For vintage movie lovers, and World War II buffs alike, the 1942 film, “Casablanca,” is a landmark movie. Apparently, the studio chiefs of wartime Hollywood thought so too, because in 1944 they made another film, titled “To Have and Have Not,” which mirrored it to a surprising degree. Set in the Caribbean, “To Have and Have Not” stars the same lead as in “Casablanca,” Humphrey Bogart. Bogart also plays a similar character: a loner American hacking a living in the tropics amidst other social rejects.
From the beginning of “To Have and Have Not,” Bogart makes it clear that he doesn’t care who runs Martinique, scoffing at those who protest the Vichy French collaborationists flying of the Republican Tricolor with the quip, “It’s their flag to fly or burn.” Regardless of his own opinions, Bogart is forced into the fight between the Vichy collaborationist and the French Resistance by sheer force of circumstances, with his landlady using his apartment for a resistance rendezvous, then guilting him into covering for the guerilla leaders. This theme of the reluctant American is identical to Casablanca’s leitmotif, where Bogart states quite bluntly that “I stick my neck out for nobody.”
Even the setting, Martinique, shares with Casablanca’s Morocco the tense neither-fish-nor-fowl ambiguity of the French overseas territories during World War II. These French occupied territories are populated by fanatics, opportunists, and deadbeats caught in a fight taking place offstage, and one that seems over already, as metropolitan France is occupied by Nazi forces. Bogart, as the isolationist American who eventually takes his side with the Allies, goes through an identical character arc in “To Have and Have Not” that he displayed in “Casablanca” two years earlier.
What sets “To Have and Have Not” aside is the screenplay. Legend has it that the movie was started on the basis of a fishing trip conversation between Ernest Hemingway and Howard Hawks, who directed the movie. As a bet, Hawks said he could take Hemingway’s worst book and make it into a blockbuster movie. Hemingway scoffed at the idea, but readily cited “To Have and Have Not”, a novel about the Florida Keys, as his worst so far, and offered to help with the screenplay. Not only did Hawks take Hemingway up on his offer, but also involved novelist William Faulkner in the successive treatments, while adding touches of his own.
As the brainchild of Hemingway and Faulkner, both Nobel Prize winning novelists, the screenplay holds its own. What stands out, however, is the real sense of reluctance Bogart is given as a character in the war-torn landscape of Martinique. In “Casablanca,” Bogart may say he “sticks his neck out for nobody,” but as soon as he’s offered a chance, the American takes refugee resistance fighters under his wing, bribing police, giving shelter and providing alibis, all quite uncoerced. In “To Have and Have Not,” Bogart is not an idealist, but rather a far more believable character whose sense of abstract justice mostly ends with a bankroll. Even in his final exchange with the Resistance leader, Bogart admits that “Maybe I’m going to fight with you just because I hate the other guys, not because I love your side especially.” While hardly a ringing endorsement, this seems more in line with Bogart’s character of a person used to giving moral dilemmas short shrift.
