To Have and Have Not (film, 1944) starring Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and Walter Brennan

American actor Humphrey Bogart plays Harry Morgan, a fishing-boat captain on the island of Martinique in 1940. He wants to stay out of the war. A young American drifter and a pair of French Resistance fighters draw him into it.

The drifter was played by Lauren Bacall, a nineteen-year-old model in her first film. During the shoot, she and Humphrey Bogart fell in love. Their romance is on the screen in every scene they share.

Plot

Summer, 1940. France has fallen to Germany, and the French island of Martinique is ruled by the Vichy government. In the harbor of Fort-de-France, Harry Morgan hires out his fishing boat, the Queen Conch, to tourists.

His mate is Eddie, an old friend who drinks too much. Eddie greets people with a strange question: "Was you ever bit by a dead bee?"

Gérard, the owner of Harry Morgan's hotel, is secretly working with the Free French. He asks Harry Morgan to use his boat to smuggle two members of the Resistance onto the island. Harry Morgan refuses. He does not take sides.

That night, in the hotel, Harry Morgan meets a young American woman. She is Marie Browning, a drifter with no money and no way home. He calls her Slim. She calls him Steve.

Slim picks the pocket of Johnson, an American tourist who owes Harry Morgan money for a fishing trip. Harry Morgan takes the wallet from her. He gives it back, and makes Johnson promise to pay what he owes.

Then the police raid the hotel bar, hunting Resistance men. In the shooting, a stray bullet kills Johnson before he pays.

Now Harry Morgan is broke. He changes his mind and agrees to carry the two Resistance fighters, Paul de Bursac and his wife, Hélène de Bursac, from a small island to Martinique.

Between Harry Morgan and Slim, something has begun. They trade dry, teasing lines, and neither one admits to more.

Slim comes to his room one evening. Before she leaves, she tells him: "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."

Harry Morgan buys Slim a ticket home. Then he takes the boat out at night to fetch the de Bursacs.

On the way back, a patrol boat fires on them. Paul de Bursac is wounded in the shoulder. Harry Morgan gets the couple safely ashore.

Back at the hotel, Slim is waiting. She has not used the ticket. She has decided to stay.

The de Bursacs hide in the hotel. Harry Morgan takes the bullet out of Paul de Bursac's shoulder himself.

The de Bursacs have a larger mission. They have come to free a man held on Devil's Island, the French prison colony. They ask Harry Morgan to help. He says no.

Then the police arrest Eddie. They keep him away from drink until he is ready to talk.

Harry Morgan has had enough. He turns the tables on the police in the hotel. At gunpoint, Captain Renard, the police chief, is forced to free Eddie and to sign passes for the harbor.

Harry Morgan, Eddie and Slim walk out of the hotel together, ready to sail. Now Harry Morgan has chosen a side.

Cast

• Humphrey Bogart as Harry "Steve" Morgan

  

• Walter Brennan as Eddie

  

• Lauren Bacall as Marie "Slim" Browning
• Dolores Moran as Hélène de Bursac

  

• Hoagy Carmichael as Cricket

• Sheldon Leonard as Lieutenant Coyo
• Walter Surovy as Paul de Bursac
• Marcel Dalio as Gérard, known as Frenchy
• Walter Sande as Johnson
• Dan Seymour as Captain Renard

Humphrey Bogart was forty-four and one of the biggest stars at Warner Bros. He was married to his third wife, American actress Mayo Methot.

Lauren Bacall was nineteen. A year earlier she had been on the cover of Harper's Bazaar. The American socialite Nancy "Slim" Keith, then married to Howard Hawks, saw the cover and urged her husband to test the girl.

Her character took its nickname from Slim Hawks. Harry Morgan's nickname, Steve, was the name Slim used for her husband.

In her screen test, she was so nervous that her head and hands shook. She pressed her chin down to keep still and looked up with her eyes. That pose became The Look, her trademark for life.

The whistle scene was written only for her test. But the Canadian-born American studio head Jack L. Warner saw it and told Howard Hawks to put it in the film.

Her first words in the film are a simple question: "Anybody got a match?"

Lauren Bacall sang her own songs in the film. For years, a story claimed that a teenage Andy Williams, later the American singer, had dubbed her voice. Both Lauren Bacall and Howard Hawks said it was not true. Andy Williams had only been tested.

On set, Humphrey Bogart called her "Baby." A few weeks into shooting, they were in love.

Howard Hawks saw it on screen and gave her a bigger part. That meant a smaller part for American actress Dolores Moran, who had been cast as the other woman, Hélène de Bursac.

But Howard Hawks disapproved of the affair. Near the end of filming, he told Lauren Bacall that Humphrey Bogart did not love her. He threatened to send her to Monogram Pictures, a studio for cheap films.

Lauren Bacall told Humphrey Bogart, who was furious. Their quarrel with the director held up the production for about two weeks.

American actor Walter Brennan plays Eddie, the loyal drunk with the dead bee. Warner Bros. borrowed him from American producer Samuel Goldwyn for $2,500 a week.

American songwriter Hoagy Carmichael, a friend of Howard Hawks, plays Cricket, the hotel's piano player. He performs his own songs.

French actor Marcel Dalio plays Gérard, the hotel owner. A year earlier he had played a croupier in Casablanca (film, 1942), with Humphrey Bogart.

Production

The film began with a bet. Howard Hawks was on a fishing trip with Ernest Hemingway, who did not want to write for Hollywood. Howard Hawks told him he could make a film out of Ernest Hemingway's worst story.

The worst story, he said, was To Have and Have Not (novel, 1937). Howard Hawks later called the book "a bunch of junk."

Ernest Hemingway had sold the film rights in 1939 to the company of American tycoon Howard Hughes. Howard Hawks bought them in 1943 and sold them on to Warner Bros. at a profit. He earned about ten times what Ernest Hemingway had made. The writer is said to have stopped speaking to him for three months.

The two men agreed that the film would not follow the book. It would tell how Harry Morgan met his woman, Marie. Howard Hawks also disliked stories about losers. In the novel Harry Morgan dies. In the film he lives.

American screenwriter Jules Furthman wrote the first script. He suggested that Marie be shaped in the mold of German-born actress Marlene Dietrich.

Then, in February 1944, the American novelist William Faulkner joined the film and became its main writer. It is the only film whose story was worked on by two future winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The novel was set in Cuba and Key West. But the American government's Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs objected. It did not want Cuba shown as corrupt and violent, at a time when the United States was courting its neighbors.

So the story moved to Martinique under the Vichy government. William Faulkner is said to have suggested the change.

The censors of the Production Code found about three dozen problems in the script. William Faulkner solved some of them by putting all the characters in one hotel, with Harry Morgan and Slim in rooms across the hall from each other.

Filming began on 29 February 1944, with only thirty-six pages of script finished. Scenes were often written just three days before they were shot. Shooting ended on 10 May 1944, after sixty-two days.

Howard Hawks and Humphrey Bogart kept changing lines on set, to make the film sexier and funnier. One of Slim's best lines, "I'm hard to get, Steve. All you have to do is ask me," came from an earlier Howard Hawks film, Only Angels Have Wings (film, 1939).

Some scenes were filmed on the California coast, at Balboa and Laguna Beach. A Frenchman who had served with the army in Martinique advised the crew.

American cinematographer Sidney Hickox photographed the film in black and white. The gowns were by Milo Anderson, a Warner Bros. designer, and the makeup by American makeup artist Perc Westmore.

The songs came from Hoagy Carmichael. With American lyricist Johnny Mercer he wrote "How Little We Know," which Lauren Bacall sings at the piano. He also sings "Hong Kong Blues" and "Am I Blue?" German-born American composer Franz Waxman wrote the score.

Release/Reception

The film had its premiere in New York on 11 October 1944. Its general American release followed on 20 January 1945.

It cost about $1.68 million and earned about $5.3 million worldwide. It was one of the ten most successful films of 1944 in America.

Many critics compared it to Casablanca (film, 1942). Time magazine called it a "tinny romantic melodrama which millions of cinemaddicts have been waiting for ever since Casablanca."

Most eyes were on the newcomer. Variety wrote of Lauren Bacall: "She can slink, brother, and no fooling!"

Bosley Crowther of The New York Times preferred the star: "For Mr. Bogart is best when his nature is permitted to smolder in the gloom."

American critic James Agee, writing in The Nation, found that "the best of the picture has no plot at all, but is a leisurely series of mating duels."

Years later, American critic Pauline Kael wrote: "The refreshingly, daringly sexy Bacall burst through the conventions of the era."

Humphrey Bogart won the National Board of Review award for best actor.

The film started a partnership. Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall made three more films together: The Big Sleep (film, 1946), Dark Passage (film, 1947) and Key Largo (film, 1948).

In 1946 they played Harry Morgan and Slim again, on the Lux Radio Theatre. The same year, the Warner Bros. cartoon Bacall to Arms (short film, 1946) made fun of the film.

The novel was filmed twice more, closer to Ernest Hemingway's story. Hungarian-born American director Michael Curtiz made The Breaking Point (film, 1950). American director Don Siegel made The Gun Runners (film, 1958).

In 2005, the American Film Institute ranked the whistle line thirty-fourth among the greatest quotes in American film.

Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall married in 1945. Before the wedding, he gave her a charm bracelet with a small gold whistle. It was engraved: "If you want anything, just whistle."

When he died in 1957, the little gold whistle went with him.

Where to watch To Have and Have Not online

Austria: available to rent or buy as Haben und Nichthaben on Amazon Video, Apple TV and the maxdome Store.

Availability varies by subscription plan and can change over time.