries passengers back and forth from Mexico. Continue reading
Triangle of Sadness: Woody Harrelson’s Captain Uniform
Woody Harrelson in Triangle of Sadness (2022)
Vitals
Woody Harrelson as Thomas Smith, cynical Communist Marxist luxury yacht captain
Mediterranean Sea, Summer 2020
Film: Triangle of Sadness
Release Date: September 28, 2022
Director: Ruben Östlund
Costume Designer: Sofie Krunegård
WARNING! Spoilers ahead!
Background
As we near the 95th Academy Awards ceremony in a couple weeks, I wanted to look at one of the more offbeat nominees. Nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay, Triangle of Sadness joins the current trends of productions like The Menu, Parasite, Succession, and The White Lotus that satirize—often darkly—the entitlement and excess of the wealthy ruling class.
The commentary is clear in Triangle of Sadness, with its middle act set aboard a luxury yacht where the staff—itself split by the tip-earning stewards and below-decks crew—are at the whim of their ultra-privileged passengers that range from social media influencers to arms dealers and oligarchs like the gregarious Dimitry (Zlatko Burić).
At the helm, or at least supposed to be, is the ship’s American captain Thomas Smith (whose surname is never mentioned on screen, I believe, though it certainly recalls the similarly named captain of the Titanic, a disaster which also has become allegorical for class disparities in the decades since it sank in 1912.) An outspoken Marxist, Thomas doesn’t fit neatly into any of the passenger and crew categories, though he’s the first to admit—once he stumbles through the challenges of drunken alliteration—that he’s “a shit socialist because I have too much! I have too much abundance in my life, I’m not even—I’m not a worthy socialist… a shit socialist.” Continue reading