Howard Hawks – Paul Wake Baker

“You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and… blow.”

One can only an imagine an audience in New York in 1944 sitting back with a gasp and then collectively going, “Whoa!” From her first moment on screen, Lauren Bacall lit up the cinema with her smoky voice and burning eyes, somehow keeping cool, almost mocking, while at the same time beckoning. Of course, it didn’t hurt that future husband Humphrey Bogart was the man she was looking at.

Although To Have and Have Not started out as an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s novel, it ended up as a movie made to capitalize on the huge success of Casablanca and Bogart’s sudden and overwhelming popularity. Much of the film echoes the former movie with great success. Instead of Morocco, the movie is set in and around the Caribbean island of Martinique, part of the French West Indies, Bogart is a skipper of his own boat, rather than a bar owner, and the French underground is once again recruiting him to their cause of fighting the Nazis. This time, however, he doesn’t go for the foxy wife of the French freedom fighter, but rather the lost little American nightclub singer.

Skipper Harry Morgan (Bogart) has been hanging out in Martinique taking sportsmen out into the ocean for deep sea fishing. Accompanied by his alcoholic assistant, Eddie (Walter Brennan), Morgan has hired his boat out for the last two weeks to a fellow named Johnson Johnson (Walter Sande), who owes him $825. When Johnson blows his chance of hooking a big marlin, he decides to call it quits and Morgan asks for his money. Johnson tells him that he will have to get it from the bank the next morning and they agree to meet at 10:30. Returning to his hotel, the manager, a man they call “Frenchy” (Marcel Dalio), begs Morgan to help the French underground with a clandestine operation, but he refuses because the danger is too great. As they talk, a sultry young American woman, Marie Browning (Bacall), steps up to his door and asks for a light. That’s where the real fun begins. Right from the beginning, Morgan gives her the nickname “Slim” and she comes back with “Steve” and that is what they call each other from then on and there is no doubt whatsoever that these two are going to get together.

A group of French patriots visit Morgan trying to convince him to help them, but he still isn’t having anything to do with them. Later that evening in the hotel restaurant, Slim sings along with piano playing songwriter Hoagy Carmichael and flirts with Johnson, eventually picking his pocket. Morgan catches her. Up in his room, they look through the wallet and he discovers that Johnson has a plane ticket for 6:30 the next morning and a fistful of travelers checks. Figuring that Johnson was trying to skip out on him, they confront the man, but a gunfight breaks out between the police and the underground characters and Johnson is killed before he can sign over the traveler’s checks. Strapped for money and with Frenchy demanding the hotel bill get paid, Morgan agrees to go to another island and pick up resistance leader Paul de Bursac (Walter Surovy). When he and Eddie get there, they discover that de Bursac has brought his wife, sultry Helene (Dolores Moran). As they head back to Martinique, they encounter a patrol boat. Morgan raises his rifle to shoot at the boat and de Bursac, not realizing he’s firing at the spotlight, tries to stop him. In the gunfire exchange, de Bursac gets hit in the shoulder. Hiding in the basement of the hotel, Morgan removes the bullet and helps him to recover, with Helene hovering over him. This makes Slim jealous and intensifies her passion for Morgan.

With everything coming to a head, Morgan decides it’s time to get out. But how?

The nicknames Slim and Steve are really cool. It turns out that director Howard Hawks and his wife, Nancy Keith, used to call each other by those nicknames. It was Nancy, in fact, who saw Bacall’s photo in Harper’s Bazaar and pointed out the 19 year old model to Hawks, who was looking for somebody new.

Originally, Howard Hughes owned the rights to Hemingway’s novel, but sold them to Hawks, who had always wanted to do a movie based on a Hemingway book. According to the documentary which accompanies the 2003 DVD, A Love Story: The Story of ‘To Have and Have Not, Hawks told Hemingway that he could make a movie of the famous writer’s worst novel, which Hawks believed was To Have and Have Not. Getting the green light from Warner Brothers, he hired well-known Hollywood screenwriter Jules Furthman to draft the screenplay. With objections from the Roosevelt administration that the book was politically sensitive regarding Cuba, they brought in William Faulkner, who moved the location to Martinique and made other wholesale changes that rendered the book almost superfluous as source material.

The chemistry between Bogart and Bacall isn’t the only thing going on in this film. Bacall and Hoagy Carmichael are great together. Hoagy performs his own composition, “Hong Kong Blues,” co-written with Stanley Adams, and he plays with the little house band on a song called “The Rhumba Jumps,” that was co-written with Johnny Mercer. Bacall sings one song in the movie, “How Little We Know,” another Carmichael and Mercer composition.

In spite of all of the similarities with Casablanca, this movie has a completely different feel to it. The former film was pinned on the past love of the Bogart and Bergman characters and it burned with the passion of lost love. To Have and Have Not is the antidote to that: it is love found and it carries all of the positive energy of that love.

This is not a great film, but it is an iconic film. And it is undoubtedly a fun movie, one that be watched over and over without one’s brain breaking apart with deep thought or worrisome agitation. The chemistry between Bogart and Bacall, in their first movie together, finding each other, is more than enough to sustain this film through the years.

This 1946 film adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled detective novel remains one of the best films ever made for a variety of reasons.

Start with Chandler’s novel, written in a unique voice and style, that delved into the underworld of big city vice, using dangerous and edgy behavior that were normally hidden from the public eye: pornography, promiscuity, and homosexuality. Phillip Marlowe stood out as a character. He was mature, worldly, manly, direct in a way that even criminals found disarming. Finally, you have a plot that wastes no time on deliberation or description. It moves forward relentless, with a certainty that is not obvious until the reader finds himself breathless in wonder.

The film is directed by the brilliant Howard Hawks, who understood the story arc and knew he wanted to make a film that wasted no time. He hired the same writers who had fashioned his 1944 adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, the great novelist William Faulkner and science fiction/crime wizard Leigh Brackett (one of the first women to break through into either genre) and told them to waste no time. Unlike other screen adaptations, he wanted this one to leap directly from the page to the screen. Working separately on different parts of the book, they finished the first screenplay in eight days.

Private eye Phillip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) is called to the mansion of wealthy retired General Sternwood (Charles Waldron). With two wealthy, bored daughters who move in a racy crowd, the old man finds himself blackmailed with the gambling debts of his youngest girl, Carmen (Martha Vickers). Sternwood’s former detective, Sean Regan, an old acquaintance of Marlowe’s, has disappeared. Before leaving, Sternwood’s older daughter, Mrs. Vivian Rutledge (Lauren Bacall) asks him if he has been hired to find Sean Regan, who had been seriously interested in Carmen, but he won’t tell her anything, but the wisecracking and banter between them creates a sexual tension that is palpable.

Marlowe begins by investigating the man who holds the gambling debts, a rare bookstore owner named Geiger, but he discovers the man’s assistant, Agnes Lowzier (Sonia Darrin) knows nothing about rare books and she stonewalls him on her boss. Hiding out in a rival bookstore across the street, he spends a rainy afternoon with the sexy proprietress (Dorothy Malone) before following Geiger home. Waiting in the car, he hears gunshots, sees a car roaring away, and then finds Carmen inside, high as a kite, with Geiger’s body on the floor before her. He finds a camera hidden inside a statue, but the film is missing. Looking around, he finds Geiger’s notebook, filled with names and unreadable ceiphers. Taking the book, he returns Carmen to the Sternwoods and finds that Mrs. Rutledge has no answers.

An old friend, Police Detective Bernie Ohls (Regis Toomey) brings Marlowe along when they fish a car out of the ocean just off a local pier. It belongs to the Sternwoods and the driver turns out to be a former Sternwood chauffer who had also been in love with Carmen. It has been made to look like a suicide, but the driver had been killed before the car was driven off the pier.

Mrs. Rutledge appears at Marlowe’s office the next morning with scandalous photos of Carmen and a new blackmail demand from a small time gambler named Joe Brody (Louis Jean Heydt). She can get the money through her friend, gangster Eddie Mars (John Ridgely). Marlowe says he will wait for her call that night before the $5,000 in blackmail money will be paid. During the day, he tails Brody to his apartment. That night, Mrs. Rutledge puts him off, but on a hunch, he goes to Brody’s and finds not only Agnes, but Mrs. Rutledge as well. Although held at gunpoint, he puts together the sequence of events as he understands them. The chauffer had actually killed Geiger and taken the photos, but Brody stopped him and confiscated them to bribe the Sternwoods, which he had done before. Marlowe suspects that Brody killed the chauffer, but Brody maintains his innocence and that killing remains unsolved. Carmen shows up with a gun, demanding the photos. Marlowe easily disarms all of them, but before he can get more information from Brody the man is shot through the door.

It is a complicated and twisting plot, but it moves forward relentlessly. The smart, sharp dialogue crisply moves the story along and renders it secondary really to the underplot: the growing relationship between Marlowe and Mrs. Rutledge.

When Hawks directed To Have and Have Not, he knew he’d found the ideal screen couple in Bogart and Bacall, so he was determined to reunite them for this movie. By that time, their off-screen romance was big news in Hollywood and the pairing was natural. With a great script and an excellent cast, Hawks shot the film in 1944, but it was kept on the shelf for two more years, partly because Warner Bros. was working feverishly to release all of their wartime films before World War II was over and partly because there were problems with Bacall. After the huge hit with To Have and Have Not, she was considered a hot property, but her follow-up film, Confidential Agent, was a flop and she’d been widely panned in reviews. Her agent, Charles K. Feldman, wrote a letter to Jack L. Warner, asking that several scenes in The Big Sleep be re-shot and the film re-edited to take advantage of Bogart and Bacall’s screen chemistry. Warner agreed and the two actors were called in to film additional scenes, including the now famous scene in the restaurant that is full of sexual innuendo.

One thing that becomes apparent right from the beginning of this movie is that beautiful young women are used in abundance to help create a strong feeling of free sexuality. It begins when Marlowe arrives at the Sternwood residence and the gorgeous Carmen walks in wearing a really short skirt and throws herself into his arms. Then, you meet Mrs. Rutledge and Lauren Bacall shines as a young urbanite living life on the edge. It continues with the girl at Acme Books, played by Dorothy Malone, who unpins her hair and closes the store to spend an afternoon drinking rye whiskey with Marlowe. Then there is the female taxi driver that Marlowe rides with who gives him her card and tells him to call her at night when she’s not working.

In the pivotal scene between Bogart and Bacall that was re-shot, the two of them are talking about having a relationship in terms of horse racing. She wonders just how far he will go and he replies that it depends on her. Is she willing “to go all the way?” This tightly wrapped sensuality, contrasted against the violence, the mystery of not knowing exactly what is happening in a plot that moves forward darkly, relentlessly creates a movie that almost impossible to stop watching. It moves that way right to the end, when we finally sense that Marlowe and Mrs. Rutledge will be able to consummate their smoldering desires.

Shot in beautiful black and white, the film has been restored to allow modern viewers to see it as released in 1946. The DVD also includes a documentary on the two versions of the movie, showing scenes that were cut and added, so viewers can see how much the film was improved by the re-shoot.

It is every bit as strong and engaging today as when it was first released and that is one reason it will always be considered a classic, perhaps the very finest example of film noir and one of the best movies ever made.