“I’m glad you’re on our side.”
“I’m not. I’m getting paid.”

Casablanca rehash though it may be, Howard Hawks’ To Have and Have Not is in some ways a superior film. It’s certainly equal in terms of entertainment value. Humphrey Bogart plays the captain of a charter fishing boat operating out of a Vichy-controlled port in the Caribbean—a cynical, fiercely independent, and apolitical man—who gradually finds himself pulled into World War II to protect a perpetually drunken old buddy (Walter Brennan) and to win the affections of a sultry transient (Lauren Bacall, in star-making her debut) who washed up in the hotel bar asking for a match.

Marked by Hawks’ clear directing style, a racy script, incredible chemistry amongst the principal cast members, bountiful diegetic music (Hoagy Carmichael), and a generally charming atmosphere, To Have and Have Not does not aim for sentiment in the way that Casablanca does, and thus echoes the standard Hawksian theme of bonding under political or moral pressures instead of the emotive sweep of romance and noble sacrifice of the more famous film. It also regularly places its characters in imminent danger where Michael Curtiz’s film plays out as more of a calculated game of chess.

If Bacall isn’t necessarily Ingrid Bergman’s peer as a teenaged, first-time actress, she is a more natural match with Bogart (the two would marry less than a year after the film’s release); her confidence, audacity, and smoldering gaze are mesmerizing, her inexperience an irrelevant afterthought.

Hawks apparently made a bet with his friend Ernest Hemingway that he could make a good movie out of the novelist’s worst book. Though Jules Furthman’s screenplay made drastic changes to the original story (and ended up featuring substantial contributions from William Faulkner), Hawks certainly won the bet.