To Have and Have
Not, 1945
DIRECTOR... Howard Hawks
STARRING... Humphrey Bogart,
Walter Brennan, Lauren Bacall, Delores Moran, Hoagy Carmichael,
Walter Molnar, Sheldon Leonard, Marcel Dalio, Walter Sande, Dan
Seymour...
~~~~~~~~~~
Whats this? Bogie's a fisherman, please, say it ain't so!
During the war Harry Morgan ''BOGART'' owns a boat on the island of Martinique and takes tourists out fishing... His present client Johnson ''WALTER SANDE'', tries to stiff him and gets killed by a stray bullet just as Harry is relieving him of his cash... The Vichy autorities confiscate the money leaving Harry flat broke... Now into the picture comes slinky Marie ''LAUREN BACALL'' and she's broke too but is trying to get to the States...
Harry immediately falls for Marie and wants to help her leave the island... He had been offered money earlier by Gerard ''MARCEL DALIO'' the innkeeper to smuggle an underground agent onto the island and refused but now decides to take on the challenge to get the much needed cash... Getting the money up front, he gives Marie the price of a plane ticket and tells her to leave the island on the next flight out and she agrees... He then leaves on his dangerous mission with his drunken sidekick Eddie ''WALTER BRENNAN'' at his side...
Harry picks up the passengers, Paul and Helene de Brusac ''''WALTER MOLNAR and DELORES MORAN'', but encounters a Vichy patrol boat while returning to the island and gets the boat and his male passenger all shot up... Harry makes it to shore and delivers his damaged human cargo to Gerard only to find Marie singing with piano player Cricket ''HOAGY CARMICHAEL''... She explains to Harry that she didn't want to desert him so she took the job as singer... Harry tells her to pack up because they are now both going to have to leave very quickly, but Harry can't find Eddie... The Vichy know it was Harry's boat that their patrol had the encounter with so they have detained Eddie... First they ply him with booze to get him to talk but that doesn't work... By the time Harry tracks him down the Vichy have decided to hold the booze back from him which Harry decides is a death warrant...
Later in his hotel room Harry
pulls a gun on the Vichy policemen, and after a bit of a pistol
whipping, forces Captain Renard ''DAN SEYMOUR'' into phoning the
police station and having Eddie released... He hands the Vichy over
to the underground and asks Gerard not to kill them, but of course
they'll have to kill them since they'll now know who's in the
underground... Harry, Marie and Eddie make their way out of the hotel
and presumably to the Free World...
~~~~~~~~~~
Even though this film is
pretty much a Casablanca clone it is different enough to make it a
great picture... This was Lauren Bacall's first screen appearance and
her and Bogie were not only an item on the screen but off screen
too... She was soon to become Bogart's fourth and final
wife...