23 Aug To Have and Have Not
To Have and Have Not, WWII Movie starring Bogart and Bacall
(1944) During the summer of 1940 a professional fisherman named Harry Morgan takes wealthy clients out on his boat out into the Caribbean from the island of Martinique. At his hotel is another guest, an American whose nickname is “Slim.”
More entertaining than the story is what was happening behind the scenes … most of this I learned from the Turner Classic Movies articles.
First of all, the story is loosely based on the novel of the same name by Ernest Hemingway. He and famous Hollywood director Howard Hawks were fishing buddies. On one of their trips, Hawks was trying to convince his friend to write screenplays and bragged to Hemingway that he could make a good movie from his worst novel, To Have and Have Not.
(While I was watching the movie, I wondered about the title of it which didn’t seem to fit at all. Now I get it. It was Hemingway’s title.)
The script was co-written by the famous American author William Faulkner. Why? He needed the money, of course.
The venue for the film was moved out of Cuba and the Florida Keys. President Roosevelt’s administration objected because the original storyline included violence and corruption in Cuba and the Office of Inter-American Affairs did not want to show our neighbor in such a way.
So the setting was moved to Martinique, a French island in the Caribbean Sea. After the fall of France, Martinique was under Vichy government control, controlled by the Nazis.
The male lead was Humphrey Bogart. Two years before he had starred in the (still) wildly popular Casablanca. With another exotic setting (Martinique) under Vichy rule, this movie was destined to have similarities.
Director Howard Hawk’s wife at the time was fashion icon Nancy “Slim Keith.” By the time she married Hawks, she had already appeared on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar. After she saw 18-year-old model Lauren Bacall on the cover of Harper’s in 1943 she encouraged her husband to give her a screen test. The rest is history.
By the way, when Nancy Hawks left her philandering husband she moved to Havana to stay with Ernest Hemingway. There she met her next husband, producer Leland Hayward. That lasted until he left her for Pamela Churchill, the socialist whose first husband had been Raymond, the son of Winston.
Hard to keep all that straight.
In To Have and to Hold, her very first movie, Bacall takes on Mrs. Hawks’ nickname “Slim.” She and Humphrey Bogart hit it off, and they were married by 1945 (his 4th, her 1st.) They would stay together until his death from cancer in 1957.
The most unforgettable scene in the movie is this one when “Slim” teaches Bogart how to whistle. In Wikipedia, I read that buried with Bogart in a small gold whistle which he gave to Bacall before they married. He had it inscribed “If you want anything, just whistle.”
Okay, back to the movie. As in Casablanca, there was a prominent piano player. Hoagy Carmichael played the part of Cricket, who accompanied Ms. Bacall in several sultry pieces and sang some himself. Dan Seymour is Captain Renard, a similar role to the one he played in the previous famous film.
Bogart is convinced to smuggle a French Resistance hero and his wife (sound familiar?) onto Martinique. In the end, it all comes together somehow but this time Bogie gets the girl.
To Have and Have Not at amazon.com
Joy
Posted at 12:31h, 24 Augustthe whistle scene was the best:>) Pamela Churchill had affairs with lots of people , Averell Harriman (whom, much later, she married) and Edward R. Murrow. The American ambassador to England, John Gilbert Winant, had an affair with Sarah Churchill, Winston ‘s daughter. Quite a lot of interconnections in that close group during the Blitz and after in WW2.
Pat
Posted at 14:23h, 24 AugustThanks, it’s fun to delve into what was happening “behind the scenes.”
Joy
Posted at 12:38h, 25 AugustThere’s a great book on the subject and more Citizens of London by Lynne Olson. http://www.lynneolson.com/citizens_of_london.htm From her online blurb:
In her latest book, Lynne Olson, author of the highly acclaimed Troublesome Young Men, focuses once again on Britain in World War II, this time from an American perspective. Citizens of London is the engrossing behind-the-scenes story of how the United States and Britain forged their crucial wartime alliance, as seen from the viewpoint of three key American players in London. Drawing from a wide variety of primary sources, Olson depicts the personal journeys of these men, who, determined to save Britain from Hitler, helped convince a cautious Franklin Roosevelt and reluctant American public to back the British at a critical time.
The three – Edward R. Murrow, the handsome, chain-smoking head of CBS News in Europe; Averell Harriman, the hard-driving millionaire who ran FDR’s Lend-Lease program in London; and John Gilbert Winant, the shy, idealistic U.S. ambassador to Britain – formed close ties with Winston Churchill and were drawn into Churchill’s official and family circles. So intense were their relationships with the Churchills that all of them were involved romantically with members of the prime minister’s family: Harriman and Murrow with Churchill’s daughter-in-law, Pamela, and Winant with his favorite daughter, Sarah.