Iron Man 2 opens a summer of hero-heavy movies: Robin Hood, Prince of Persia, The A-Team, The Last Airbender – heroes, heroes. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll see these movies and I’ll have fun, but honestly the things that’s missing in all of these movies is strong female characters that function as something more than plot points.
When I say strong I don’t mean many of the women seen nowadays in popular movies, where “strong” seems to mean white-collar job and type-A personality. I’m talking about what I got into when looking at Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise, where the character’s defined by what they do and what they want rather than what they are or the job they have.
Which is partially why I’m not addressing Casablanca in this column. I mean, I’ve been avoiding the big historical movies like Birth of a Nation, Gone With the Wind, and Citizen Kane on purpose, trying to bring out more obscure movies, but with Casablanca I’ve got a bit of a beef.
My secret shame is that while I adore the craft of Casablanca, I’ve never enjoyed it on a gut level, and the reason for that is simple: Isla Lund is a whining sap. Yes, Ingrid Bergman’s luminous, but Isla Lund always struck me as more of a well-cast plot device than a character.
She wants Victor Laszlo, then she wants Rick, then she want Laszlo, and then she wants, what? Justice? Victory? To avoid regret? I’ll tell you what she wants: whatever helps the plot.
Which is why I was so delighted with this week’s case in point: 1944’s To Have and Have Not.
Howards Hawks worked with Ernest Hemingway to completely re-plot his novel of the same name. Once they laid the groundwork, the screenplay went through four writers, including William Faulkner, who re-worked it even more.
As you might expect with novelistic thinkers like Hemingway and Faulkner involved, To Have and Have Not doesn’t have the taught structure of the play-turned movie Casablanca. The movie rolls out more like a novel, with plotlines and relationships that weave in and out of each other, episodic rhythms, and a more subtly drawn relationship to World War II. That said, with its story of intrigue in Vichy-era Martinique, its similarities to Casablanca are unmistakable.
At the heart of the movie is the relationship between Humphrey Bogart’s Harry Morgan and Lauren Bacall’s Marie Browning. You know that clip of Lauren Bacall you always see with the “You do know how to whistle” bit? That’s in this movie as the climax of a scene where 19 year old Lauren Bacall seduces Humphrey Bogart – a scene added after Hawks cast Bacall in the role to highlight her sheer star power.
Part of what makes her Marie Browning so compelling is the way Howard Hawks plays her against that recent memory of Ilsa Lund in Casablanca, which had won the Academy Award for Best Picture two short years before. While Lund functions only as a love interest, Browning caries an entire world with her, a world of isolation every bit as weighty as Harry Morgan’s. Howard Hawks couldn’t stomach a woman who saw her wartime role as providing a happy home life for some Eastern European pansy
Browning and Morgan work together from their first interaction to the last. We watch as they discover that they’re a match for one another, and through their teamwork they outmatch everyone else in the movie. Unlike Lund, Browning isn’t just a beautiful woman in soft-focus, she’s a partner and equal – and it is only because they can go toe to toe with each other that they break through their tough exteriors and find that loneliness inside, a loneliness that is the real reason why they are so connected.
As much as I love that last scene in Casablanca, I think now I’m going to watch the To Have and to Have Not when I want me some WWII romance.
Next week: back to Russia and back in time.
