To Have and Have Not · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

She's already leaving when she turns in the doorway. "You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow." Nineteen years old, chin tucked, eyes up, and she owns the room she's walking out of. Everybody remembers that line. Almost nobody can tell you what the resistance plot was actually about. Hold onto that gap. It's the secret of the movie.

Howard Hawks made the most relaxed adventure film of the war by trusting two things almost completely and the plot barely at all. To see why that's strange, start with what the plot is. A neutral American skipper in Vichy-occupied Martinique watches the occupation lean on people he likes, gets drawn into running a Free French operative, and converts from cynical detachment to commitment. Perceive a situation, act to change it, transform it. Deleuze calls this the action-image, the engine of classical Hollywood: a sensory-motor circuit where seeing leads cleanly to doing and the cut just keeps the chain moving. Hawks is one of its great practitioners. Morgan's arc is the large form specifically — a whole oppressive situation bears down until one decisive act remakes it (Situation → Action → new Situation). Casablanca, from which Hawks borrowed almost the entire chassis, runs the identical circuit. The Vichy island is the synsign, the encompasser: a milieu that closes around the hero and calls the act out of him. Morgan against the Vichy police is the binomial, force meeting force.

Here's the argument, though. If you watch To Have and Have Not for its action-image, you'll be bored — because Hawks is bored by it too. The plot, in his own framing, was raw tonnage stripped off a Hemingway novel he thought was bad. What he actually films is the affection-image: the close-up, where a feeling lands on a face but hasn't yet discharged into action. Bacall's face. The famous "look" — chin to chest, eyes lifted — began as a fix for camera nerves; her head trembled under a direct gaze, so they had her press her chin down and look up. It steadied her, and it produced the most charged passive image in the film. Composed. Challenging. Giving nothing away. Deleuze would call it a potisign, an icon of power — not one fixed quality held still, but micro-movements building intensity, a face poised on a threshold of desire. Nothing is decided in it. Everything is felt.

Then the voice. Low, rough, controlled — the film's real sound effect, a steady pitch of adult sexuality against which the wartime intrigue plays like background noise. Think about how odd that is in terms of Deleuze's machine. The action-image is supposed to drive the picture. Hawks quietly demotes it to ambient sound and lets a face and a voice carry the weight.

Watch where the whistling line actually happens. A doorway, Bacall mid-exit, handed both the last word and the high ground of the frame. A posture that exposes a relation instead of advancing a plot is what Deleuze means by the gest — and that's exactly what Hawks stages. The blocking is the romance: she walks into his space, sits where he sits, turns leaving into theater. The competence is the courtship. And competence is Hawks's whole religion. Deleuze names the bond by which a milieu and its people stamp each other the imprint; in Hawks the imprint is always professional skill. You belong by being good at the work. Slim earns the group the way Furthman's earlier women do, not through femininity but through demonstrated ability.

None of this came from nowhere — film is a discourse, and this is one of its most openly indebted chapters. The chassis is Casablanca: Vichy port, cynical loner, romantic complication, even Marcel Dalio carried over from one café to another, a debt so total the film turns it into a feature. The woman descends from Furthman's own line — Dietrich in Morocco, who weaponizes a diegetic song (Bacall sings "How Little We Know" the same way); the women of Only Angels Have Wings and Bringing Up Baby, who barge into male professional space and reshape it. The overlapping dialogue perfected in His Girl Friday arrives here as a rhythm working on your nervous system, not as naturalism. Bogart's calm-is-danger persona was codified in The Maltese Falcon; Hawks just loosens it — Morgan is Rick without the wound. Hawks rarely built from scratch. He assembled, and made the assembly feel inevitable. What he sent forward was less a story than a person: the Bogart-Bacall current, and the cool, self-possessed Hawksian woman who keeps surfacing in the noir to come.

The significance is quiet and large. Hawks proved you could take dead material and conjure something effortless out of texture alone — and, in Deleuze's history of cinema, he let the affection-image carry a film the action-image only pretended to be driving. The look does the work the gunplay claims. This is still movement-image cinema, confident and whole; the postwar break into the time-image is years away and Hawks never wanted it. But you can feel the hairline crack — a film where the plot has gone to noise and a face has become everything. Watch it again for the whistle. Then watch it once more for what's moving across her face before she says a word.