Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 45

Bogart, Bacall, and Howard Hawks

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grooming of newcomer Bacall to Bogart! It referred to the male star as “veteran in
timing, voice inflection and all the tricks of technique” who “generously passed on
his experience gained knowledge” to ensure Bacall’s “socko debut.”'^ Consistent
with Bogart’s combat roles and post-C asablanca star status, opponents “fighting
with pistols” lose to the patriotic masculine star. In line with red meat promotional
strategy, violence and sex are heightened and conflated. Drawing on recognized
crime roles at the studio to capitalize on rugged romantic appeal, Warners’ release
states: “Bogart dishes out violent death in the best Bogart tradition. Even so, the
combustion crown for the film goes to tawny topped Bacall. She lighted the spark”
and “whipped it to flame.” It promoted Bacall as “sultry,” the first woman Bogart
“lived to keep” and "maintaining his lease on her love life through the currently
filming The B ig Sleep.""
Reversing gender roles, publicity cited Bacall having to be embarrassingly
assertive in boldly initiating “sex charged situations” with “Bogey playing hard to
get” in the screen effort to “prove that he can love like he can fight.” This is not
unlike the transitional strategy of easing men back from wartime combat into
relationships with women in the home— in a move from violence to love, and
toward sexual confrontations with transgressively assertive career women who
were working during the war.
In “fumigating” the narrative for the PC A, Warners noted Hemingway’s
Cuban “revolutionists were purified by making them DeGaullists fighting the Vichy
French for control of Martinique” in a wartime reformulation capitalizing on
Casablanca"s success. Publicity also established the milieu of the film. “Settings
for the Hemingway story harmonized with the mood of smoldering sex and violent
intrigue. A smoke hazed cabaret interior, more than vaguely reminiscent of
Casablanca; the dingy but picturesque waterfront of Fort de France” that was
“duplicated from photographs” to ensure “authenticity” from an “Army regiment
stationed in Martinique.” It noted “fog shrouded island landings and open sea”
with “narrowly sinister hotel corridors and a decidedly masculine bedroom.”'^ Not
surprisingly, in a cultural and production context growing out of the war, this trend
toward “authenticity” often related to violence. This tapping into a hard-hitting
milieu paralleled wartime experience, realistic newsreels and combat films. A
prominent trend toward realism proliferated during the postwar period—on screen
(in Hollywood and abroad, as in Italian neorealism growing out of the war), and on
the New York stage. This pervasive realism contributed to the development of film
noh% in a wartime symbiosis between documentary and Hollywood narrative films
related to the wartime psyche emerging in noir.
Warner Bros, publicity for To H ave and H ave N ot read, “When Humphrey
Bogart kills a man in a motion picture, he wants to do it right.” In this wartime
production and promotion context, it explained how the actor and director Hawks