To Have and Have Not
"You must do the thinking for both of us" this is not. No man can do any thinking in the presence of this 19 year old first time actress, especially not Bogey, who seems to be in awe of Howard Hawks' discovery.
This is the moment when Howard Hawks' female leads changed from the feisty fast talking banterers of Bringing up Baby and His Girl Friday to the laser-eyed man-killers of Red River and Rio Bravo, trying their best to match Bacall who is unmatchable. Joanne Dru is no Angie Dickenson and Angie Dickenson, even with feathers, can't match Lauren Bacall with a cigarette. To Have and Have Not is Warner's Casablanca copycat without the story, though cowritten by William Faulkner, but if I had seen it earlier I would have known that I recently met the single greatest living female American movie legend. And my awe would have been more appropriately like Bogart's.
posted by Mike @ 3:40 PM
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2 Comments:
From Bogdanovich's interview with Hawks in Who the Devil Made It:
"I told Hemingway I could make a picture out of his worst book and he said, rather grumpily, 'What's my worst book?' I said, 'That bunch of junk called To Have and Have Not."
The making-of doc on the dvd says that Hawks was jealous of Bogey and Bacall's offscreen romance, because he was hoping to sleep with his new discovery himself (in spite of the fact that Bacall was actually his wife's discovery). When that didn't play out the way he wanted it to, he slept with a couple of other female cast members instead.
Bogey and Bacall meanwhile were openly affectionate on set, and all the cast and crew members covered for Bogey when his wife would visit the set. Just a nice healthy relationship between a 19 year old and a 45 year old with a no-good wife getting in the way. Ah, the good old days.
Or is today the good old days? When it's perfectly legit for a making-of doc to only concern itself with the sex lives of the film's principals and treat the actual film incidentally.
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