A blatant box office grab, this positioning had plenty of basis in To Have and Have Not<\/em>\u2019s content. After all, the film\u2019s setting in French Martinique\u2014a Caribbean island then under Vichy rule (note the Marshal P\u00e9tain posters)\u2014bears more than a little resemblance to Casablanca<\/em>\u2019s Morocco, all palm trees, exotic markets, and cosmopolitan caf\u00e9s, crackling with anti-fascist resistance. (If Warner Bros. didn\u2019t reuse Casablanca<\/em>\u2019s sets, the studio missed a significant opportunity to economize.) Humphrey Bogart returns, this time as Harry Morgan, who, like his hard-boiled Rick Blaine, is an American expat living in a fascist-controlled sea port, doing his best to stay out of the war. Like Rick, \u2018Morgan\u2019 is assiduously \u201cminding my own business,\u201d in this case, chartering his fishing boat for tourists. And To Have and Have Not <\/em>shares Casablanca<\/em>\u2019s basic plot: Bogart\u2019s character refuses to help the anti-fascist resistance until a beautiful woman, this time Lauren Bacall\u2019s Marie (to Ingrid Bergman\u2019s Ilsa), plays a catalytic role in converting him from self-centered isolationism to selfless antifascist interventionism\u2014as an unsubtle surrogate for U.S. audiences during World War II (which was a bit dated by 1944, as critics noted). There might even be a self-reflexive in-joke in To Have and Have Not, <\/em>when Bogart-as-Morgan warns his \u201crummy\u201d sidekick Eddy (the beloved Walter Brennan), \u201cThey\u2019re never going to believe that story [\u2026] a second time.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Beyond Morgan and Marie, and excepting the oddball Eddy, To Have and Have Not<\/em>\u2019s <\/em>tertiary characters also reiterate Casablanca<\/em>\u2019s. There is the piano-tickling Cricket (Hoagy Carmichael) to Casablanca<\/em>\u2019s Sam (Dooley Wilson). [N.B., though Cricket is white, To Have and Have Not <\/em>finds other ways to express the era\u2019s paternalistic and colonialist racial politics.] Rounding up the usual suspects for the Gestapo, there is Vichy collaborator Captain Renard (Dan Seymour), who seems a composite of Casablanca\u2019s<\/em> Captain Renault (Claude Rains) and Signor Ferrari (Sydney Greenstreet), and the worse for this caricaturizing mash-up. Modeling selfless antifascist heroism, there is De Gaullist leader-in-transit Paul de Bursac (Walter Szurovy), cut straight from the cloth of Victor Lazslo (Paul Henreid), complete with a speech about the nature of bravery, and about the Nazis\u2019 underestimation of humanity\u2019s irrepressible antifascist spirit. (Lazslo: \u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter if the Nazis killed them all; more would come.\u201d De Bursac: \u201cThere\u2019s always someone else.\u201d) De Bursac even has a gorgeous wife in tow, Hellene (Dolores Moran), wardrobed and lit like Ilsa. The couple emerge out of the fog, as if the plane from Casablanca\u2019s <\/em>final scene delivered Mr. and Mrs. Lazslo\/De Bursac straight to Martinique. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For all these echoes, emphasized by the studio\u2019s publicity, audiences flocked to To Havana and Have Not, <\/em>while most contemporary critics derogated it as derivative, a lesser copy. And it\u2019s true, for my money, Hawks\u2019s film does not stand up to Michael Curtiz\u2019s instant and enduring classic. But, starting with Jean-Luc Godard\u2019s re-estimation of To Have and Have Not<\/em> in Cahiers du cinema <\/em>in 1952, as part of his hyperbolic assertion of Hawks as \u201cthe greatest American artist,\u201d it <\/em>has established a place for itself in film history in its own right, not least of all for its impressive literary pedigree and the Bogie and Bacall of it all.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Indeed, To Have and Have Not <\/em>originated in the Ernest Hemingway novel of the same title, published in 1937, little of which remains in the final film. Book-ended between two masterpieces, A Farewell to Arms <\/em>(1929) and For Whom the Bell Tolls <\/em>(1940), it is considered lesser Hemingway, a strained attempt to respond more explicitly to the era\u2019s fashion of politically committed art. As the title suggests, it underscores Depression-era socioeconomic inequality, in Key West and Havana, between which the novel travels and where Hemingway had homes. In Cuba, that inequality sparked a revolution against dictator Gerardo Machado, with which Hemingway sympathized, mostly. Thus, his protagonist Harry Morgan finds himself smuggling Cuban revolutionaries to the U.S., despite his initial demurral. The changed setting of the film\u2014from Cuba to Martinique\u2014came late, at the insistence of U.S. government propaganda agencies, which worried that any association between authoritarianism and Cuban leaders might embarrass the island\u2019s new would-be dictator Fulgencio Batista, an important ally to the war effort.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n According to legend, the film adaptation was born when Hawks told Hemingway \u201cI can make a picture out of your worst story,\u201d and Papa took the bait. Together, on a ten-day fishing trip on Hemingway\u2019s beloved boat in 1939, the two men reworked the novel into a rough film story. But Hawks couldn\u2019t convince Hemingway to participate further, despite threatening to hand the project to his literary rival, William Faulkner. Hawks would later make good on that threat (hiring Faulkner to doctor that last-minute setting change), but not before selling the rights to Warner Bros. in 1943, attaching Bogart to the project, contracting Jules Furthman to develop a script, and discovering Bacall, a 19-year old fashion model who nailed her screen test with To Have and Have Not\u2019s <\/em>most famous line, \u201cYou do know how to whistle, don\u2019t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.\u201d Also according to legend, Hawks instructed Furthman to write two versions, one that minimized Marie\u2019s (Bacall\u2019s) role and another that heightened it, depending on whether the newbie proved up to the task.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She did, and then some. That screen test was no fluke. From the moment Bacall first appears, leaning in a doorway and asking huskily, \u201cAnybody gotta a match?,\u201d she lights up the screen. The first-time actress exudes what one contemporary critic called a \u201cstone-crushing self-confidence\u201d (castration anxiety, anyone?). Playing To Have and Have Not<\/em>\u2019s heroine, she is more independent than Casablanca<\/em>\u2019s; she is an agent of action, lifting wallets and pulling strings, driving the relationship with Bogart\/Morgan, not driven by it. Where Bergman\u2019s Ilsa was earnest, demure, sweet, and unimpeachably moral, Bacall\u2019s Marie is sarcastic, sassy, sultry, and a little bit suspect\u2014though it turns out she has her own moral code and exudes grace under pressure, like all good Hemingway heroes. As such, she gets some of the film\u2019s best lines: the aforementioned \u201cput your lips together and blow;\u201d as well as \u201cIt\u2019s even better when you help,\u201d after Bogart kisses her back; and her tongue-in-cheek recitation of Eddy\u2019s metaphorical tagline: \u201cWas you ever bit by a dead bee?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course, Bacall\u2019s debut success has everything to do with Bogart (veteran actor 25 years her senior), and the chemistry that grows between them. Bogart and Bacall fell in love on set, initiated an affair, and got married eight months after the film\u2019s release\u2014and eleven days after Bogart\u2019s divorce from his third wife. Bogie and Bacall would go on to make the most of their chemistry in three more films together, The Big Sleep <\/em>(1946, also directed by Hawks), Dark Passage <\/em>(1947), and Key Largo <\/em>(1948). Wonderfully, To Have and Have Not <\/em>captures the coupling process of Hollywood\u2019s most iconic couple, because its scenes <\/em>were filmed sequentially, as Faulkner scribbled rewrites just days ahead. Witnessing this budding real-life romance is one of the greatest pleasures offered today by To Have and Have Not, <\/em>which can otherwise drag and confuse, a little bit dated these seventy-five years later.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Plus, Bogart gets the girl, off-screen and on it, in a happy ending. Take that, Casablanca.<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0 “To Have and Have Not” is streaming on HBO Max. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/to-have-1024x748.jpg\")
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