From Page to Screen to Screen: Hemingway's "To Have and Have Not"

THE NOVEL:

To Have and Have Not was Hemingway's third novel, released in 1937, between two of his major works (A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls).   It's main character is Harry Morgan, a captain of a small boat in the Florida Keys and Cuba who makes a living chartering the wealthy for fishing trips.  Short on cash after being stiffed his payment by a client, Morgan agrees to smuggle some Chinese immigrants from Cuba to the US.  He tries to prevent Eddie, a rummy and his first mate, from going with him, but he sneaks on to the ship anyway.  Thinking he'll be double-crossed after loading the immigrants on his boat, Morgan kills the man who hired him and then leaves the Chinese on the shores in Cuba.

Times being tough, Morgan takes to running rum from Cuba to the US, and on one trip he and another mate, Wesley, are shot by the Cuban patrol.  Harry loses his arm and his boat is confiscated.  The novels shifts at this point, Harry's relationship with his wife is delved into, his troubled relations with the wealthy inhabitants of the Florida keys, a few of whom temporarily become main the focus of the book.  Hemingway swaps narrators and focuses on the Haves instead of the Have Nots for quite a while, before going back to Harry Morgan, who's agreed to steal back his boat and run some Cuban bank robbers back to Havana, but things don't go as planned.  The robbers kill Morgan's friend Albert and in the ensuing drama, a shootout leaves all the boat's occupants dead, including Morgan.

This is one of Hemingway's more marginal novels, along the lines of Across the River and into the Trees, and is in fact better known for the first of it's film adaptations.  The novels changing narrators and roving focus is a questionable choice, and has garnered divisive reviews.


THE FILMS:

To Have and Have Not (1944)

Length: 100 minutes
Director: Howard Hawks

To Have and Have Not is a classic of the Hollywood golden age.  Humphrey Bogart plays Harry Morgan, a captain of a charter ship in Martinique, a French colony in the Caribbean now under Nazi rule.  Morgan is no fan of the Nazis, but he remains staunchly apolitical.  Morgan and Eddie, played here as pure comic relief by Walter Brennan, turn down a job smuggling French resistance fighters into Martinique.  At the hotel bar, Morgan notices a young woman pick-pocket his charter's wallet (said charter owed him a little under a thousand dollars, and claimed he'd need to cash a check the next morning).  Morgan confronts the girl, and discovers that the charter had nearly two grand in cash and traveler's checks, as well as a plane ticket out of Martinique for the next morning.  The woman introduces herself as Marie Browning (Lauren Bacall, in her first film role), and together they confront the charter.  But the revolutionaries are attacked in the hotel bar, and the charter catches a stray bullet.  Morgan is questioned by the Gestapo and has his money confiscated.  In need of cash, he agrees to help the French resistance fighters.  As the film goes on, his relationship with Browning and desire to help the resistance grows.  The film also has an affable bar singer/pianist.

If the plot sounds a bit like Casablanca, that's because it is.  Casablanca was a big hit, and the studios wanted to strike while the iron was hot.  What's especially interesting is that one of the screenwriters was William Faulkner, who was not Hemingway's biggest fan.  I can't imagine it caused him much heartache to cut a lot of the Hemingway from To Have and Have Not.


The Breaking Point (1950)

Length: 97minutes
Director: Michael Curtiz

The Breaking Point stars John Garfield as Harry Morgan, a charter boat captain who ferries between Newport, California and Mexico.  His charter has them take him and a young, beautiful woman to Mexico.  The woman, Leona Charles (Patrice Neal), attempts to seduce Morgan, but is rebuffed.  After the charter strands Morgan, Leona, and Morgan's mate Wesley in Mexico, Morgan agrees to smuggle some Chinese immigrants aboard his ship.  When the man who hired him tries to double cross him, Morgan kills him and dumps his body in the ocean before releasing the immigrants on the Mexican coast.  When he gets back to California, he finds that one of the immigrants identified his boat, and it's being confiscated by the coast guard.

Morgan's relationship with his wife Lucy (Phyllis Thaxter) and their two daughters is a major part of the novel, and the relationship is fantastically complex.  Not melodramatic, mind you, but they clearly love each other very much but have their own issues and insecurities, and his continuing friendship with Leona Charles throws a small wrinkle into things.

Morgan finds out that the boat was released due to the efforts of the crooked lawyer that facilitated the deal with the Chinese.  The lawyer blackmails Morgan with the knowledge of the murder, and gets him to ferry some robbers to Mexico.  Morgan decides to double cross the robbers and turn them in for the reward.  Unfortunately, Wesley is on the boat when the robbers arrive, and they kill him.  Some time later, there's a shootout, on the boat, and Morgan is the only survivor, but he'll need his arm amputated.


The Gun Runners (1958)

Length: 83 minutes
Director: Don Siegel

The Gun Runners stars Audie Murphy as Sam Martin, captain of a charter boat that runs between Cuba and the Florida keys.  He works with an alcoholic first mate named Harvey (Everett Sloane).  A combination of a crooked charter and a gambling problem land Martin in money troubles.  He takes on a man named Hanagan (Eddie Albert) and his beautiful girlfriend Eva (Gita Hall) to Havana for what Martin believes is an affair, but is really a meeting for an arms deal with the Cuban revolutionaries which ends up with Hanagan shooting a Cuban military officer.   When they get back to the keys, Martin tells his wife what happened.  Lucy Martin, played by Patricia Owens, is the perfect wife.  Beautiful, supportive, trusting, their relationship is completely without trouble, despite the obvious troubles in their lives.

Anyway, Hanagan buys the papers on Martin's boat, and forces Martin to smuggle the guns and a revolutionary into Cuba.  When the revolutionary realizes that most of the boxes of guns are empty, Hanagan kills him.  They discover that Harvey had been hiding on the ship, and he jumps overboard when Martin gets them close to a shoreline.  Martin takes a bullet, but kills all the bad guys (which is completely believable; Murphy received the medal of honor for single-handedly holding off an entire company of German infantry).  He picks up Harvey, and the two head home.

Murphy did a lot of Westerns and war movies, and the director is best known for crime/action movies, most notably Dirty Harry and Escape from Alcatraz (although those were after The Gun Runners.  Siegel directed the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers as well as a bunch of crime thrillers with titles like Riot in Cell Block 11, Crime in the Streets, Private Hell 36).  The Gun Runners tries to keep some of this aesthetic, but it's hit or miss.



THE BEST ADAPTATION:

The Breaking Point (1950)

While none of the films go into the rich/poor issue as Hemingway does, The Breaking Point at least attempts to with Leona Charles, the beautiful socialite.  There is much more similarity with the plot of the novel in general, as Garfield is a bit darker than Murphy's Sam Martin, and less of a smooth talking maverick than Bogart's Morgan.  The relationship between Morgan and his wife is complex and sincere, whereas this relationship is absent in To Have and Have Not and drastically simplified in The Gun Runners.



THE BEST FILM:

Tie-
To Have and Have Not (1944)
The Breaking Point (1950)

"You know how to whistle, don't you?"

I know, declaring a tie is a bit of a cop out.  But these movies are both fantastic and I honestly can't choose.  I've already discussed the relationship in The Breaking Point, but I haven't mentioned the incredible chemistry between Bogart and Bacall (who ended up getting married).  To Have and Have Not also has some great music, and fantastic acting.  While The Gun Runners is a solid film, it's not on the level of the other two.  Audie Murphy may have been one of the greatest soldiers of the twentieth century, but Bogart and Garfield are better actors.  These are two very different movies, the former lighter in tone with a strong romantic core, while the latter is darker and morally ambiguous.  Both films had excellent directors, and in an ironic twist, the film that wasn't trying to repeat Casablanca was directed by Michael Curtiz, who directed Casablanca in 1942.


Anyway, check back next week when I'll look at W. Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge (1944), and it's two adaptations.

The Razor's Edge (1946) starring Tyrone Power
The Razor's Edge (1984) starring Bill Murray (which is a pretty weird casting decision.  I'm interested to see how it pans out.)

Some Clickhole

If you don't know already, clickhole.com is the Onion's response to Buzzfeed.  And, every now and then, they have some great lit-themed posts.  Specifically their advice from eight famous authors and the absolutely hilarious series of letters between Hemingway and Fitzgerald discussing early drafts of The Great Gatsby. 

Friday Before & After Quiz #1

Time for the first weekly brainteaser installment!  Here's how the game works:  You get a synopsis of a story, and you have to figure out the title.  The title will be a combination of the two sources (books, plays, movies, tv shows) that are combined to form the synopsis. For example:

After the Union Army ends her idyllic antebellum lifestyle, Scarlett O'Hara works to devise an unbreakable code based on the Navajo language.

The solution is: Gone with the Windtalkers.  (A combination of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind and the 2002 film Windtalkers.)  Some leeway will be taken with articles at the beginning of titles, but all answers can be determined from just the information provided.  Here are your five for this Friday:

1. Ernest Hemingway describes his early days in the South of Westeros.

2. Frodo and Sam take a walking tour of Suffolk.

3. A middle-aged black chauffeur is hired to drive a white young American girl on her fateful Roman holiday.

4. Three French sinners must spend eternity locked in Banksy's first art gallery exhibition.

5. A group of Prague-based intellectuals and free thinkers struggle to deal with Soviet oppression, the fleetingness of life, and a portal that lets them enter the consciousness of an American actor.

Scroll down for solutions!

1. A Moveable Feast for Crows (A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway (1964) and A Feast for Crows by G. R. R. Martin (2005))

2. The Lord of the Rings of Saturn or The Fellowship of the Rings of Saturn (The Lord of the Rings series by J.R.R. Tolkien (1955) and The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald (1995))

3. Driving Miss Daisy Miller (Driving Miss Daisy (1989 film) and Daisy Miller by Henry James (1879)

4. No Exit through the Gift Shop (No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre (1944 play) and Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010 film))

5. The Unbearable Lightness of Being John Malkovich (The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera (1984) and Being John Malkovich (1999))

Competitive Bad Writing

It's one thing to make fun of unintentionally bad writing.  There's Philosophy and Literature's famous, if short lived, bad writing contest, in which they highlight the worst in published academic writing, with the stated goal of exposing the use of technical jargon and impenetrable syntax as disguises for lack of insight.  Since 1993, Literary Review has awarded their annual 'bad sex in fiction' award.  Winners(?) of that honor include heavyweights like Tom Wolfe (for I Am Charlotte Simmons) and Norman Mailer (for The Castle in the Forest).  But, like the Razzies for film, these are awards for unintentional bad writing.  No one sets out to write a book or publish an essay with the goal of winning one of these awards.  No, it's a special kind of contest that gets people to produce wretched content on purpose.  

The first big, annual, bad-writing contest I could find began in 1977 and ran to 2005.  Originally a promotional even for Harry's American Bar & Grill, The International Imitation Hemingway Contest, also known simply as the Bad Hemingway Contest, was a runaway success, prompting submissions from amateurs and famous writers alike.   Here's an example from the 1986 winner, The Snooze of Kilimanjaro by Mark Silber:

Now he would never write the things he had saved to write until he learned to spell them. For instance, accommodation. One C, two Ms, or the other way around? He wasn’t sure. Or chrysanthemum? On rugged Kilimanjaro, there was not even a dictionary.

“How do they know I’m dying?” he asked the woman, indicating the crowd of undertakers, florists and wake caterers who were gathering at the edge of the campsite. “Is it the odor?”

“Of your poop?” she asked. “Or your poetry?”

She knew how to hurt him this woman, this female being, this person of the nonmale persuasion. And he would have hurt her back, at least challenged her to a thumb wrestle, if he hadn’t felt it just then. The cold stale breath.

Death.

 Presumably inspired by the IIHC's success, the Faux Faulkner award was created in 1989.  (Both the Hemingway and Faulkner awards were later sponsored by United Airlines, which ended its sponsorship of both in 2005.)  Perhaps the most prestigious extant bad-writing award is the Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest.  Edward George Bulwer-Lytton was a Victorian novelist, whose novel Paul Clifford (1830) infamously begins with the line: It was a dark and stormy night...  The Bulwer-Lytton, run by the English Department at San Jose State University, has been giving out their annual prize since 1982.  Winners produce the worst first lines to novels from a variety of genres.  The 2014 winner:

  When the dead moose floated into view the famished crew cheered – this had to mean land! – but Captain Walgrove, flinty-eyed and clear headed thanks to the starvation cleanse in progress, gave fateful orders to remain on the original course and await the appearance of a second and confirming moose. — Elizabeth (Betsy) Dorfman, Bainbridge Island, WA    

Or one of my favorites from this year, the winner of the purple prose category: 

Cole kissed Anastasia, not in a lingering manner as a connoisseur might sip a glass of '82 La Pin, but open-mouthed and desperate, like a hobo wrapping his mouth around a bottle of Strawberry Ripple in the alley behind the 7-11. -- Terri Meeker, Nixa, MO   

Typically, bad-writing contests seem to be named 'in honor of' specific writers, and take on the tone of good-natured joking rather than mockery.  While the Bulwer-Lytton is the only major annual bad-writing contest I know of that's still giving out prizes, smaller once-off contests pop up frequently.  Enjoy the following video, in which Neil Gaiman reads the winners of a special Bad-Gaiman contest.

10 More Short Books You Should Read

A couple weeks ago, the Huffington Post ran an article titled "These Amazing Classic Books Are So Short You Have No Excuse Not to Read Them."  It included the usual suspects, Heart of Darkness, The Great Gatsby, Animal Farm, The Turn of the Screw.  There list is definitely worth checking out, but I thought I'd add a few of my own suggestions to the mix.  Here are ten great books under 200 pages:  


CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD by Gabriel García Márquez (120 pages):

García Márquez is one of the best known Latin American writers of our time.  His 1981 novel follows an unnamed narrator's attempt to reconstruct what happened in his small hometown decades earlier.  Everyone in the town knew that the Vicario brothers were planning to kill Santiago Nasar, except, seemingly Nasar himself.


THE BALLAD OF THE SAD CAFE by Carson McCullers (71 pages):  

Carson McCullers is a writer in the Southern Gothic tradition, like Shirley Jackson and Flannery O'Conner.  The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (which usually comes with a few other stories), shows a haunting portrait of a small town, and the rise and ruin of Miss Amelia at the hands of the grotesque Cousin Lymon.

SULA by Toni Morrison (192 pages):

Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison's 1973 novel Sula focuses on a town and two women, and has one hell of an opening line: "Except for World War II, nothing ever interfered with the celebration of National Suicide Day."

THE CRYING OF LOT 49 by Thomas Pynchon (183 pages): 

Probably the only Pynchon book that will take you less than a month to read, but this slim 1966 volume has a lot of depth to it.  Oedipa Maas wades through a world populated with equally improbable names and even less probable explanations, as she stumbles through what is either a massive conspiracy, a colossal prank, or her own paranoia.  


FAHRENHEIT 451 by Ray Bradbury (179 pages):

"It was a pleasure to burn..." A great first line for one of the great dystopian novels in American fiction.  Guy Montag is a fireman: one of the chosen few who make sure that no book is left unburned.  A treatise on the evil of censorship and illiteracy, the danger of pacification through television, as well as a compelling story make this a fantastic read.

THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA by Ernest Hemingway (127 pages):

Published in 1952, this is the novel that restarted Hemingway's career.  It is a prime example of Hemingway's unparalleled style.

THE HITCHHIKERS GUIDE TO THE GALAXY by Douglas Adams (180 pages):

Published in 1979, Hitchhikers Guide is the first in the world's longest trilogy (the series has five books, whereas most trilogies tend to peter out around the third), this is the one of the great examples of absurdist humor and genre parody.

THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY by Thornton Wilder (138 pages):

Wilder's 1927 novel focuses on a disaster.  A bridge that has stood for a century collapses, and five people fall to their death.  Brother Juniper decides to try to understand the lives of those who died, and determine if it was all a meaningless accident or something more meaningful.

POST OFFICE by Charles Bukowski (149 Pages):

"Maybe I'll write a novel, I thought.  And then I did."  Love him or hate him (and I've seen plenty of both), Bukowski has had a significant impact on 'dirty realism' and can be pretty damn funny.  His 1971 debut novel is semi-autobiographical, the author surrogate Henry Chinaski has to deal with a soul-crushing position working in the post office.

A POLITICAL FABLE by Robert Coover (88 pages):

Originally written and published in 1968 under the more descriptive title, The Cat in the Hat Runs for President, A Political Fable is a bizarre book.  Allegorical and surreal, it will answer questions you never knew you wanted to ask like, "How many Republicans can be swallowed whole by a whale" and "Just how far do you have to go to drive the opposition quite literally insane."