Michael Curtis is almost the perfect inverse of my issue with Nicholas Ray. While I find Ray’s work to be filled with personality (ie: sadness) on a narrative level, I find his use of imagery to be only adequate. Curtiz on the other hand, has a gorgeous visual sense with nothing thematically holding his body of work together as a whole. And so, Ray is oft held up as an Auteurist God, while Curtiz is dismissed as a competent craftsman. They dismiss the genius of William Wyler and Robert Wise for the same reasons. And while I agree that their filmographies cannot be read like a novel, it’s foolhardy to dismiss individual films for this reason alone. Andrew Sarris wrote of forests and trees, can't we have both? Why do they have to be mutually exclusive? I’d argue that the closing moments of The Breaking Point are bolder than most studio pictures of the era. I’m glad Criterion saw fit to bring it into the fold as a work that is worthy of attention.
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