Hawks Marathon: To Have and Have Not (1944)

To Have and Have Not occupies a weird space for me.  My brain formed an expectation of what the movie was based off... now that I think about it, very little.  Pretty much the only thing I knew about this movie was that Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall had a steamy romance while it was filming mirroring the romance in the movie.

And in a way, that is what happens.  Bogart's character meets Bacall's characters and they have a battle of wits of sorts, mostly because that was pretty much the only way to build sexual tension in the 1940s without violating the Production Code.

Except that the movie is barely about the romance or budding romance as it were.  A lot of it is about the development of Harry Morgan from an apolitical guy uninterested in fighting to a man willing to fight for the resistance.  Hawks claims that he wasn't really interested in being political and the focus of the movie was the relationship.

Whatever his intentions, that doesn't really come across.  I mean sure the relationship is not an unimportant part of the movie or anything, but it really seems like the majority of the plot is about Bogart's progression as a character.  To me anyway. 

I find the development of To Have and Have Not pretty fascinating.  It was made in the middle of World War II about a period of time before the Americans joined the war based on a book that had nothing to do with World War II.  

First off, it is astounding how many movies set or about World War II were made while World War II was happening.  Hollywood moved much, much quicker back in the day.  Americans weren't involved in World War II for that long, less than four years.  

To Have and Have Not was based on a book by Ernest Hemingway.  Except that it was purposefully made by Hawks because he told Hemingway that he could make a good movie out of Hemingway's worst book, which he believed was To Have and Have Not.  The original story was set in Cuba, but featured an unfavorable portrayal of the Cuban government which violated the Good Neighbor policy.

William Faulkner was hired to rewrite the initial screenplay and changed the setting to France, and during World War II.  So to say the movie deviates from the novel would be an understatement.  So Hemingway wrote the novel, Jules Furthman wrote the original draft, and Faulkner wrote the finished draft, making this possibly the greatest collection of writers to contribute to a movie ever.

Hawks wanted to model the success of Casablanca by basically aping it.  The movie got mixed reviews with the negative ones saying it was a rip-off of Casablanca.  Which was essentially Hawks' intention.  I haven't seen Casablanca in a long, long time, so I can't really comment on this.  Parts of it certainly reminded me of Casablanca, but it didn't feel like I was watching the same movie thankfully.  But again, I don't have a great memory of Casablanca (which I did love when I did watch it)

The acting is all great.  That's to be expected of course.  I'm not entirely sure how old Bacall was supposed to be in this movie, but she definitely plays older.  She was 19 at the time of filming which blows my mind.  It's no surprise Bogart is good since he was immediately cast.  Hell, his character was probably written with him in mind.  And Walter Brennan shows up yet again in a Hawks production and there's a reason he kept getting cast by Hawks.

To Have and Have Not is one of those films that amazes me in how it was ever good.  Only 36 pages of the script were written when filming began, so Faulkner had to re-write nearly the entire movie on the fly.  Hawks would change some of the dialogue the day of filming.  I don't know it just always shocks me when movies are made with the plan being "it'll get done, don't worry about it right now."

Maybe one day I'll do a Casablanca/To Have and Have Not watch back-to-back to see just how similar the movies feel, but for now I'll just appreciate To Have and Have Not as its own movie.  I think I just really like the resistance sideplot/mainplot with the romance being the "real" story.  I mean they certainly make enough of the same movies, it's not like the Casablanca plot is repeated ad nauseam and it is a genuinely great setting for a movie. 

3.5/4 stars

Sabrina (1954): The Titans of Hollywood

Well this movie is what happens when you have an All-Star cast in a extremely classic story.  Poor girl goes unrecognized by rich guy, poor girl changes so she looks rich, rich guy notices her, and then she falls in love with her true love.  This has a slight trick in that the "true love" is only going out with her so she will get over the rich guy at first.

Anyway, all's that needs to be said in order to be convinced to watch this movie is: Humphrey Bogart, Audrey Hepburn, William Holden, Billy Wilder.  One of the greatest directors ever with AFI's #1 star of all-time, Audrey Hepburn is certainly one of the icons of film, and then William Holden is sort of underrated normally, much less amidst the other three.

I don't think Audrey Hepburn could have pulled this off at any other time in her career.  This was basically her breakout role, and I'm as surprised as anyone that her poor girl who doesn't get noticed essentially works.  Who knew?  (I think a lot of it is that the clothes she wears as the chauffeur's daughter are really unflattering.

And I suppose I can't be the only one who's sort of creeped out by the age difference between Hepburn and Bogart, am I?  I mean Bogart was 54 and at best, he looked like he was approaching 50.  Hepburn was 23 and she looked even younger.  Different time, and it's not that distracting to the movie, but it's still sort of odd.  (Though Bogart did marry a 20-year-old Lauren Bacall about 10 years earlier)

Here's yet another film that uses a well-worn romantic comedy trope and succeeds in spite of it, possibly because it did it first, but also because of the talent.  And it just doesn't feel well-worn when you watch it like newer movies that use it would.  Not much to say, except that it's a pretty enjoyable film.

3.5/4 stars