Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (65 page)

After rehearsing all through New Year’s, however, Hawks gave over all day on January 3 to Bacall. She and Ridgely rehearsed all morning with the
cinematographer, Sid Hickox, and a full crew working as if on an actual shoot, and after lunch Hawks spent six hours slowly taking them through the entire scene for the cameras. Hawks was patient and, in his understated way, endlessly encouraging to the novice, making her feel, as she said, “secure.” By the end of the day, Bacall felt she had done well; for Hawks’s part, he was positive now that
he’d found a sensation, and it was only a matter of showing it to Feldman, Warner, and Bogart before he could tell his terribly anxious young hopeful that she had the role.

The rest of the casting quickly fell into place. When the Sylvia/Helen role was meant to be as, or more, important, than Marie, there was some talk of casting Ann Sheridan, whom Hawks had recommended to Warner after testing
her for
The Road to Glory
years before. But the diminishing size of the part, as well as Sheridan’s suspension from Warners at that moment, tabled this idea. No longer in need of a big name, Hawks became interested, in more ways than one, in Dolores Moran, and decided that her fleshier, more voluptuous looks would contrast effectively with the willowy
Bacall. Walter Brennan was the only possible
choice for Eddie the rummy and he was borrowed, not without the usual difficulty, from Goldwyn. Dan Seymour, a rotund former nightclub performer who had just played the doorman at Sydney Greenstreet’s Blue Parrot club in
Casablanca
, was originally tested to play one of the Cuban revolutionaries, which he found absurd. Not long after, he said, “I got a script and I read it, and it’s nothing like
the scene I did. On the front it said, ‘Dan Seymour, Capt. Renard.’ I read it and found out it was the Vichy policeman.” Hawks personally outfitted him in a beret, requested that he be padded to bulk him up even beyond his 305 pounds, and asked that he use only the slightest of French accents. Marcel Dalio, the superb French actor who had also appeared in
Casablanca
, was an easy choice to play
Gerard, or “Frenchy.”

As for Hoagy Carmichael, the enormously successful and personable songwriter had written tunes for numerous films and had performed a bit in one but had never harbored any ambitions as an actor. Virtual neighbors, Slim and Carmichael’s wife, Ruth, became very friendly, and the Carmichaels were shortly frequent guests at Hog Canyon. “I was rather fascinated with Hawks because
I knew he had what you call class and understanding and intelligence,” Carmichael said. “I was delighted we could be friends. Before I knew it, when I was in New York, I got a wire from him asking me if I’d like to be in the picture.” When Carmichael got back to California, Hawks shrewdly made him feel comfortable by testing him playing “How Little We Know” on the piano, accompanied by Bacall.
Carmichael was right at home sitting at the keyboards, and no one could have seemed more natural portraying a sympathetic saloon pianist than the genuine article himself. Among Hawks’s crew members, most important to him was his favorite assistant director, Jack Sullivan, who set the quiet, somewhat formal tone on the set as much as Hawks himself did. Dan Seymour described him as “a deadly Irishman
and, just like Hawks, he never showed any emotion. He was not someone you could be intimate with.” The picture also marked Hawks’s first collaboration with the film editor Christian Nyby, who became a good friend and longtime associate of Hawks. A protegé of Harry Warner’s, Nyby was always on the outs with Jack, who fired the young cutter, only to find himself overruled. Reserved and physically
not dissimilar to Hawks, Nyby, at his director’s request, was on the set for most of the shooting. “Howard never gave me cutting instructions,” Nyby said. “He felt it was up to me to do my job.”

Hawks kept Furthman working on the script through January and into February but, feeling he could use a couple of extra minds bearing down
on the material, called in two mystery-writer friends, Cleve
F. Adams and Whitman Chambers, to provide additional help. Working separately, they came up with very little and, in Adams’s case, less than that, as he proceeded to replace Furthman’s great, tough dialogue with a weak watered-down alternative. For his part, Furthman got through most of one more revision by mid-January and delivered his final solo draft in mid-February. Still set in Cuba, this version
beefed up Marie’s role even further, modeling her more explicitly on the characters he had written for Dietrich in
Morocco
and
Shanghai Express
, and even stealing a couple of his own lines from the latter. When Shanghai Lily is asked why she is going to Shanghai, she flippantly replies, “To buy a hat,” the same reason Marie was now given for coming to Cuba. He also attempted to recycle that film’s
most famous line, “It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily,” but
Shanghai Express
had been made before the Code, and this did not slip past the watchful eye of Joseph Breen. Another lift, this time from
Morocco
, was Marie’s sarcastic remark when she sees Morgan carrying a woman who has fainted: “You trying to guess her weight?”

Now that he felt Bacall had what it took to
put his idea of the character over, Hawks urged Furthman to push Marie’s hard-edged dialogue and one-upsmanship lines as far as he could. Explaining his intentions to Bogart, Hawks said, “You are about the most insolent man on the screen and I’m going to make the girl a little more insolent than you are.” When Bogart told him there was “fat chance of that,” Hawks replied, “I’ve got a better than fat
chance.… In every scene you play with her, she’s going to walk out and leave you with egg on your face.”

Among Furthman’s other changes for this draft, the “whistle” scene is worked in, although in a different way. Also in desperation, Morgan agrees to transport some Japanese for a sinister Mr. Kato, whom he subsequently kills. On a second illicit voyage with the Cuban bank robbers, one of them
kills Eddie, but Morgan manages to shoot them before they do the same to him, whereupon he returns the stolen loot to the authorities. At the end, Helen still believes Morgan is going to return to New York with her until Morgan changes his mind just before getting on the seaplane with her.

With shooting due to begin in two weeks, Warner Bros. was obliged to send the script to moral watchdog Joseph
Breen; the studio was not pleased by his response. In a six-page, single-spaced rebuke of Furthman’s screenplay, Breen wrote, “The general unacceptability of this story is emphasized by its overall
low tone
and by the suggestion that your sympathetic lead, Morgan, is a murderer, who is permitted to go off unpunished.” Objecting
strenuously to the “scummy” feel and “a kind of flavor of ‘pimpery’
to the entire proceedings,” he insisted that all the characters be “
softened
,” that all the women characters be changed “to get away from any possible suggestion that they are prostitutes,” that the studio “remove from the script the business of the men sleeping in the women’s rooms,” and that Morgan’s killings of Kato and the Cubans be clearly made acts of self-defense. Breen then enumerated
three dozen instances in which the script willfully violated the Production Code, making it impossible to approve unless many changes were made.

But another problem suddenly sprang up that, for a moment, at least, seriously threatened the picture’s proceeding. The Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs decided that the nature of the story ran directly counter to the interests of
the United States’ Good Neighbor Policy with Central and South America and intimated that the film would therefore not be granted an export license, thereby placing all overseas markets off-limits. Jack Warner wanted to cancel the production, but Hawks obtained permission from Inter-American Affairs to set the action in Martinique, a French-controlled territory that lay outside its domain. Hawks called
on his most resourceful script doctor, William Faulkner, to perform some emergency surgery.

Faulkner solved numerous problems on the script. Having recently written an unproduced epic screenplay for the studio on Charles de Gaulle and the Free French, the writer was au courant with issues regarding the anti-Vichy movement and saw at once how the the conflicts in
To Have and Have Not
could be
updated and altered to reflect war intrigue in the Western hemisphere. The film would now begin politically, with some local blacks appreciating the large “V” torn into a Pétain poster. The Cuban revolutionaries cum criminal terrorists would become members of the Gaullist underground, the local authorities became personified by Captain Renard, both smuggling missions were eliminated, Helen and her
husband were “Casablancanized” into resistance fighters in need of Morgan’s help, Marie became his sole romantic interest, and Eddie was not only beefed up as a character but spared from dying as well. Faulkner solved the problem of sleeping arrangements by simply having everyone stay in the same hotel, and he facilitated the Morgan-Marie encounters by placing their rooms directly opposite each other.
He also cut down the quantity of Marie’s drinking and, by jettisoning the smuggling, effectively did away with what appeared to be Morgan’s murderous side. To suit Hawks’s taste for compressed
storytelling, Faulkner also boiled the time frame down to a very eventful three days, a far cry from the three seasons of the novel.

Faulkner had about a week to make these major conceptual adjustments;
the rest would have to be done as shooting progressed. Between January 19 and February 16, the ever-reliable Roy Davidson shot twelve days of second-unit footage of fishing, boat maneuvers, rum running, and robbery coverage, off Balboa and Laguna Beach; after a break, he subsequently shot five more days of related material. Principal photography began on Tuesday, February 29, with scenes involving
Morgan, the American fisherman Johnson, and sixty-five extras in the San Francisco Café. The very next day brought the first exchange between Bogart and Bacall, in which Morgan meets her with Gerard in the hallway and tosses her a box of matches so she can light her cigarette. Bacall was beside herself with nerves, trembling so much that she couldn’t even catch the matchbox or light her cigarette
without her hand shaking. However, Bogart was a prince, making light of it and joking around with her until she relaxed. The next day was devoted to the two stars’ first scene alone, with Morgan roughly threatening to take Johnson’s wallet away from Marie, then quarreling with her about what she’s done and how they will dispose of the money. At this early stage, Hawks took things slowly to make
sure the two actors got off on the right foot, and he made things easier for the still nervous Bacall by breaking the dialogue down into very short shots. In the beginning, he uncharacteristically did as many as fifteen takes of each setup, introducing a fair amount of new dialogue into the scenes on the set, shaping the scenes, and his new star’s performance, until he was fully satisfied. Eventually,
as Bacall’s confidence grew, along with Hawks’s faith in her, he was able to reduce the number of takes.

The modus operandi had Faulkner working just one to three days ahead of the shooting. Generally, the reclusive writer preferred to work in Hawks’s bungalow, which was directly across from Hal Wallis’s. Occasionally, when a scene hadn’t quite gelled, the director asked him to the set, where
they would confer sotto voce or repair to Hawks’s portable office whenever Hawks needed a line, and where Faulkner could quietly observe the efficient work of the script girl, Meta Carpenter, with whom he had resumed his passionate love affair from the 1930s after the failure of her marriage to the pianist Wolfgang Rebner. Dan Seymour recalled that Faulkner would sometimes sit in a chair next to
Hawks, who would ask, “‘How did that sound, Bill?’ Faulkner would nod, go off for a shot of Scotch
and come back with a new line that was always better.” Faulkner also made a point of visiting the set whenever Hoagy Carmichael was due to perform.

In her autobiography, Bacall cogently described what she considered Hawks’s “brilliantly creative work method.” Each morning, “We would sit around with
only the work light on and read through the scene, and he’d throw in lines that he or Slim or someone had come up with the night before. We’d try things, or he’d say, ‘Why don’t you try that?,’ or someone would suggest something and he’d say fine. He always had Furthman around because he always said, ‘If there are five ways to play a scene, Furthman will always come up with a sixth.’” Several
published accounts have stated that Furthman left the picture after Faulkner was engaged, but in fact he was always on call to help punch up dialogue or find a new angle on a scene; for example, he completely rewrote the bullet-removal scene in the cellar, including its withering repartee between Marie and Helen, just before it was shot in mid-April. Only after the actors had digested all the changes
and worked out their movements did Hawks bring in the cinematographer, Sid Hickox, to set the lighting and camera angles. Dan Seymour said that Meta Carpenter had the hardest job because she was always “furiously writing down everything while Hawks would suggest ways of doing it.… Lots of times, only a half hour before shooting a scene would we decide how it would be done.” Bacall considered it
“the perfect way for movie actors to work,” but only a director with Hawks’s confidence and power at the studio could get away with such a relaxed approach in the film-factory climate of the era.

Meta Carpenter, a vastly experienced pro by this time, considered this approach “a dangerous way to make a motion picture” and credited the fact that it worked this time to Faulkner’s industriousness,
craftiness, and superb sense of story structure. While the writer slaved away to add heart to Furthman’s clever, playful, often intoxicatingly sexy surfaces, the company of filmmakers and actors had an exhilarating time, charged with professional as well as personal tensions. Artistically, the film was a high-wire act in which one of the nation’s great writers created a taut line on which a great
director and a core group of uniquely inspired actors danced some breathtaking variations, always landing on their toes. Emotionally, the arrows of desire, suspicion, jealousy, and resentment were pointing in potentially deadly cross patterns.