A few years back I was wandering the AGHS library and I happened to see To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway. I guess I knew it was a book, but I had never really thought of the film as an adaptation of a Hemingway novel. It looked pretty short, so I picked it up. About eighty pages in I had to head to Wikipedia. This wasn't the movie as I remembered it... maybe this book just shared a title with the movie... but what a strange title to share. Sure enough, wiki had the answer: Director Howard Hawks and Ernest Hemingway were fishing buddies. One drunken even Hawks bet Hemingway that he could turn his worst book into a great film. Hemingway called his bluff and chose To Have and Have Not. Hawks immediately went to work enlisting a team of writers including Pulitzer prize winner William Faulkner. He scrapped nearly all of Hemingway's story, kept a vague semblance of the main character and the setting, added a love story, and possibly modeled it after the wildly successful Casablanca. It worked. Hawks crafted a super cool movie even though he may have cheated just a bit.
What struck me most about my most recent viewing is the absolute brilliance of Lauren Bacall. She was only nineteen years old during filming in her debut film and completely owns the screen. There may not be a more modestly seductive performance in all of cinema. This film doesn't hold up to Casablanca, but Bacall's performance molds it into something entirely different and more than worthy of your time.
My take from 2010 with a short ode to the late Bacall and my late Grandma Becton.
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