To have and have not the wild robot: movies

I first saw 1944’s TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT in college. I’d left a party early, gone down to the common room and discovered it on the late show. The intensely sexy Lauren Bacall, the sexual chemistry of her and Humphrey Bogart, the crackling dialogue, and the drama of a WW II romance directed by Howard Hawks and released by Warner Brothers—wow.

TYG and I watched it for a date movie a couple of weeks back and it didn’t blow me away as much—but I did still enjoy it (so did she).

It’s 1940 in Martinique, where Harry Morgan (Bogart) runs a charter boat with the help of his friend Eddie (Walter Brennan), an addled alcoholic (“Was you ever bit by a dead bee?”). He meets Slim (Bacall), a pretty vagabond and occasional thief and sparks and snappy dialog start flying; after she kisses him for the first time Slim quips that “It’s even better when you help.” A local resistance cell wants Harry’s help getting a prisoner off Devil’s Island; he’s uninterested in helping them but ultimately he likes them better than the local Vichy authorities (French Nazi-friendly government) so he gets drawn in.

This is very obviously modeled on Casablanca, right down to having Hoagy Carmichael as a local pianist, analogous to Dooley Wilson in the earlier film. Romantic Comedy argues it’s almost refuting the earlier film: Bogart’s Harry is a nobody compared to Rick (when a customer stiffs Harry, it takes Slim picking the guy’s pocket to settle the score) and his picking sides isn’t about big principles but about who he likes best. However it doesn’t work anywhere near as well as Casablanca, with several weak scenes (there was no point to having Bacall sing several numbers, especially as she can’t sing). There’s some truth to the critique in The Films of Howard Hawks that it works because of the two stars and the dialogue more than anything else.

It does show Hawks’ fondness for lively scenes over plot and narrative because the plot isn’t focused — most of the time it works but in some spots in drags (which I never feel about Casablanca). Bacall would go on to marry Bogart; her role here is modeled on Hawks’ own wife (also nicknamed “Slim”). Her character has a lot in common with Jean Arthur’s Bonnie in Only Angels Have Wings — a drifter who stumbles into a relationship with a guy who’s not into relationships. Hawks has said Bacall gave him what he wanted, Arthur didn’t, but I think both characters work. . “Why don’t you put him on a goldfish bowl in the center of the table and be done with it?”

Lupita Nyong’o voices THE WILD ROBOT (2024), a droid who wakes up in a wilderness with no clue to why she’s there or what her assignment is. Fortunately after she accidentally kills some geese she winds up with their newly-hatched gosling (Kit Connor) imprinting on her. Now she has a task, to raise him into a goose, but even with the sharp-eyed fox Fink (Pedro Pascal) to help, parenting is more complicated than expected. Very charming; with Bill Nighy as an old goose and Marc Hamill as a dour bear. “We talked about this — dead things don’t have to explain why they’re dead.”

As I’m giving a Mensa presentation on Monty Python’s Flying Circus next month, it seemed a good time to rewatch THE LIFE OF PYTHON (1990), a documentary looking at how the six-man comedy team cut its teeth on British comedy such as David Frost and Do Not Adjust Your Set before launching their show in the summer of 1969. Very informative about their creative process (Graham Chapman didn’t write skits but his beta-reading suggestions were always spot on), their conflicts, and the path to Holy Grail and Life of Brian. Well worth watching if you’re a fan. “Who was Monty Python? What was he? And is he contagious?”

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