To Have and Have Not ***** (1944, Humphrey Bogart, Walter Brennan, Lauren Bacall) – Classic Movie Review 1346

Producer-director Howard Hawks’s 1944 wartime adventure enjoys the enormous benefit of introducing the star pair of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall to the screen, in the first of the real-life couple’s series of four movies together. It proves a momentous meeting and makes a great cinema occasion. Supposedly based on Ernest Hemingway’s novel, the story is extensively altered in the laboriously and meticulously developed screenplay credited to Jules Furthman and William Faulkner.

Hawks’s romantic version of Hemingway’s story features Bogart as the cynical expatriate American skipper Harry Morgan, who is swept up in the troubles with the French Resistance on the island of Martinique in World War Two. Morgan helps to transport a Free French Resistance leader and his beautiful wife to Martinique while romancing Marie ‘Slim’ Browning, a resistance sympathizer and the a sexy, sassy lounge singer in the club where Morgan spends most of his days.

Bogart gives one of his most iconic and archetypal dependable performances as a world-weary care-worn, much-battered hero. Great though he is, the star generously allows Bacall in her first film at the age of 19 to steal a lot of his thunder as the sexily alluring drifter Marie Browning, who positively purrs teasing insolence to her elders and betters. The stars’ on-screen sparring match lets viewers a little bit inside their real-life love duet, accounting for much of this film’s magnetism. For example, Bacall memorably teaches Bogart how to whistle – just put your lips together and blow!

Producer Howard Hughes sold the book rights to Hawks, who re-sold them to Warner Bros. Hawks went fishing with Hemingway and told him he could make a film out of what he considered his ‘worst book’, which he told him was ‘a bunch of junk’. Despite the insults, Hemingway worked on the story together with Hawks. Another famous author, William Faulkner, out of print and broke’, was drafted in to help with the script.

Hawks and The film preserves the book’s title, and the names and characteristics of some of the characters, but nothing from beyond the first fifth of the volume. Hawks was wrong about the book being ‘a bunch of junk’ but not about the film. He went boldly ahead with his own vision and the result’s wonderful.

Bacall says: ‘You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.’ His character is actually Harry, but Steve was Bacall’s nickname for Bogart.

Hoagy Carmichael memorably tinkles the ivories as Cricket, the piano player in the hotel bar. Bacall sings ‘How Little We Know’, written by Carmichael and Johnny Mercer. Another Carmichael song, ‘Hong Kong Blues’, co-written with Stanley Adams is also used. ‘Am I Blue?’, written by Harry Akst and Grant Clarke, is performed by Carmichael and Bacall. ‘The Rhumba Jumps’,  by Mercer and Carmichael, is performed by the Martinique band.

Moran, Sheldon Leonard, Dan Seymour, Marcel Dalio, Walter Molnar, Walter Sande, Aldo Naldi, Paul Marion, Eugene Borden, Pedro Regas, Maurice Marsac and Louis Mercier co-star.

The myth that a teenage Andy Williams dubbed the singing for Bacall is just that – a myth – though he was tested along with some female singers to dub for her.

Warner Bros re-made To Have and Have Not in 1950 as The Breaking Point with John Garfield as Harry Morgan, directed by Michael Curtiz. It is much more faithful to the Hemingway novel and bears little resemblance to the 1944 film. And Hemingway’s novel was filmed once more as The Gun Runners.

Adored screen legend Lauren Bacall died on August 12 2014, aged 89.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1346

Link to Derek Winnert’s home page for more film reviews: http://derekwinnert.com/

Movie Queen (Lauren) by Graeme Jukes 2015.