***“You Know How To Whistle, Don’t You?”-Lauren Bacall And Humphrey Bogart’s To Have And Have Not

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

To Have And Have Not, starring Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, Walter Brennan, Hoagy Carmichael, directed by Howard Hawks, screenplay by William Faulkner, based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway, 1944-Take Two  

The recent passing away of the actress Lauren Bacall (Summer, 2014) prompted me to think about watching (again) her very first movie with her paramour met on the film then, Humphrey Bogart, the now classic To Have and Have Not. And so I did and reminded myself how that film has always been at the top of my list for the greatest films that I have seen. And why not. Look at the pedigree. Based on a novel by Ernest Hemingway, although in the end quite loosely for I do not believe a fox like Marie, the role Ms. Bacall plays in the film, would have stayed in the same room as the novel’s Captain Morgan for a minute. Moreover rather than being a guy who in the end tried to work on the same street as the angels the book’s Captain had no such lofty notions. Like the Hemingway short story The Killers that was also made into a film with Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner the screenwriters, directors, and producers played loose and free with the story line. Based on a screenplay at least in part written by William Faulkner who had a feel for such dialogue (and who I believe did not like Hemingway and maybe it was mutual and might go a long way toward explaining how Hemingway’s  grizzly sea saga out of cheap street turned into a hot romance-driven vehicle.

How about some musical interludes played by the great popular Midwestern-born composer (Stardust, How Little We Know), Hoagy Carmichael, as the worldly and world wary piano player, Cricket, at the bar of the hotel where Marie and Captain Morgan (Bogie’s role and Steve before long, before she gets her hooks into him, gets them in deep, after about two minutes and a couple of off-hand come hither looks his way) play out their dance. Not only does Hoagy provide the musical interludes in the club but along the way apparently Marie in her vaguely acknowledged checkered background which included some tough times also could sing for her supper and snags Steve with that look, that slight smile that had him thinking bedroom thoughts (or maybe it was me thinking that is what Steve should have been thinking) singing How Little We Know. Hell, had every guy in the room thinking those bedroom thoughts, even the guys lined up at the bar trying to drown their sorrows. Add in a very good performance by Walter Brennan as Eddie, a drunk who at one time could have navigated with the best of them but rum got the better of him like many a sea-faring man, who thinks he is watching out for the good captain. Directed as well by the well-regarded Howard Hawks who had even then a long list of film credits next to his name and who seems to have just let Lauren and Bogie go through their paces once the passion thermometer heats up the screen.    

But all of that credit acknowledgement is so much eye-wash for what makes this film great is the chemistry between Marie and Steve. Chemistry I have mentioned elsewhere in another review of a Bacall-Bogart collaboration, The Big Sleep, producing some of the sexiest scenes that two people can make with their clothes on. (Nudity would detract enormously from this mating ritual. Beside, unlike in pre-code 1930s Hollywood, no such thing would occur before the screen. Christ they were by then afraid to show assumed nudity scenes behind a shower curtain and usually gave married couples twin beds. Jesus.)              

Even the plotline pales before the dance these two put on. Frankly some of the story seems a bit of a rehash of the earlier Bogart vehicle (with Ingrid Bergman), Casablanca, where a recalcitrant world weary, jaded Rick, owner of Rick’s American Café and recovering from a lost love affair gets involved with the Free French (the good guy against the damn Vichy) as well. (Although working through his resume he had fought in Spain as a premature anti-fascist, always a plus in my book for good deeds.) Here day sports fishing boat Captain Morgan walks into the same kind of local political mess except in French Martinique (Vichy-controlled) rather than French Morocco (also Vichy-controlled). But not before shedding his doubts about taking such risks, and of course when Marie enters the scene by coyly asking him for a match for her cigarette you know those fears will fall by the wayside. (By the way it seems that they, everybody from the breakfast table to the smoke-filled night clubs are lighting cigarettes every two seconds reminding me of how much smoking went on then in the movies, and in life including mine.)

See Steve is strictly hand to mouth on this day fishing trip business depending on rich American tourists and sport’s fisherman to make his daily bread. (By the way Captain Morgan to you guys who don’t know him like those bad guy Vichy officials trying to round up once and for all those damn Gaullist Free French who interrogate Steve and Marie after some gun-play at the club when Free French agents try to hire Steve’s boat to help get a major resistance leader off Devil’s Island (see I told you the plot- line was familiar, shades of getting Victor Lazlo out of Casablanca in the film by the same name).  Right when Marie and Steve meet after she takes a room across from him in the in hotel after coming in by plane from parts unknown with funds from unknown sources (but the modern reader can guess) he has no dough having been stiffed by some goof fisherman (and a guy Marie clipped a wallet from which started the official dance between them down in the club). Once Marie tells her story though and how she hold up when the chips are down (at the police station where they are questioned by those local gestapo-types and she is slapped and later when she performs nurse duties without flinching or losing her cool under pressure) gets to him in the end.

Naturally once Steve moves off the dime he is totally committed to seeing that reckless resistance fighter sent to get the leader off Devils’ Island who got nicked the first time he tried gets to finish the job he was sent to that outpost to do. Still World War II big events, the world going up in flames, everybody forced one way or the other to take sides, and the troubles of a couple of lovers aside like I say all that is window-dressing for the moves Marie and Steve put on each other. From that first tossed matchbook when Marie need a match and Steve obliges with a double-take and she flaunts that wicked smile which speaks of adventures to come, come under satin sheets of the mind, to various “come hither” scenes to the ‘you know how to whistles scene” to her flopping down on his lap on their first kiss exchange to her seductively singing with Cricket to that shimmy she puts on as they walk out the door of the bar off to see what the future brings, Eddie trailing behind carrying her bags-together. Thanks Bogie-Thanks Lauren-RIP