“To Have and Have Not” is a rather spiritless Bogart movie that shows him as a man named Harry Morgan whose love for minding his own business and having the fewest possible connections with society is overthrown first by a woman named Marie (Lauren Bacall) and then by the cause for which the de Gaullists are fighting. His turnabout in both cases isn’t very convincing or exciting though his love affair, which has been advertised as the sex bout to top all sex bouts, has some moments of likable slapstick humor. It consists mainly of verbal grappling that sounds as if the participants—Harry, who understandably calls Marie “Slim,” and Marie, who not understandably calls Harry “Steve”—were competing for the chance to fill Oscar Levant’s place on Information Please. The love-making is taken further out of the realm of love by Miss Bacall’s exaggerated idea of what seductiveness should look like and by her unsure grounding in the art of Katharine Hepburn. The love affair does present the uncommon movie fact of a woman wooing the man, doing it very bawdily, and not getting her knuckles wrapped for it later. But the virtue of this honesty is then more than counterbalanced by the fact that situation and characters are pulled all out of shape, and the writing cheapened, not to illuminate the relationship but to throw the audience some speck-sized erotic thrills. This all takes place on Martinique, just after the fall of France, where Morgan runs a For Hire cabin cruiser, and the film ends with his setting out to rescue a famous de Gaullist from Devil’s Island.
I think, though, that the picture has some worthwhile things in it and much entertainment that is easy to take, largely because it presents Humphrey Bogart and his ability to fill a role with a richer response, effect and conviction than a movie role usually warrants. Some of its belligerent dialogue (Bogart’s, and that of a character named Johnson, who appears only at the beginning of the picture and is well played, in the Bogart manner, by Walter Sande) is good in a realistic way, and sounds as if it could have been thought up by the characters. Incidents like the first meeting between Morgan and Johnson realize the small animosities and aggressions that ride on every word of some casual conversations. A Howard Hawks film is apt to be very jittery, and this one achieves questionable vitality by not remaining long on any one of a superabundance of scenes. The movie takes place, as do many Bogart films, in a night club, around a piano player who sings and plays tunes from Lucky Strike’s All Time Hit Parade with what is supposed to be a genuine jazz quality. Hoagy Carmichael is this piano player, and though both his singing and the atmosphere are overdesigned, he is one of the best popular-song writers and generally worth watching in this picture.
“To Have and Have Not” is nevertheless half-hearted and slight movie-making, even though one of its screen authors is William Faulkner, its director, Hawks, one of the best for contriving to avoid dull movies, its original novel by Hemingway, and its chief actor, Humphrey Bogart, who seems to me to make a better Hemingway hero than Gary Cooper ever has. It has, for one thing, too many dominant concerns to handle. One of them, which shows the fight on Martinique between the de Gaullists and the Vichyites and the hero’s part in that fight, seems completely tacked on. Another, and its most adequately realized one, is its very professional portrait of the traditional Bogart personality. The character is one of the more complicated ones that the movies have tackled, and this picture notes, in an academic, careful way, its main aspects: that he is never weak, affectionate, non-combustible, ineffective, deceitful, cowardly, in need of help, advice or anything else, that he is a man of strong feeling which he rigorously subdues out of his great sense of how to get along in the world. But another thing this film attempts to do is wholly unbelievable and irritating: it tries to change this character from the most determined kind of asocial man into a French patriot. “To Have and Have Not” also has its love bout to exploit, along with all kinds of odds and ends that proved popular in earlier Bogart films, and the result is a picture that has no more structure or unified effect than a string of familiar but unrelated beads.
October 23, 1944