Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 43

Bogart, Bacall, and Howard Hawks

39

meat misogynism was rife in A. E. MacKenzie’s August 17, 1937 Warner Bros,
synopsis of the original story (from advance galleys of Hemingway’s novel) about
rum-running between Cuba and Key West, where life is cheap amid a ‘'depression”
setting. Harry was ''hard and trained to kill when an occasion demanded ruthless
action,” married, with three daughters, described as:
.. .young bitches at an age when they were liable to lay any one
with the price of a movie they wanted to see badly enough.
That came from their mother’s side of the family honest enough.
Marie had been a whore before Harry married her, but he was
the only man she ever found capable of subduing her physically
and so she stuck to him with a more avid loyalty than any moral
principle could have induced. By conventional civilized
standards the Morgans were scum; but in terms of their
background and jungle surroundings they were a worthy family
unit of ‘"have-nots”. One must do what is necessary to live in
one’s own world. Only sperm-less suckers try to kid themselves
they’re in another.^
In addition to the synopsis’ pronounced gender polemics, MacKenzie’s
1937 Warners rendering of Hemingway’s novel included repeated ethnic slurs—
from “Chinks” to ‘"Spiks” to “Niggers.” All of this, along with shady rum-run ning,
smuggling, gangsters and Cuban revolutionaries, was duly reformed and sanitized
(‘white washed’) for the PCA to meet chief censor Joseph Breen’s approval.
However, changes for the Code and the war in Warner’s To H ave and H ave N ot
adaptation actually used Casablanca's, framework to metaphorically su g g est
increased sex and violence (like D ouble Indemnity and otherfilm s noir) as a means
of gaining PCA approval. Rather than gangsters or other ""unsavory”characters,
the villains were Nazis a la the Vichy French. Warners’ May 15, 1944 revised
synopsis reeked of wartime espionage and duplicity, justified by overthrowing the
Nazis. It read: “Vichy 'loyalists’ rule the French island of Martinique in the days
following the fall of France. Under the calm surface, however, revolt brews in Fort
de France, the capital, as Free French patriots continue to struggle for liberty.”'^
And rather than the male protagonist having a whore wife and three slut
daughters— capitalizing on Bogart’s i^osX-Casablanca appeal—the hero, Harry
Morgan (aka Steve), and new female co-star. Slim, were decidedly single. Breen
purged any suggestion of prostitution or adultery, although it’s suggested in Slim’s
recurrent ability to procure large sums of cash and entire wallets from seductively
enticing men at the bar. And unlike the book, Bogart doesn’t die at the end of the
narrative, but instead sails off with the girl. Enter Bacall. Howard Hawks had