This short featurette about the making of the 1944 movie, "To Have and Have Not" is packed with much information for a running time of just 11 minutes. It has interviews with film historians and writers Leonard Maltin, Eric Lax and Robert Osborne. Film clips from the movie are interspersed. Basically, it is in two parts. The first "A Love Story," the first words of this short. It's about the romance that develops between Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall – that would result in their marriage later.
The second part is about the movie itself, mostly the complete change in the plot and setting from Ernest Hemingway's novel. It has some very interesting information that I doubt many people know about, or that many knew about in the 1940s. Tying the two together is some information about how Lauren Bacall got in the picture in the first place.
The Bacall-Bogart romance ended in marriage, and lasted until he died of cancer at age 57 in 1957. Their film matching was a director's dream for chemistry, except in this first case. They made three more films together in the 1940s – all smashing successes. The historians said that Howard Hawks was jealous of Bogart because he, Hawks, had designs on Bacall. Hollywood adultery knows no end. Hawks was married at the time to his second of three wives, Nancy Gross. It was she who had pointed out Bacall to him – she was on the cover of Harper's Bazaar magazine as a model. Through some errors and coincidences after that, Bacall wound up in Hollywood and got the role of Slim in "To Have and Have Not." There's much more to that background, and one can find it from a number of other sources.
The most interesting part of this short has to do with the wholesale change in the story. The main character in Hemmingway's book gets involved in running black-market goods between Cuba and Florida. He eventually gets involved with some revolutionaries and is killed. According to this short, the Roosevelt administration "didn't like the idea of bringing the book to the screen." The narrator says, "Under the Good Neighbor policy, they tried to force the studio to cancel the film by withholding its export license because it depicted corruption and violence in Cuba."
So, Hawks came up with another plan. Studio research discovered one single island in the Caribbean that wasn't included in the U.S. government's Good Neighbor policy. That was Vichy-controlled Martinique, a French colony. So, the simple solution was to change the setting. And, since it was now thrust into the World War II arena, which the original story predated by a few years, there were all kinds of opportunities for plot changes. Hawks brought in William Faulkner, himself an accomplished novelist and playwright, and he did a complete rewrite of the screenplay. Would anyone wonder that he might have been influenced by the success of that other film "Casablanca" in 1942? Especially with so many similar situations and possibilities?
Apparently, Hawks and Hemingway were friends who fished together in the Caribbean. If Hemmingway objected to the wholesale change in his story, and use of his name to trumpet the film, I don't think anyone ever knew. He was in need of money at the time and Hawks bought the film rights for $80,000, with $10,000 going to Hemingway. According to some movie sources, after Hawks told him that he had made $1 million on the movie, Hemingway wouldn't talk to him for six months.
