 They say you can't have everything but To Have and Have Not comes close. 
This one has been a long time coming to Pulp Intl. To Have and Have Not. We love this flick. We never bothered to highlight it because it's so familiar to so many, but with the Pulp Intl. girlfriends out of town (did we mention that yet?) we decided to revisit a few movies we've seen often. First off, we get it, Hemingway fans. The film mutilated his 1937 novel. But what a shock—Warner Brothers was not going to make a Marxist themed movie in 1944. Hemingway may have, we like to imagine, wanted to keep the book out of Hollywood's hands for that very reason. But when Warners came across with a fat offer he was like, “Well, sure, okay, I suppose that amount of money will take the sting out of you whitewashing my Marxist opus.” You, see everyone has a price.
 Howard Hawks directed, and Jules Furthman and William Faulkner wrote a screenplay that changed the location of the novel, its time period, its subtext, and its characters. Basically, Warners wanted a follow-up to Casablanca, and that's exactly what they got, though To Have and Have Not differs from Casablanca by being light-hearted in general, and wickedly comical in parts. But there are also thrills aplenty. The basic idea is Humphrey Bogart plays a diffident charter boat captain in French Martinique who finds himself drawn into World War II thanks to an idealistic anti-Vichy cabal that plans to rescue a French patriot imprisoned on Devil's Island.
Everything and everybody in the film is great. Lauren Bacall, in her debut, brings just the right tone to her character Marie Browning, Walter Brennan puts on a physical acting clinic as Bogart's alcoholic sidekick, and as the Vichy administrator of Martinique, Dan Seymour channels Major Strasser from Casablanca, adding a touch of torpor meant to disguise his snake-deadly nature. The film also adds great music performances in the down and dirty Bar du Zombie and the café of Hotel Marquis, with Hoagie Carmichael taking on the Sam role from Casablanca. To Have and Have Not is so iconic it has been studied in university courses and written of in modern treatises about race. The latter is a lot to pile onto this lightweight adventure. Set in the Caribbean, it tries to at least portray a high level of racial inclusiveness, though not perfectly.
There's one more reason to watch the movie. We've seen it so much we've developed a drinking game from it. We've developed lots of drinking games from movies, but don't generally play them when the Pulp Intl. girlfriends are around (did we mention they're out of town?). Take a shot every time someone throws something in the water. That's it. Bottles, matches, whatever. If you're really brave, take a shot every time someone litters, whether at sea, on land, or indoors. It's interesting to observe littering behavior from an era when the environment was thought to be boundless and impossible to ruin. As members of a generation trained to get our garbage in a receptacle at all costs, the polluting here is really funny to see. 10 out of 10 for this movie. Watch it. Love it. Watch it again. It premiered in the U.S. today in 1944.         
 Bogart and Bacall arrive in Italy in Grande style. 
Above, a beautiful poster for Il grande sonno, better known as The Big Sleep, with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Was Bacall a redhead? Well, she was in Italy. At the top of the poster you see that this played at the Politeama cinema. Rome? Naples? Palermo? Genoa? Cinemas with that name abounded, so we have no way of knowing exactly where the poster was displayed. You'll see the art attributed to Luigi Martinati on various websites, but we don't think so. It doesn't look like his work, and it's actually signed “Nico” near Bacall's right thigh. Martinati did paint a couple of posters for this movie, though, which we may upload later. We've talked about The Big Sleep—as has every other film noir related site on the internet. We don't have any special insights, but if you're curious what we said anyway, check here. After opening in the U.S. in 1946, The Big Sleep arrived in Italy today in 1947, which the poster tells us was martedì—a Tuesday.
 You know what they say about men with big hats. 
In this production still from 1946's The Big Sleep featuring a bizarrely large hat in the foreground, Martha Vickers falls into Humphrey Bogart's arms. Bogart, under normal circumstances, would have been smart to likewise fall for Miss Vickers, but his other choice in the movie was Lauren Bacall. Which means it was she who got hat, head, and all the rest.
 Trust me, I can do this for a long, long time. 
Lauren Bacall gives the camera the look she made famous, and which gave male filmgoers palpitations. Ironically, the look came about because in her first film To Have and Have Not she was so nervous her head was shaking, so she kept her chin down to suppress the tremors, which required her to look from under her eyelids. Or so the story goes. This particular photo was made for her thriller Confidential Agent, and it dates from 1945.
 Italian master’s genius spanned decades.
Back in August we showed you a poster from Luigi Martinati, who worked from 1923 to 1967, and said we'd get back to him. Below, seven more great promotional pieces with his distinctive signature on each.
 
To Have and Have Not 
On the Waterfront 
Phantom of the Rue Morgue 
Humoresque 
Flamingo Road 
The Wrong Man
 If only their taste in mates matched their taste in music.  
The Noir City Film Festival continues its challenging 2016 slate when it screens another pair of classics tonight—Love Me or Leave Me and Young Man with a Horn. Both are musical dramas, and though neither is a noir, both take viewers to dark places. In the 1920s period piece Love Me or Leave Me velvety-voiced Doris Day stars as a struggling chanteuse given a break by gangster James Cagney. He quickly becomes her manager and uses force to launch a national career, blind to the fact that she has real talent and can succeed with no strongarm man to back her. But Cagney doesn't see her talent—show business is gangsterism for him, and bullying is how he operates. When he finally bullies his way into marriage with Day his constant rage transforms her into an indifferent and isolated woman. This is one of those movies that will, especially in a full house in San Francisco, trigger groans of distaste as Cagney ticks all the worst boxes of reprehensible human beings—treating women like meat, slapping them around, trying to obtain sex by force, dispensing emotional abuse, and using violence as a tool in every situation, against both women and men. But the audience may be just as hard on Day by the final reel for   possessing a level of forgiveness that is alien to people circa 2016. Love Me or Leave Me is an excellent movie—cringe inducing in parts, but deeply involving, and perhaps destined to be the most discussed film of the festival. Day stars in Young Man with a Horn as well, singing again, this time with Kirk Douglas, who plays a gifted child musician who grows up to be an ace trumpet player thanks to the tutelage of an elder jazzman. Unfortunately he has a congenital inability to conform, particularly when it means playing dance band music over improvisational jazz. The arrival of a femme fatale—in the person of the awesome Lauren Bacall—brings a whole new set of troubles. The gender roles are reversed from Love Me or Leave Me, but the films each explore how a bad relationship saps the joy from the soul of an artist, and Day is winningly sweet in both. Perhaps by now you’ve noticed the theme that has emerged with this year’s Noir City offerings—they are all about artists or their artistic output. In Rear Window and The Public Eye it’s photographers, in The Two Mrs. Carrolls it’s a painter, In a Lonely Place and The Bitter Stems deal with a screenwriter and journalist, Deception and Humroresque look at classical musicians, and The Dark Corner and Crack Up deal with art as   commerce and contraband respectively. The theme is nice, but once again two films will be screening tonight that present yet another challenge to noir purists attending this year’s fest. Both films are great, but we’ll be surprised if organizers stray this far from the form next year.
 Slipping into darkness. 
Lauren Bacall appears here in what may be her most famous publicity image, gazing from the darkness with a knowing, mischievous, heavy-lidded look she made her trademark in The Big Sleep, Dark Passage, and To Have and Have Not, three films that were a sort of informal trifecta of film noir. She also appeared in Key Largo, less a noir than a melodrama, but still excellent. All co-starred Humphrey Bogart, who she married in the middle of this run of films and remained married to until his death in 1957. Bacall joins him more than half a century later, aged eighty-nine.
 Everybody who was anybody was there. 
This photo made today in 1954 shows American singer/actress Abbe Lane posing outside Ciro’s nightclub in West Hollywood, California. Lane had begun in show business as a child actress, but became world famous after she married bandleader Xavier Cugat and began fronting his group as a singer. Although this is a famous photo, one you can find elsewhere on the internet, we thought it was worth posting anyway, not just because of Lane, but because supper clubs like Ciro’s really don’t exist anymore. Ciro’s, which by the way was unrelated to the many famous Ciro’s that existed in Europe during the Jazz Age, from its opening in 1940 to its closing in 1957 was a favorite spot of screen personalities, singers, producers, and writers, a place where the night’s meet-ups and trysts were reported in the next day’s gossip columns. Below you see Lane and Cugat, Charlie Chaplin with Paulette Goddard, Lane onstage fronting Cugat’s rumba band, Cary Grant with Betsy Drake, Lucille Ball with Desi Arnaz, Jr., and others.          
 Reports of her retirement were greatly exaggerated. 
Here’s an interesting little item we found on an auction site. It’s a copy of the Argentine film magazine Mundo Argentino with Lauren Bacall, née Betty Joan Perske on the cover. The inset text reads, “Lauren Bacall says goodbye forever to Hollywood,” and while she did disappear from films for four years, she returned in 1963 and has continued acting all the way up until 2012 so far. This cover appeared today in 1959.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1916—Goldwyn Pictures Formed
In the U.S.A., Samuel Goldfish and Edgar Selwyn establish Goldwyn Pictures, which becomes one of the most successful independent film studios in Hollywood. Goldfish also takes the opportunity to legally change his last name to Goldwyn. 1916—First Battle of the Somme Ends
In France, British Expeditionary Force commander Douglas Haig calls off a battle against entrenched German troops which had begun on July 1, 1916. Known as the Battle of the Somme, this action resulted in one of the greatest losses of life in modern history—over three-hundred thousand dead for a net gain of about seven miles of land. 1978—Jonestown Cult Commits Mass Suicide
In the South American country of Guyana, Jim Jones leads his Peoples Temple cult in a mass suicide that claims 918 lives, including over 270 children. Congressman Leo J. Ryan, who had been visiting the makeshift cult complex known as Jonestown to investigate claims of abuse, is shot by members of the Peoples Temple as he tries to escape from a nearby airfield with several cult members who asked for his protection. 1973—Nixon Proclaims His Innocence
While in Orlando, Florida, U.S. President Richard Nixon tells four-hundred Associated Press managing editors, "I am not a crook." The false statement comes to symbolize Nixon's presidency when facts are uncovered that prove he is, indeed, a crook.
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