Charlie Feldman had his brainstorm in the spring of 1942 during an evening at Jack Warner’s house. Among the films the mogul screened that night was a Paramount short that contained excerpts of a speech by Vice President Henry Wallace stressing the importance of the “common man” in the worldwide “people’s war” against fascism. Stirred by this notion, Feldman shortly conceived of an episodic film that would spotlight that fight as it was being carried on in several different parts of the world. To begin putting the pieces together, he enlisted the enthusiastic help of his client Edward Chodorov, and by summer’s end they had assembled an extraordinary team of writers, including Clifford Odets, Lillian Hellman, Dalton Trumbo, Ben Hecht, Pearl Buck, Edna Ferber, Maxwell Anderson, Leon Feuchtwanger, Franz Werfel, Sidney Buchman, George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, and, for the music, Jerome Kern.
While Chodorov concentrated on coordinating the writers’ work, Feldman spent weeks twisting arms in a vain attempt to convince film industry leaders to get behind his desire to make Common Man on a noncommercial charity basis. In his view, the war effort justified, even demanded, this one major exception to business as usual in Hollywood, and he tried to shame key organizations, notably the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America and the Screen Actors Guild, into supporting him. The idea was that no one would be paid, no star would work more than twelve days, and all profits would go to a charitable war fund. Numerous Feldman clients and friends, including Marlene Dietrich, Irene Dunne, Randolph Scott, Merle Oberon, Jean Arthur, and Margaret Sullavan, volunteered to participate, and directors Alexander Korda and Lewis Milestone both expressed an interest. But the MPPDA showed not the slightest inclination to help Feldman; Chodorov noted “We have met unbelievable opposition from high places in getting this project rolling, not the least of which has been the recently passed ruling by the Actors’ Guild Board prohibiting its members from participating in ‘charity’ pictures.”
Though the industry at large would not support a film to benefit the war effort, several studios were interested. Because of the superior profit percentage he could obtain there, Feldman was initially inclined to place the picture at Universal, but the price tag was out of its league. MGM and Fox entered the hunt, but by the beginning of 1943 the patriotic fervor of Jack Warner carried the day, with Louella Parsons trumpeting that “Jack is so sold on the idea the big budget didn’t phase him.” Under the terms of the deal, 50 percent of the net profits would go to United Nations Group charities and Warner Bros. would get the other half, with 2½ percent of the world gross going to the Motion Picture Relief Fund.
After spending time negotiating with the War Production Board in Washington, D.C., and enlisting the Time magazine foreign correspondent Stephen Laird and the radio writer Norman Corwin to help further with the script, Feldman officially announced the project at the beginning of 1943, with Dietrich, Charles Boyer, Claudette Colbert, Leslie Howard, and Ingrid Bergman as only the first of the many stars who would appear. He could easily have decided to use as many directors as there would be episodes, but it was thought better to employ one director to oversee, shape, and give a consistent tone to the work of the many writers. When it was clear that For Whom the Bell Tolls wasn’t going to fall his client’s way, Feldman immediately took the new project to Hawks.
Quite prepared to make this his major contribution to the war effort, stimulated by the prospect of working with so many outstanding writers, challenged by the staggering logistics, and sharing Feldman’s belief in the film’s commercial potential, Hawks agreed to sign on, as long as Warner, and not Hal Wallis, would oversee the production for the studio. Nervous that the film would miss its historical moment, Feldman got the gears moving as fast as he could, prodding Hawks to settle on several particular stories and whip them into shape. The director immediately called on Faulkner to write two of the episodes and made overtures to Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, and others for contributions. Joris Ivens, a celebrated Dutch documentary filmmaker, was later engaged as technical adviser for his intimate experience of the war and conditions in other countries.
As work pressed ahead at a rapid pace through the spring, the filmmakers found a way to frame the diverse episodes. “Abraham Lincoln Comes Home,” a cantata with music by Earl Robinson and libretto by Millard Lampell, portrayed the funeral procession of the assassinated president in a way that inspirationally conveyed the never-ending struggle for freedom; this would be wrapped around and threaded through the entire picture to lend it thematic continuity and growing resonance. Spinning off from this would be the numerous contemporary war stories: “The Diary of a Red Army Woman,” the story of a heroic Russian peasant girl who flies in bombing missions and loses her young husband in the war, written by Violet Atkins and William A. Bacher, from a story suggestion by Isabel Donald; “Ma-Ma Mosquito,” from a 1940 story by Dean S. Jennings about a tough old Chinese grandmother recognized by Chiang Kai-Shek for leading resistance against Japanese occupation; “American Sequence,” with a story by Hawks and dialogue by Faulkner; the “English Episode,” about a young British pilot, by John Rhodes Sturdy, the scenarist of Corvette K-225; “French Sequence” by Faulkner, in which a Frenchwoman, raped and prostituted by the Nazis, resists to help the Allies; “Greek Sequence,” by Hawks and Faulkner, based on the story “The Weapon,” by Georges Carousso, about how the Athenians resisted the Axis by mocking them; and a Norwegian story for Ingrid Bergman, which was never written. While retaining the basics of the original sources, Faulkner made at least three passes at the entire screenplay himself and, more than anyone, can be considered the main author of the overall work.
The picture, now titled Battle Cry, was to open with a prologue defining a “battle cry” as something that “rises out of man’s spirit when those things are threatened which he has lived by and held above price,” something worth fighting for so that he and his family will “be not cast into slavery, which to a man who has once known freedom is worse than death.” A train whistle resembling the words “Free____dom! Free____dom!” turns into Paul Robeson’s voice chanting the same thing. Little black children scream, “Again, Uncle Paul! Go like a train again!” and he does. An old southern Negro explains to the kids that Lincoln’s body wasn’t actually on the Freedom Train “because Lincoln was freedom, and freedom wasn’t dead. So Abraham Lincoln wasn’t on that train.” At the end of the prologue, Robeson’s face is superimposed over a head-on shot of the locomotive as he sings the “Freed____dom!” cantata.
The action opens in early 1942 at the Springfield, Illinois, railway station. Young Fonda, who bears a certain resemblance to Abe Lincoln, is waiting to be transported off to a war he doesn’t understand. Grandpa explains that the nation has now got the same fight on its hands that Abe had—the fight for freedom and against slavery. The story then flashes back some seventy-seven years to when Grandpa, as a little boy, was standing at the same station watching Lincoln’s funeral train arrive.
Flashing forward, Fonda is now stuck in the African desert with a group of Americans, an English officer, and two prisoners, German and Italian officers. Among the Americans are a nineteen-year-old southerner named Akers; a paralyzed, stoical Negro soldier who goes by the name “Private America,” and a by-the-book army regular named Sergeant Reagan. The various episodes occur as stories told by these characters, and throughout the philosophical discussions generated by the men in the desert concerning their reasons for fighting and the importance of freedom, the image of the Freedom Train reappears.
After the telling of several stories, the mixed group votes on whether to stay put or forge ahead into the desert, and much is made of the democratic voting process. At this point the crippled Negro speaks out, saying that Abraham Lincoln gave him the vote and much more, but he questions, in the manner of Sergeant York, whether killing is right under any circumstances, given the decrees of the Bible.
The Freedom Train speeds by once again, with reenactments of Lincoln’s life and the shooting at Ford’s Theatre; t
hen the funeral train turns into a roaring express, with the cheering faces of American troops beaming from the windows.
The desert group votes to stay at their compound, upon which a Corporal Loughton tells the tragic “French Sequence.”
The climax begins at the desert outpost just before sunrise. A Nazi tank approaches, whereupon the sneaky German officer trains a commandeered machine gun on his captors, only to be shot by the Italian officer, who is shown throughout to be highly civilized, with his forced obedience to the German merely representing a temporary lapse. The tank and garrison continue to fire on each other, the noise finally blending into the sound of the Freedom Train, which is superimposed over fighting tanks and finally overcomes them as Robeson sings his cry for freedom. The trainful of G.I.s finally passes by, and the final image contains a slogan written on the last car: BERLIN TOKYO OR BUST.
On July 28, second-unit director Roy Davidson, who had done the miniature work on Air Force, shot 130 seconds of footage of burning wheat fields for the Russian and Chinese episodes in the San Fernando Valley. Four actors and thirty-six extras took part. This, alas, was all that was ever shot on Battle Cry. On August 4, word came down from the Warners front office to halt all work on the picture and to cease making any further charges against it, due to what was viewed as an alarmingly escalating budget, which had already climbed to $232,348 before filming even began. Stunned at the cancellation on the brink of production after so much work had been poured into it, Hawks and Feldman could only console themselves with the money they earned for not having made a picture. Having spent very little to buy them, the pair sold four of the diverse stories to Warner Bros. for $79,500, and Hawks personally collected the full $100,000 due him as salary for the second film under his five-picture deal. For his trouble, Faulkner received $17,340.
In so many ways, Battle Cry was antithetical to what Hawks generally preferred in a screen story: it was explicitly political, very liberal in slant, episodic, riddled with flashbacks, attentive to diverse cultures, and encompassing many different times and places. Reading the script, it is difficult to imagine Howard Hawks truly getting behind any of these conceits and sympathies. Yet one can only deeply regret that the picture was never made. Although its tone and stance come across clearly in the script, how successful it could have been as a unified, not to mention personal, film is not clear at all. It would have been fascinating to see if Hawks could have pulled together such an ambitious, over-reaching project, one so unlike anything else he ever attempted. It would have been one of a kind for Hollywood as well, but the system was not as conducive as it would become to this kind of mad, obsessive venture that threatened to spiral out of control as easily as it could clean up at the box office. And who would not have been curious to see a cast that was to have included, in addition to the stars previously mentioned, Gary Cooper (as Fonda), Bette Davis (as Ma-Ma Mosquito), Humphrey Bogart, Ida Lupino, Lauren Bacall, John Garfield, Ann Sheridan, and George Raft?
But it was not to be, so Hawks and a particularly disappointed Feldman had to assess their fall-back position. They didn’t know it for sure yet, but as it turned out they were sitting prettier than ever.
26
Not in the Script: To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep
Slim was his ideal woman. The things Slim missed, he put into Bacall.
—Christian Nyby
Howard Hawks tried many times to arrange a meeting between Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. The two great, proud authors always resisted the idea, however, so the closest Hawks, or anyone, ever came to getting them together was on the credits of To Have and Have Not. Hawks often claimed that when Hemingway turned down his offer to work on the adaptation and doubted that the director would ever be able to make a film from that novel, he taunted the author by saying, “I’ll get Faulkner to do it; he can write better than you can anyway.” This may well have been typical after-the-fact bravado on Hawks’s part, but there is no doubt that he took some perverse pleasure in having his genuinely good friend Faulkner rewrite his more arm’s-length pal Hem to his own specifications. However, it was a long time coming to that, and Faulkner was far from Hawks’s mind when he initially got around to figuring out how he would crack the nut of To Have and Have Not.
After having first visited Hemingway in Key West in 1939, Hawks had been forced to bide his time in tackling the picture because of his split with Howard Hughes. Originally, Hawks intended to do it as his second picture for Hughes, after The Outlaw. Hughes knew that Hemingway was in urgent need of cash in May 1939, when the author was still trying to finish writing For Whom the Bell Tolls, and induced him to sell it outright for a paltry ten thousand dollars. Four years later, Hughes would part with the book only for an enormous profit, especially if Hawks was the buyer, and the tycoon ended up forcing Hawks and Feldman to cough up $92,500 for the rights. This was one literary deal on which the two partners weren’t about to make a profit of their own; knowing full well what they had paid Hughes, Jack Warner reimbursed them for exactly the same amount.
For Hawks personally, this was unfortunate, because his reckless gambling losses, along with the expenses involved in the upkeep of Slim and Hog Canyon, had once again placed him in big hole. In June 1943, the IRS filed a levy with Warner Bros. against Hawks in order to collect $81,476 in unpaid back taxes. An arrangement was quickly made under which the studio initially withheld two thousand dollars per week from his five thousand-dollar salary; it was later altered to a 50 percent deduction of whatever his weekly paycheck might be (the amount varied between three and five thousand dollars, depending upon the advances he received at the start of a specific production). By September, Hawks urgently needed thirty thousand dollars in cash to pay off more gambling debts, and Warners obliged with an advance of 30 percent of his total salary for To Have and Have Not. Hawks thought nothing of withdrawing all the money from the household bank account to bet on races, leaving Slim holding the bag when trade and service people turned up demanding payment. As she put it, “His gambling was a compulsion that turned the entire household upside down.’
When Battle Cry fell apart, Hawks was ready to move along quickly to his next picture under his Warner Bros. contract, and they agreed on two films the director would do back-to-back. After the Hemingway story, Hawks would direct the film version of Dark Eyes, a 1943 Broadway farce about some Russian refugee actresses who, during a long weekend on a Long Island estate, convince a well-heeled capitalist to finance their play. Having paid far too much money for it, Warners was anxious to place it in reliable hands so that it would have a good chance to become a major film attraction.
To Have and Have Not suddenly became a “go” project when Humphrey Bogart agreed to star in it. After appearing in thirty-five films at Warner Bros. in seven years, Bogart had emerged overnight as a romantic, if still tough, leading man in Casablanca, and the studio was now anxious for him to follow up in the same vein. Barring any direct contribution from Hemingway himself—now a moot point in the wake of the huge success of For Whom the Bell Tolls—Hawks had always intended to use Jules Furthman on the adaptation, so shortly after Battle Cry came to its abrupt end, Furthman was put to work on the script, at $2,500 per week.
The way in which To Have and Have Not moved from page to screen has been analyzed by numerous scholars and from various points of view, with special attention to how the finished film does, and does not, reflect the contributions of Hemingway, Faulkner, and Hawks and, secondarily, Furthman and the whole Casablanca ethos. The various drafts of the screenplay have been combed over by several academics, notably by the Hemingway expert Frank M. Laurence, the Hawks specialist Gerald Mast, and the Faulkner scholar Bruce F. Kawin, who edited and wrote an introduction to the screenplay for publication. All of these writers offer valuable insights into the evolving, quicksilver nature of this most unexpected and near-miraculous adaptation, as do numerous other Hawks critics and commentators on the Bogart-Bacall phenomenon.
From almost eve
ry possible angle, however, this is the decisive film of Howard Hawks’s career, the one in which nearly all of his vital interests intersect in some way. Hawks aficionados can argue about the relative differences in greatness between To Have and Have Not and, say, Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, Only Angels Have Wings, and Rio Bravo. But if one isn’t turned on by To Have and Have Not, if it doesn’t make a viewer “see the light,” as it were, then it is doubtful if any of his films will.
Hawks scholars can also use the making of the film, as well as the result, as a perfect example of the auteur theory in action. The director on this picture was surrounded by several highly powerful personalities and artistic voices: perhaps the two greatest novelists of the first half of the twentieth century, another very individualistic writer, a major star with his own indelible image, and a studio with, arguably, the strongest “personality” in the film industry. And yet, through the strength of his own will, Howard Hawks was able to bend all these exceptional forces to effect a maximum expression of his own worldview. No matter the degrees to which one can detect elements of Hemingway, Faulkner, Casablanca, or, for that matter, Conrad, Sternberg, and the demands of Hollywood escapism, the film To Have and Have Not is, beyond doubt, exactly the work its director intended it to be, and would have been nothing like this in the hands of anyone else.
Strictly from his own perspective, Hawks accomplished many things with To Have and Have Not: he finally worked from a story by his favorite modern author and stood it on its head, collaborated with his two preferred screenwriters, added some of the screen’s most famous dialogue to the Hollywood anthology, elaborated the persona of one of the cinema’s greatest stars, achieved his long-cherished dream of creating a new star from whole cloth, unintentionally launched a celebrated and enduring love affair, made a screen personality out of a popular song composer, named his leading man and lady after himself and his wife, had at least two affairs on the side (and did not have another he desired), made a great deal of money, and created a work that has stood the test of time as one of the great, audacious romantic-comic melodramas.
Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood Page 48