To Have and Have Not
Directed by Howard HawksMartinique, 1940. Harry Morgan, an American charter-boat captain operating out of Vichy-controlled Fort-de-France, keeps his politics at arm's length and his business simple. When a client skips out on a bill, Morgan is left broke and under the watchful eye of the local Vichy police, represented by the menacing Lieutenant Coyo. Into this carefully maintained neutrality walks Marie Browning, a young American drifter with enough composure to unsettle a man who has spent years cultivating indifference.
Frenchy, a local resistance sympathizer who runs the hotel where Morgan docks his life, presses him to ferry a Free French operative and his wife across the water. Morgan refuses – then accepts, for money, then for reasons that money alone cannot explain. The arrival of Paul and Helene de Bursac complicates every arrangement Morgan has made with himself. Coyo tightens the screws. Eddie, Morgan's aging, alcohol-blurred companion, becomes a liability the authorities are willing to exploit. Marie, who might have walked away, does not.
To Have and Have Not is nominally an adventure picture, but it operates on the interior logic of noir: a protagonist whose self-imposed exile is an extended act of self-deception, a woman who sees through that deception before he does, and an environment of occupation and surveillance that makes every small choice a moral one. The film arrived in 1945 still trailing the atmosphere of wartime, yet its real subject is the cost of remaining uninvolved when the world insists otherwise.
