It was also One of Howard Hawk's Worst Movies As Well...

... Except for Hoagy Carmichael! 

Unfortunately, Lauren Bacall was always a smug, Democrat Party shill for the rest of her life. m/r

To Have and Have Not

by Mark Steyn  Mark at the Movies  September 16, 2017

Last weekend Hurricane Irma clobbered Florida, and we offered by way of aural consolation a special edition of our Song of the Week dedicated to "Songs in the Keys of Florida". It included this 1980s hit by Bertie Higgins:

We had it all
Just like Bogie and Bacall
Starring in our own Late Late Show
Sailing away to Key Largo...

Which made me think maybe it's time for Key Largo as our Saturday-night movie date. And then I thought some more and decided that the Bogie/Bacall film I really liked from that neck of the woods, or seas, was set in another patch of Irma-devastated real estate. So we're going to do what Howard Hawks did when he bought the rights to Ernest Hemingway's original novel of To Have and Have Not: Hawks relocated the story from Key West to Martinique, and likewise we're swapping Key Largo for Martinique, where we have at least a couple of readers, whom I hope are holding up okay. And, if you're one of our Keys readers, well, Humphrey Bogart's fishing boat in this film retaines its Florida origins: the Queen Conch, registered in Key West.

It started as a dare. Howard Hawks bet Hemingway that he could make a picture of his worst book. Hemingway said: "What's my worst book?" Hawks answered: "That bunch of junk called To Have and Have Not." "I needed the money," pleaded Hemingway, before declaring that nobody could make a decent picture out of it. So Hawks called in various old hands to work on the script, including Hemingway's longtime novelist rival and now penniless loser William Faulkner. And by the time it opened in late 1944 Hemingway's story had turned into Casablanca sideways: This time not French North Africa but the French West Indies; not Claude Rains as the cynical Capitaine Renault, but Dan Seymour as the cynical Capitaine Renard; not Mr and Mrs Victor Laszlo as the famed Resistance figures who need to be spirited out of Casablanca, but M et Mme Paul de Bursac as the famed Resistance figures who need to be spirited out of Fort-de-France; not Rick's Café but the Marquis hotel, where sitting at the piano is not Sam but Cricket. And through it all there's Bogart, playing the world-weary politically indifferent American who remains studiously neutral before being forced to choose sides.

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