Careful What You Wish For

There’s a story Howard Hawks tells, which we might take with a grain of salt, Hawks being known to embroider, when it suited him, but it goes like this.  He’s on a fishing trip with Hemingway, and Hemingway starts bitching that Hollywood can’t seem to make a decent picture out of any of his books.  Hawks says, you didn’t sell the books to the right person.  Meaning it should have been you, Hemingway says.  Oh, hell, Hawks says, breezily, I could make a good picture out of your worst book.  We imagine Hemingway fixing him with a slow stare.  Yeah, and just which of my books is the worst? he asks.  Hawks shrugs.  To Have and Have Not, he says.  OK, wiseguy, Hemingway says.  You got a deal.  And they shake hands on it. 

Hawks took the project to William Faulkner.  Faulkner’s first script had been for Hawks, in 1932, and they worked on six pictures together, the best known being To Have and Have Not, in 1944, and The Big Sleep, two years later.  It’s probably not news that Faulkner and Hemingway took potshots at each other over the course of thirty years, but there doesn’t seem to have been bad blood on Faulkner’s part.  Be that as it may, Faulkner told Hawks that To Have and Have Not would never make a movie.  The censorship problems aside, there’s no story.  Well, we gotta do something, Hawks tells him.  And they did.  They came up with a back story, everything that happened beforehand, and led up to where the book starts.  Faulkner’s script is essentially a prequel to the novel.  Hawks later said they had so much material there was enough left over for another movie.

Actually, there was enough left over for two.

Michael Curtiz cast Garfield in The Breaking Point, in 1950, and Audie Murphy starred in The Gun Runners, in 1958, directed by Don Siegel. I’ve written about The Breaking Point in this space before (in 2019). I’d put it in the Top Ten of any list of Curtiz movies, if not the Top Five. Robin Hood, The Sea Hawk, Casablanca, Passage to Marseille, White Christmas. The script is credited to Ranald MacDougall, but there’s a lot more Hemingway in it than there is in To Have and Have Not.  Photographed by Ted McCord, who shot an amazing amount of features and TV - most notoriously the delirious Leslie Stevens noir, Private Property – and including Treasure of the Sierra Madre, for Huston, and the early 1960’s Jack Lord series Stoney Burke. Garfield thought it was his best performance, and I wouldn’t argue, only to say that in the last few years of his life, he made Force of Evil, We Were Strangers, and The Breaking Point, and it’s an awful God damn shame he died as young as he did.  Patricia Neal definitely took a sharp turn from nice girls, here; in fact, she never did a character anywhere near as cheerfully careless and predatory before or since. This one broke the mold. And the movie itself is a sort of orphan, not exactly noir, but more overtly political, like We Were Strangers. Garfield isn’t tragic, in the classic sense, he isn’t fated, because of some character flaw, he’s in fact deeply moral. If anything, he believes too much.

The Gun Runners isn’t long on moral context.  Audie Murphy is very good in it, but he isn’t playing somebody who’s conflicted, he’s playing somebody decent.  (I think Audie Murphy’s very underrated; his two best performances are for John Huston, The Red Badge of Courage and The Unforgiven.)  Don Siegel says he didn’t think Audie was right for the part, but Siegel says he didn’t want to do the picture anyway. In any event, it’s a very tight movie, carefully set up, with good support – Everett Sloane, Jack Elam, Dick Jaeckel – but Eddie Albert steals the show as the heavy, full of smiling menace. It might remind you of the dynamic in the Randolph Scott pictures that Scott made with Budd Boetticher: the charming villain, cat-like and purring, the hero out of his depth and treading water.

There is, of course, one more. Islands in the Stream, which is Hemingway’s own remake. The novel was left unfinished, so the script for the movie interpolates not a little from To Have and Have Not, particularly in the third act. This is a class-A picture, no question. The cast, with George C. Scott in the lead, the director, Franklin J. Schaffner, fresh off Papillon, and using the same cinematographer, Fred Koenekamp, the swoony score, by Jerry Goldsmith – the composer’s personal favorite. My chief reservation is that it’s a shade too reverent.  They could have done with a little B-picture subversion, Marie Windsor snapping her gum or her garters.

Maybe that should have been Hemingway’s complaint, that the movies were too respectful.He’s said to have liked Gary Cooper in For Whom the Bell Tolls, but they sure sanitized the crap out of the novel. I think Hawks had the right idea. Take a second-rate book, and turn it into a pretty good picture. Treat it with kid gloves, you’ll only embalm it. Leave out the pretense, keep the mischief.