This is a much underrated and almost unknown and forgotten crown jewel among the Hemingway screenings, and it's an odd one out for Hemingway, as it's an unusual character prying into the depths of a heel fighting it out with destiny for his honour, which he has been losing all his life. We never get to know anything about his background, why he can't talk of America, let alone go back, and Micheline Presle, who appears to know all about him throughout from the beginning, treats him like poison. It's the boy that saves everything, he is the only thing he has to live for, and it's for him he finally risks his life to save his honour. At least he saves one of them.
Micheline Presle makes a very convincing appearance as one of Hemingway's most hard-boiled women, out-shadowing even Ava Gardner by her hard experience and relentless attitude, which only the boy can soften and only by his absolute honesty of innocence. Even when the father hits him and treats him with flamboyant treachery, the boy continues to believe in him and trust him, and the departure scene at the station, when he sends the boy away by train, with its following scenes, is heart-rending and the apex of the film, culminating with Micheline's singing performance, almost as poignant as Edith Piaf. This is a great film in its dire human realism, the story of a greater conflict and more difficult battle than any war, of a man struggling with impossible odds for an impossible honour out of reach, and how he gets through with it after all.
John Garfield is almost even better here than in "The Breaking Point" on Hemingway's "To Have and Have Not", the better and later version than Bogart's, here he plays an equally doubtful character posed against impossible odds, but here the addition of the boy and that relationship suddenly gives John Garfield's dubious character an ocean of interesting depth.
