Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (63 page)

After the telling of several stories, the mixed group votes on whether to stay put or forge ahead into the desert, and much is made of the democratic voting process. At this point the crippled
Negro speaks out, saying that Abraham Lincoln gave him the vote and much more, but he questions,
in the manner of Sergeant York, whether killing is right under any circumstances, given the decrees of the Bible.

The Freedom Train speeds by once again, with reenactments of Lincoln’s life and the shooting at Ford’s Theatre; then the funeral train turns into a roaring express, with the cheering faces
of American troops beaming from the windows.

The desert group votes to stay at their compound, upon which a Corporal Loughton tells the tragic “French Sequence.”

The climax begins at the desert outpost just before sunrise. A Nazi tank approaches, whereupon the sneaky German officer trains a commandeered machine gun on his captors, only to be shot by the Italian officer, who is shown throughout
to be highly civilized, with his forced obedience to the German merely representing a temporary lapse. The tank and garrison continue to fire on each other, the noise finally blending into the sound of the Freedom Train, which is superimposed over fighting tanks and finally overcomes them as Robeson sings his cry for freedom. The trainful of G.I.s finally passes by, and the final image contains
a slogan written on the last car:
BERLIN TOKYO OR BUST
.

On July 28, second-unit director Roy Davidson, who had done the miniature work on
Air Force
, shot 130 seconds of footage of burning wheat fields for the Russian and Chinese episodes in the San Fernando Valley. Four actors and thirty-six extras took part. This, alas, was all that was ever shot on
Battle Cry
. On August 4, word came down from
the Warners front office to halt all work on the picture and to cease making any further charges against it, due to what was viewed as an alarmingly escalating budget, which had already climbed to $232,348 before filming even began. Stunned at the cancellation on the brink of production after so much work had been poured into it, Hawks and Feldman could only console themselves with the money they
earned for not having made a picture. Having spent very little to buy them, the pair sold four of the diverse stories to Warner Bros. for $79,500, and Hawks personally collected the full $100,000 due him as salary for the second film under his five-picture deal. For his trouble, Faulkner received $17,340.

In so many ways,
Battle Cry
was antithetical to what Hawks generally preferred in a screen
story: it was explicitly political, very liberal in slant, episodic, riddled with flashbacks, attentive to diverse cultures, and encompassing many different times and places. Reading the script, it is difficult to imagine Howard Hawks truly getting behind any of these conceits and sympathies. Yet one can only deeply regret that the picture was never made.
Although its tone and stance come across
clearly in the script, how successful it could have been as a unified, not to mention personal, film is not clear at all. It would have been fascinating to see if Hawks could have pulled together such an ambitious, over-reaching project, one so unlike anything else he ever attempted. It would have been one of a kind for Hollywood as well, but the system was not as conducive as it would become to
this kind of mad, obsessive venture that threatened to spiral out of control as easily as it could clean up at the box office. And who would not have been curious to see a cast that was to have included, in addition to the stars previously mentioned, Gary Cooper (as Fonda), Bette Davis (as Ma-Ma Mosquito), Humphrey Bogart, Ida Lupino, Lauren Bacall, John Garfield, Ann Sheridan, and George Raft?

But it was not to be, so Hawks and a particularly disappointed Feldman had to assess their fall-back position. They didn’t know it for sure yet, but as it turned out they were sitting prettier than ever.

Slim was his ideal woman. The things Slim missed, he put into Bacall.

—Christian Nyby

Howard Hawks tried many times to arrange a meeting between Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. The two great, proud authors always resisted the idea, however, so the closest Hawks, or anyone, ever came to getting them together was on the credits
of
To Have and Have Not
. Hawks often claimed that when Hemingway turned down his offer to work on the adaptation and doubted that the director would ever be able to make a film from that novel, he taunted the author by saying, “I’ll get Faulkner to do it; he can write better than you can anyway.” This may well have been typical after-the-fact bravado on Hawks’s part, but there is no doubt that
he took some perverse pleasure in having his genuinely good friend Faulkner rewrite his more arm’s-length pal Hem to his own specifications. However, it was a long time coming to that, and Faulkner was far from Hawks’s mind when he initially got around to figuring out how he would crack the nut of
To Have and Have Not
.

After having first visited Hemingway in Key West in 1939, Hawks had been forced
to bide his time in tackling the picture because of his split with Howard Hughes. Originally, Hawks intended to do it as his second picture for Hughes, after
The Outlaw
. Hughes knew that Hemingway was in urgent need of cash in May 1939, when the author was still trying to finish writing
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, and induced him to sell it outright for a paltry ten thousand dollars. Four years later,
Hughes would part with the book only for an enormous profit, especially if Hawks was the buyer, and the tycoon ended up forcing Hawks and Feldman to cough up $92,500 for the rights. This was one literary deal on which the two partners weren’t about to make a profit of their own; knowing full well what they had paid Hughes, Jack Warner reimbursed them for exactly the same amount.

For Hawks personally,
this was unfortunate, because his reckless gambling losses, along with the expenses involved in the upkeep of Slim and Hog Canyon, had once again placed him in big hole. In June 1943, the IRS filed a levy with Warner Bros. against Hawks in order to collect $81,476 in unpaid back taxes. An arrangement was quickly made under which the studio initially withheld two thousand dollars per week
from his five thousand-dollar salary; it was later altered to a 50 percent deduction of whatever his weekly paycheck might be (the amount varied between three and five thousand dollars, depending upon the advances he received at the start of a specific production). By September, Hawks urgently needed thirty thousand dollars in cash to pay off more gambling debts, and Warners obliged with an advance
of 30 percent of his total salary for
To Have and Have Not
. Hawks thought nothing of withdrawing all the money from the household bank account to bet on races, leaving Slim holding the bag when trade and service people turned up demanding payment. As she put it, “His gambling was a compulsion that turned the entire household upside down.’

When
Battle Cry
fell apart, Hawks was ready to move along
quickly to his next picture under his Warner Bros. contract, and they agreed on two films the director would do back-to-back. After the Hemingway story, Hawks would direct the film version of
Dark Eyes
, a 1943 Broadway farce about some Russian refugee actresses who, during a long weekend on a Long Island estate, convince a well-heeled capitalist to finance their play. Having paid far too much
money for it, Warners was anxious to place it in reliable hands so that it would have a good chance to become a major film attraction.

To Have and Have Not
suddenly became a “go” project when Humphrey Bogart agreed to star in it. After appearing in thirty-five films at Warner Bros. in seven years, Bogart had emerged overnight as a romantic, if still tough, leading man in
Casablanca
, and the studio
was now anxious for him to follow up in the same vein. Barring any direct contribution from Hemingway himself—now a moot point in the wake of the huge success of
For Whom the Bell Tolls
—Hawks had always intended to use Jules Furthman on the adaptation, so shortly after
Battle Cry
came to its abrupt end, Furthman was put to work on the script, at $2,500 per week.

The way in which
To Have and Have
Not
moved from page to screen has been analyzed by numerous scholars and from various points of view, with special attention to how the finished film does, and does not, reflect the contributions of Hemingway, Faulkner, and Hawks and, secondarily, Furthman and the whole
Casablanca
ethos. The various drafts of the screenplay have been combed over by several academics, notably by the Hemingway
expert Frank M. Laurence, the Hawks specialist Gerald Mast, and the Faulkner scholar Bruce F. Kawin, who edited and wrote an introduction to the screenplay for publication. All of these writers offer valuable insights into the evolving, quicksilver nature of this most unexpected and near-miraculous adaptation, as do numerous other Hawks critics and commentators on the Bogart-Bacall phenomenon.

From almost every possible angle, however, this is the decisive film of Howard Hawks’s career, the one in which nearly all of his vital interests intersect in some way. Hawks aficionados can argue about the relative differences in greatness between
To Have and Have Not
and, say,
Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, Only Angels Have Wings
, and
Rio Bravo
. But if one isn’t turned on by
To Have and Have
Not
, if it doesn’t make a viewer “see the light,” as it were, then it is doubtful if any of his films will.

Hawks scholars can also use the making of the film, as well as the result, as a perfect example of the auteur theory in action. The director on this picture was surrounded by several highly powerful personalities and artistic voices: perhaps the two greatest novelists of the first half
of the twentieth century, another very individualistic writer, a major star with his own indelible image, and a studio with, arguably, the strongest “personality” in the film industry. And yet, through the strength of his own will, Howard Hawks was able to bend all these exceptional forces to effect a maximum expression of his own worldview. No matter the degrees to which one can detect elements of
Hemingway, Faulkner,
Casablanca
, or, for that matter, Conrad, Sternberg, and the demands of Hollywood escapism, the film
To Have and Have Not
is, beyond doubt, exactly the work its director intended it to be, and would have been nothing like this in the hands of anyone else.

Strictly from his own perspective, Hawks accomplished many things with
To Have and Have Not:
he finally worked from a story
by his favorite modern author and stood it on its head, collaborated with his two preferred screenwriters, added some of the screen’s most famous dialogue to the Hollywood anthology, elaborated the persona of one of the cinema’s greatest stars, achieved his long-cherished dream of creating a new star from whole cloth, unintentionally launched a celebrated and enduring love affair, made a screen
personality out of a popular song composer, named his leading man and lady after himself and his wife, had at least two affairs on the side (and did not have another he desired), made a great deal of money, and created a work that has stood the test of time as one of the great, audacious romantic-comic melodramas.

Even more than with most Hawks shoots, the filming was leisurely and very often
rare, uproarious fun. But it was also highly charged, with erotic currents coursing in sometimes conflicting directions on and off the set, secrets dearly kept when the truth was clear to all, games being played between the filmmakers and the studio brass, a director alternately thrilled-with and infuriated at his young discovery, and writing that was barely staying one step ahead of the staging
of scenes. If there are a half dozen film shoots in Hollywood history one might like to have witnessed—
Intolerance, Queen Kelly, Gone with the Wind, Citizen Kane
, and
Rebel Without a Cause
might rank among them—
To Have and Have Not
would certainly be one.

Hawks said that the one thing he liked about the novel
To Have and Have Not
was that “the two leading characters were marvelous in their relationship
with each other,” and he claimed that he and Hemingway spent several days knocking around ideas about how Harry Morgan and his wife, Marie, had met, which is what Hawks wanted to make the film about. Even if Hawks and Hemingway did have these discussions, very little of what the author suggested can possibly have ended up in the script, so far removed from Hemingway are the picture’s characters
and viewpoints. As James Agee commented at the time, “It has so little to do with Ernest Hemingway’s novel that I see no point in discussing its faithfulness!”

In fact, the first four of the book’s twenty-six chapters supply the film with some basic characters and what was intended, until the last minute, to be its setting: Harry Morgan, a struggling charter-fishing-boat operator during the Depression;
his refusal to transport to Florida some Cuban revolutionaries, who then get gunned down; his rummy friend Eddy (later abetted by another mate, Albert); his pathetic day with the chiseling American client Mr. Johnson, who not only loses two big fish but Morgan’s costly rod and reel, then skips town without paying him; Morgan’s being forced, for financial reasons, to carry human cargo he
could do without, and the Pearl of San Francisco Café, a waterfront hangout in Havana. Beyond this, however, the novel charts choppy waters the film never contemplated: Harry’s loss of an arm and his boat, a wife and kids back in Key West, and a bifurcated focus between the desperate Morgan and a bunch of alcoholic society layabouts centered around a self-important writer, Richard Gordon, whom Hemingway
cruelly based in part on John Dos Passos. The story is one of inexorable decline and destruction, climaxing thematically with Morgan’s defeatist rumination, “No matter how, a man alone ain’t got no fucking bloody chance.”