absolutely sure
by
Douglas Messerli
Jules
Furthman and William Faulkner (screenplay, based on the novel by Ernest
Hemingway).
Howard Hawks (director) To Have and Have Not / 1944
It
has always struck me as immensely funny that the great novelist William
Faulkner—along with expert screenwriter Jules Furthman (writer of Morocco, Blonde Venus, Rio Bravo and,
again with Faulkner and others, The Big Sleep)—was
assigned the project of rewriting Ernest Hemingway’s rather mediocre novel, To Have or Have Not. Even director
Howard Hawks, an admirer of Hemingway, reportedly thought the work was Hemingway’s
worst.
Fortunately, the 1944 film hardly
resembles Hemingway’s original, only the basic plot outlines being retained.
Instead of Cuba, Hawks and his screenwriters locate the story in
Vichy-controlled Martinique, a situation which automatically calls up Michael Curtiz’s
film of two years earlier, Casablanca,
in which Humphrey Bogart had also starred. Like the earlier movie, To Have or Have Not finds the hero,
Harry Morgan, to be an American unwilling to get involved in the French underground;
and like Casablanca this film is
filled with Vichy followers and revolutionaries—some of them like Marcel Dalio
and Dan Seymour having also acted in the Curtiz film—who come together in a
local watering hole, this the hotel bar overseen by a popular singer, in this
film Dooley Wilson being replaced by the wonderful performer-composer Hoagy
Carmichael, playing a figure named Cricket. And just as in Casablanca Harry, here nicknamed “Steve” (Bogart), at the important
moment, determines to support the underground, mostly out of love for the
beautiful heroine, this time round the singer Lauren Bacall, playing Marie “Slim”
Browning.
Yet despite a slew of wonderful lines,
Bogart’s brooding cynicism, and some wonderful songs such as “How Little We
Know,” “Am I Blue?” “Hong Kong Blues,” and “The Rhumba Jumps,” To Have or Have Not is no Casablanca. The small hotel bar can’t
compare to Rick’s American Café, Captain Renard (Seymour) can’t even begin to
match Claude Rains’ Captain Renault, and Walter Brennan’s comic drunken Eddie is
more spooky as opposed to the loving lug S. K. Sakall. Moreover, as beautiful
as is the dusky-voiced Bacall, who was just 19 at the time of filming, she
doesn’t have the acting abilities nor the radiant beauty of Ingrid Bergman. And,
finally, the story—no matter how Faulkner and Furthman attempted to gussie it
up—is just too thin: Harry refuses to help the underground, but changes his
mind when the Vichy government accidentally shoots the man who owed him money;
he meets the singer “Slim,” falls in love, and to help her, an underground hero,
and the heroes’ wife escape, goes patriotic on us.
You know you don’t have to act with me,
Steve. You don’t
have to say anything, and you don’t have
to do anything. Not
a thing. Oh, maybe just
whistle. You know how to whistle,
don’t you, Steve? You just put
your lips together and…blow.
But
just a few moments earlier after kissing him, then kissing him again to which
he more fully responds, she quips “It’s better when you help”—an even better
line for my money.
Not until Rita Hayworth’s Gilda of two
years later would there be a better definition of a vamp. Bacall was clearly out to seduce her man, and
we get to witness every moment of it. Shortly after the film, Bogart divorced his
wife and married Bacall, the courtship of which the entire country had
witnessed.
While Casablanca
is filled with homoerotic moments, To
Have or Have Not is utterly heterosexual. Not even Harry’s strange relationship
with Eddie is even worth talking about. Eddie, to use the metaphor of the
movie, simply has a “bee in his bonnet”—he expresses a constant fear of bee
stings throughout—and it is only he who demands proof of the hero’s love. Slim
is absolutely sure of her man. From the moment she meets him, Harry doesn’t
have a chance.
Los Angeles,
April 11, 2016
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