Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogard fall in love onscreen and off in TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT
TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT (Howard Hawks, 1944)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Saturday, September 7, free with museum admission, 2:00
Series runs September 7 – November 10
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us
Bogie and Bacall’s first film together is a ripping WWII yarn liberally adapted from the Ernest Hemingway novel by Hemingway, director and producer Howard Hawks, longtime screenwriter Jules Furthman, and future Pulitzer Prize winner William Faulkner. In To Have and Have Not, Humphrey Bogart stars as Captain Steve Morgan, a man’s man who owns a fishing boat in Martinique, which is under Vichy rule. Morgan is determined to avoid getting involved in the war and its complex politics, but when hotel owner Frenchy (Marcel Dalio) offers him some much-needed cash in exchange for making a secret middle-of-the-night ocean pickup of French Resistance fighter Paul de Bursac (Walter Surovy) and his wife, Helene (Dolores Moran), Morgan relents, bringing along his perpetually drunk sidekick, Eddy (Walter Brennan). Morgan is being closely watched by police captain Renard (Dan Seymour) and his small gangster-like crew, but he decides this time to take the risk and heads out to sea. Meanwhile, he is spending more and more time with the mysterious young woman across the hall, Marie “Slim” Browning (Lauren Bacall), who can be both tender and alluring and as tough as nails. If a lot of this sounds like Casablanca, that’s because it is, with Warner Bros. trying to repeat the success of their Oscar-winning hit. The similarities are many, from Morgan’s reluctance to get involved helping an important married couple in the Resistance movement to his potential romance with a beautiful blonde, from Vichy police captains named Renard and Renault to actors such as Seymour and Dalio, who appear in both pictures, and the inclusion of a piano player serenading the locals (Dooley Wilson in Casablanca, Hoagy Carmichael in To Have and Have Not.)
Marie Browning (Lauren Bacall), Frenchy (Marcel Dalio), and Steve Morgan (Humphrey Bogart) get immersed in a dangerous situation in Vichy-run Martinique in Hawks classic
It is perhaps the two films’ parallelism that prevented To Have and Have Not from receiving even a single Oscar nomination, especially considering Bacall’s spectacular debut, a bold, confident performance filled with nuance, whether she’s singing with Carmichael, lifting a bar patron’s wallet, lighting a cigarette with Bogart (with whom she started a long romance), or teaching him to whistle. Even with the Casablanca comparisons, To Have and Have Not works on its own, a thrillingly entertaining noir that also features wonderful cinematography by Sidney Hickox, especially one marvelous scene that casts ominous shadows from louvered blinds across Bogie and Bacall. To Have and Have Not is screening September 7 at the Museum of the Moving Image, kicking off the two-month series “The Complete Howard Hawks,” comprising more than three dozen works by the legendary Hollywood director and producer who conquered multiple genres; the films range from the famous (Rio Bravo, The Big Sleep, Scarface, Bringing Up Baby, Red River, Ball of Fire, Sergeant York, His Girl Friday, The Thing from Another World, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) to the more obscure, including his silent films (Trent’s Last Case, Fig Leaves, A Girl in Every Port, Fazil).