Counting Down the Greatest Crime Films of All-Time: #38

Otto Penzler ranks, analyzes, & celebrates the 106 greatest crime films of all-time. Catch up on the series and find new installments daily here.

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To Have and To Have Not (1944)

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TYPE OF FILM: Crime / Espionage

STUDIO: Warner Brothers—First National

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER: Jack L. Warner

PRODUCER: Howard Hawks

DIRECTOR: Howard Hawks

SCREENWRITERS: Jules Furthman and William Faulkner

SOURCE: To Have and Have Not, novel by Ernest Hemingway

RUNNING TIME: 100 minutes

PRINCIPAL PLAYERS:

Humphrey Bogart……………………………………………………………………Harry Morgan

Walter Brennan……………………………………………………………………………….Eddie

Lauren Bacall……………………………………………………..………Marie “Slim” Browning

Hoagy Carmichael…………………………………………………………………………..Cricket

Dan Seymour………………………………………………………………………Captain Renard

Marcel Dalio…………………………………………………………………………..…….Gerard

Dolores Moran……………………………………………………………………Helene de Brusac

Sheldon Leonard…………………………………………………………….……Lieutenant Coyo

Walter Molnar………………………………………………………………………Paul de Brusac

Walter Sande……………………………………………………………………………….Johnson

Aldo Nadi…………………………………………………………………..…Renard’s bodyguard

Paul Marion………………………………………………………………………………Beauclerc

Patricia Shay………………………………………………………………………..Mrs. Beauclerc

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DID YOU KNOW?

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Lauren Bacall made her screen debut in this film version of Ernest Hemingway’s novel. She had been working as a successful model and was spotted on the cover of Vogue magazine by director Howard Hawks’s wife, Nancy Raye Gross, a model whose nickname was “Slim.” Bacall, whose real name was Betty Jane Perske, modeled as Betty Bacal (first changed to Lauren and with an “L” added to the last by Hawks, who signed her to a personal services contract), was nicknamed “Slim” in To Have of Have Not. Within three weeks of meeting, she and Humphrey Bogart fell in love, somewhat complicated by the fact that he was married at the time. Bacall was only nineteen when they met and uncomfortable with the notion of getting involved with a married man, so Bogart got a divorce and they were married within the year. They went on to star together in The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947), and Key Largo (1948).

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THE STORY

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Harry Morgan is a professional fisherman who rents out his boat on Martinique, a French island in the Caribbean, in the days following the fall of France. He returns to his hotel after a disastrous trip with an American client who tries to cheat him out of his fee. Later, when he tries to collect, a stray shot in a Vichy raid on the hotel room kills the client, all of whose funds are impounded.

Morgan, broke and hoping to help Marie—the singer at the hotel with whom he has begun a flirtation—buy a plane ticket back to America, agrees to use his boat for a risky mission. He will smuggle a leader of the French underground and his wife, Paul and Helene de Brusac, onto an island.

With Eddie, an old rummy he takes care of, aboard, Morgan picks up the French couple and encounters a Vichy patrol boat; Brusac gets wounded. When he brings the passengers to the hotel, Morgan finds that Marie has not used her ticket but remained at the hotel, waiting for Morgan to return. Guessing that the Vichy police will suspect him of the run that brought the resistance leader to the island, Morgan and Marie get ready to flee when he learns that Eddie has been arrested. The police are confident that withholding liquor from him will force him to talk. Morgan suddenly turns violent when the police inform him of their plan, and he shoots one, beating two others until they call for Eddie’s release. Handing the remaining policemen over to the de Gaullists, Harry and Marie board his ship to leave the island.

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Although the story of To Have and Have Not was not an especially original one (more than one viewer has noticed its structural similarity to Casablanca), it became an enormous box-office hit, largely because of the extraordinary charisma of the two stars and the heat they generated whenever they were together on screen (to say nothing of the heat they generated when they were off screen).

In one of the more interesting little rumors that has entered cinematic mythology, it has been widely reported that the singing voice of Marie was not Lauren Bacall’s but that it was dubbed by Andy Williams, the popular singer of the 1960s and ‘70s. The fourteen-year-old singer had indeed been used several times to dub actress’s voices and was hired to do the same for this film. In her autobiography, Bacall maintained that she did her own signing. Williams had always maintained that his voice was used. In fact, Williams originally sang “How Little We Know,” and Hawks heard Bacall singing along. He was so impressed with Bacall’s singing that he reshot the scene, using her own singing voice throughout. She also sang her own song in The Big Sleep the following year.

To Have and Have Not was remade in 1950 as The Breaking Point, a first-rate film starring John Garfield and Patricia Neal. It was remade again in 1958 and shouldn’t have been.

The memorable, if understated, sexiness of Bacall was in part the result of her posture and carriage. Her head was always down, so when she looked at Bogart, even if she was standing and he was seated, her eyes were looking upward at him in a coy manner. This was not her natural bearing. As a very young woman taking on a starring role in her first film, she was so nervous that she couldn’t stop her head from shaking. In time, she learned that the only way she could stop it was to put her chin on her chest, which obviously kept her head down and eyes up.

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BEST LINE

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(Could it be anything else?) Marie “Slim” Browning is making an overtly flirtatious overture to Harry Morgan. “You know you don’t have to act with me, Steve,” she tells him. “You don’t have to say anything and you don’t have to do anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.”