Pre-Code Parade: TODAY WE LIVE (1933)

William Faulkner was Snoopy: a dogged writer who dreamed of being a World War I flying ace. Faulkner had the double advantage over the bipedal beagle of actually existing and doing so during the war. He went to pilot school but no further, but let the folks at home believe more than that. He was good at fiction, or so the Nobel committee said. He was less good at movies, but found a patron in Howard Hawks. Maybe Hawks sat on his doghouse roof in turn and dreamed of writing famously. He sought the company of great writers. Hemingway kept him at arm's length (he liked Gary Cooper better), allowing him a free (in spirit if not in price) adaptation of To Have and Have Not scripted by none other than Faulkner but never consenting to write for film. Hemingway may have stayed away from movies so he could sneer at his rivals for writing them. Faulkner needed the money more, I suppose -- though by the time Hawks got hold of him he had become a bona fide bestseller by virtue of his novel Sanctuary, filmed without his input as The Story of Temple Drake, and enough of a celebrity that his name could be mentioned in some of the advertising for his adaptation, directed by Hawks, of his own short story "Turnabout." The story appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, another workplace Hemingway avoided and another he held against his rivals, even the friendly ones like F. Scott Fitzgerald, who supposedly wasted his gifts working to commercial formulae. For what it was worth, "Turnabout" was well read in the Post, but required enhancement in the adaptation to cinema. Faulkner is credited with the story (of course) and the dialogue of Today We Live, but the "screen play" itself flowed from other pens. Edith Fitzgerald and Dwight Taylor ought to be mentioned here, because their additions to the magazine story might otherwise convince people (like me) who know the story only through the movie to think that the story itself had been written by Snoopy.

It is like this: Gary Cooper is a rich American who moves to England and becomes Joan Crawford's new neighbor, introducing himself with an almost national instinct at the worst time, Joan having lost her father to the war. That leaves her with a brother, played by future husband Franchot Tone, and a future husband, played by Robert Young, whose possible intimacies with Crawford are unknown to me. You can tell the other three are British while Cooper isn't, however alike all four sound, because they're already there when the picture starts. They're fighting in the war, too, and in his turn Cooper catches the war bug, around the time Crawford catches the Cooper bug.  Joan herself crosses the water to play nurse, only to learn that Cooper, a flier himself, has crashed and died. Audiences with memories of William Wellman's Wings would by this point be reluctant ever to fly with Gary Cooper, unless they realized that it was too soon in the picture, at this more advanced point in his career, for Cooper to be dead. Joan herself doesn't realize this and hooks up with Young for consolation. As was predictable, Cooper reappears expecting to pick up where he left off with Crawford and realizing his error, and her deceit, only when he delivers a drunken Young to his living quarters, which are Crawford's, too.

Faulkner thus adds, or is provided with, an additional motive element of romantic rivalry for the scenes that are the real material of "Turnabout" and the stuff that must have attracted Hawks to the story. Cooper and Young, the latter seconded by Tone and the former by Roscoe Karns, engage in a contest of one-upmanship, debating whose is the braver work in the war. While Cooper bombs cities, Young and Tone operate a torpedo boat that doesn't fire torpedoes but guides them -- hauls them, really, toward their targets. Young gets a plane ride, Cooper a boat ride; each is impressed. The sea scenes are somewhat more convincing, Hawks's setbound planes lacking the scale and mobility of later fakery in films like Too Hot to Handle. Through editing and simple directorial persistence Hawks manages to give these scenes some dramatic momentum. Hawks was also obviously enthused by scenes of barracks camaraderie, the great sport of First World Warriors during their downtime being the training and matching of fighting cockroaches. But there is nothing Hawksian, and hardly anything Faulknerian, about the wrap-up. Would either of them have assumed on their own that once Cooper returned from the presumptive dead that either he or Young must die the big death? Yet audiences and/or producers assumed just that, and so did our creators. So Young gets blinded in battle. By movie rules that means that Crawford will give up any further thought of Cooper to take care of Young, while Young will not want to be a burden to her, as he imagines a blind man must be. He convinces Tone to take him out for one more mission, while Cooper, learning of Young's adventure, rushes his plane into the air to pretty much watch as a mishap with the torpedo boat's firing mechanism, to describe it generously, compels Tone to take on a suicide mission. Following movie rules himself, he's going to spare Young by tossing him overboard, but this is the moment Young has been waiting for, so rather than take a dive he wraps himself around Tone (some scholars see subtext in "Turnabout," but some people see subtext everywhere) and together the buddies send a shipload of Heinies to Valhalla, blowing Crawford a clear path to her romantic reunion with Cooper.

Faulkner would return to themes of flying in his novel Pylon, adapted by Douglas Sirk during Faulker's second round of celebrity as The Tarnished Angels, and to themes of World War I in A Fable, infamous during his lifetime as an overhyped pretentious post-Nobel dud. Hawks hooked up with him next for another war picture, 1936's The Road to Glory. Their best-loved collaborations are To Have and Have Not and their Raymond Chandler adaptation, The Big Sleep, for which they and co-writer Leigh Brackett, according to legend, had to ask Chandler whodunit, in vain. Later, Hawks identified Faulkner as the perfect man to write an Ancient Egyptian epic -- the idea hadn't occurred to Norman Mailer yet -- and the end product, Land of the Pharaohs, reached DVD as a "Cult Camp Classic." Today We Live was the only time Hawks adapted his friend's own work, which is probably a good thing for both men's reputations, which were better off when this film was more thoroughly forgotten.

TO HAVE (Howard Hawks) AND HAVE (Hemingway) NOT (1944)

 

Last weekend wasn't the first time I'd watched Howard Hawks's version of To Have and Have Not, but it was the first time since I'd read the actual novel by Ernest Hemingway. As I noted when I reviewed The Gun Runners, Don Siegel's partial adaptation of the same source material, Hemingway's novel describes the downward spiral of an otherwise typical two-fisted lone-wolf hero who trusts the wrong people and takes too many risks out of Depression desperation for money. It may have been the last time Hemingway wrote a hero who wasn't just a version of himself, and it's an expansive attempt to draw a broader picture of society from a variety of perspectives, particularly in the final section, and in a variety of literary styles. The novel is more ambitious than its reputation suggests and seems to have set the tone for Hemingway's later incomplete experiments in fiction. Hawks's movie had a different kind of ambition, which was to exploit the blockbuster success of the movie adaptation of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. That meant selling To Have and Have Not as "Ernest Hemingway's most daring man-woman story," when the novel was nothing of the sort. Hemingway's Harry Morgan is married with children, concern for whose future drives him to increasingly desperate and ultimately fatal schemes. Hawks's Harry, as conceived by Jules Furthman and Hemingway rival William Faulkner, is unattached, unless you count his loyalty to his rummy sidekick Eddie. In the novel, Harry contemplates murdering Harry to take the heat off himself in the first episode, but spares him thanks to a lucky bookkeeping break. Nothing close to that happens in the movie, but the overall compassion the movie Harry has for Eddie is typical of the book. In the book, however, Eddie disappears after the first episode, and in a later chapter Harry has a different rummy sidekick who gets killed in cold blood by the bank robbers Harry has agreed to transport in a getaway boat. That's the sort of detail that got the novel its bad name and the movie its repute for having "cleaned up" Hemingway's story.

Drastic literary adaptations like this one raise questions of aesthetic ethics. Hawks's movie is regarded as a classic and beloved for introducing Lauren Bacall to Humphrey Bogart and the world. On the other hand, it's a travesty of Hemingway and has threatened since its release to take the novel's place in the pop-culture consciousness.  Can it be "wrong" and "right" at the same time? That's hard to say when you watch a movie adaptation of a novel after reading the novel. My feeling tends to be that the filmmakers owe some fidelity to the novel, and owe the public a reasonably accurate representation of the novel. But I'm not going to say that an unfaithful adaptation can't be a good movie. I recently read T. T. Flynn's novel The Man From Laramie, which was made into an Anthony Mann - Jimmy Stewart western not long after publication. Mann took liberties with the story, but I can say unhesitantly that the film was better than the book, which was little more than a page-turner burdened with purplish prose. The story was improved by the adaptation, but should that be our only standard of judgement? Approaching the matter from the other side, To Have and Have Not may be one of the most flagrant travesties of a novel, but it's far from being the worst literary adaptation. Compared to such things as Roland Joffe's The Scarlet Letter or Brian de Palma's Bonfire of the Vanities, Hawks's film isn't even a bad movie. But is it good enough that its merits outweigh its injustice to Hemingway?

Like The Gun Runners, Furthman and Faulkner's script works mostly with the first section of the novel, which is based on the short story "One Trip Across." In the story, Harry Morgan turns down a group of Cuban revolutionaries who want him to do some smuggling for them because it's too great a risk to his livelihood. Harry's main trade is taking tourists out fishing. He takes a Mr. Johnson out and patiently endures the man's failure to learn anything about the sport after days at sea until Johnson's incompetence costs Harry a rod and reel. Johnson decides to leave Cuba the next day and promises to meet Harry at the bank the next morning to square up with him. After Harry learns that Johnson left early, leaving Harry about $800 in the hole, our hero is more willing to take on risky work. Instead of helping the revolutionaries, who've been shot up anyway, he gets involved with a Chinese people-smuggling ring in the full expectation that he might get killed in the process. Harry pre-emptively bumps off the Chinese boss, dumps the illegals within wading distance of shore, and faces the dilemma of what to do about Eddie that I mentioned earlier.

In Hawks's movie, the setting has shifted to French-ruled Martinique, with Free French patriots taking the place of Cuban rebels. The business with Johnson on the boat is much as in the novel, but the movie takes pains to minimize the extent to which the Bogart character is shown as a sucker. Before Johnson can abscond, the pretty drifter Slim (Bacall) picks his pocket. Harry discovers the theft, takes the wallet from Slim, and finds that Johnson had plenty of traveler's checks that he could have made out to Harry on the spot. Harry and Slim confront Johnson, and Harry compels Johnson to make the checks payable to him. Before Johnson can sign, however, he's killed in a crossfire between Free French and Vichy forces, and Harry is SOL. That makes him more amenable to doing things for the Free French, and from that point Hawks's more-or-less original romance begins.

What does that leave us with? Apart from some cosmetic details -- a Gestapo officer is nicknamed "Bee-Lips" like a fixer from the novel -- there's nothing more of Hemingway in the movie. The personality of Eddie, tailored to Walter Brennan's screen persona and enhanced with allegedly comic business like his constant inquiry, "Was you ever bitten by a dead bee?" is almost entirely made up for the film, as is the whole character of Slim. The notion that Slim is "all right" because she answers the dead-bee query correctly -- "Why, have you?" -- would probably have made Hemingway puke. On that note, I was intrigued by the scene where the Gestapo man is plying Eddie with booze in order to loosen his tongue about the whereabouts of Harry's passengers. Impressed by the fat spy's slimy politeness, Eddie declares him "all right" and starts to ask the bee question when Harry abruptly changes the subject. Was Harry afraid that the Nazi would give the correct answer? Was this moment Hawks's own unconscious confession that the whole dead-bee idea was garbage? Perhaps.

Subtract Hemingway and Hawks's To Have and Have Not is self-evidently a Casablanca ripoff, with Bogart reprising his reluctant-hero act, Hoagy Carmichael sitting in at the piano for Dooley Wilson, and Dan Seymour (in the Gestapo role) as a substitute fat man for Sidney Greenstreet. The big difference is that the Bogart character doesn't romance the noble Free French woman whose husband lies wounded, but the charismatically insolent Slim. From Warner Bros.'s standpoint, an important purpose of the picture is to put over Lauren Bacall, particularly as a singer -- though that thread of her career wasn't really picked up again for another quarter-century, until Bacall starred in a Broadway musical. If you dig the stars you'll dig the film. The chemistry is there. Bacall earned her spot. But otherwise, with the arguable exception of Brennan, Bogart's surrounded by a B-team cast by Casablanca standards -- and I'd be willing to argue against Brennan in this picture. Bogart himself is coasting. Harry Morgan should be a more desperate character, almost like Bogart's Roy Earle from High Sierra in his fatedness and compromised ruthlessness, but once you give the character partners (the Free French) who are certain not to betray him, the noirish edge is largely gone from his one trip across, leaving behind little more than a likable lark that becomes a little less likable, fairly or not, when you learn what To Have and Have Not was and could have been. No one who likes the Hawks movie without having read the book should like it less, and those who've done both and like the film better should stick to their guns, since we'd presumably disagree on the book more than on the movie. All I know is that I can't look at this picture the same way I used to. I suppose that's too bad, but on the other hand I'm glad I read the real thing.

The Original O.J.

A stormy moment in the reconciliation of Oscar "O.J." Jaffe

and Mildred "Lily Garland" Plotka aboard the Twentieth Century limited.

Oscar Jaffe is involved in a mutually self-destructive romantic relationship with a blonde. Despite theatrical threats of suicide, the woman leaves him. He thinks he can do without her, but in time he grows desperate. When chance throws them together, he becomes maniacally manipulative, again using the threat of his own death to get her to rejoin him. She has succeeded without him, but despite her protests they are a perfect match. Both are self-dramatizingly hysterical, capable of tantrums that can be turned on and off at the drop of a hat. Although she treats her eventual return to him as a defeat, each is really the other's best audience. They are arguing furiously at the end, but it is really a happy ending.





The film is Twentieth Century (1934), starring John Barrymore and Carole Lombard. Howard Hawks directed it. Historians treat it as an early specimen of the "screwball comedy." That's always been one of the more vague genre labels. It usually seems to mean that characters act crazy, but characters frequently acted crazy in movies before the turning-point year of 1934, which also saw It Happened One Night emerge as a kind of founding film. I guess two things really distinguish screwball from the movies of the Marx Bros. or other zany comedians. First, the vaudevillian tendency to break the fourth wall and address the audience is gone. Second, the romantic leads rather than outright comedians carry the burden of the comedy. You could almost think of screwball as the second stage of a contagion that the Marxes and other acts spread from the advent of talkies to a point when it spread to the general population. Hawks' 1938 film Bringing Up Baby, with Katherine Hepburn as a screwball heiress, is usually considered the peak of the genre.

Barrymore gives a self-parodying performance, as he was a "Master Thespian" of his day before booze destroyed him. It's self-parody on another level thanks to all the references to Svengali, since Barrymore had made a rather good movie of that story back in 1931. I don't know how deep in drink he was at this point, but he's camouflaged by actors Walter Connolly and Roscoe Karns who do more blatant drunk acts at different points in the picture. I found Carole Lombard to be rather shrill, but it's okay for her to be obnoxious since this isn't one of those stories where you're necessarily rooting for the likable lovers to get back together.

The mentality of the film is more like that of a Coen Bros. film in its overall hard-boiled attitude. That attitude is often equated with cynicism, but I think it can be described more subtly as fatalism plus perseverance. It's the attitude of people who are not optimists, yet do what they've got to do. It contrasts strongly with the introverted self-pity that characterizes most acting in our time. It's probably a Depression attitude, though it can't be called "depressed." It involves an understanding that if you're going to try to survive in hard times, you can't waste time bemoaning everything. It's an attitude that may make a comeback soon if Americans apply themselves. It's one of the qualities that makes Twentieth Century a fairly funny film. Another, from my personal perspective, is the use of a religious fanatic (and all-round lunatic) as comedy relief that ultimately adds an element of farce to the plot. The film is definitely worth a look the next time it turns up on Turner Classic Movies, where I saw it this morning.