TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT

“You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and… blow.” With these words, 19-year-old Betty Joan Perske became screen legend Lauren Bacall, entrancing America and Humphrey Bogart in equal measure. The result of a bet between Ernest Hemingway and director Howard Hawks that a good film could be distilled from the author’s worst novel, To Have and Have Not stands as one of the greatest, if least faithful, treatments of Hemingway’s prose. The story concerns a fishing-boat captain (Bogart) persuaded to smuggle French resistance fighters into Martinique, but the Bogart/Bacall chemistry (inspired by Hawks and wife Nancy Keith, whose pet names “Slim” and “Steve” are appropriated) accounts for its immortality. With piano-man Hoagy Carmichael accompanying Bacall’s memorable rendition of “How Little We Know.”