To Have and Have Not (film) To Have and Have Not (film) To Have and Have Not is a 1944 American romance-war-adventure film directed by Howard Hawks, loosely based on Ernest Hemingway's 1937 novel of the same name; however, the story was altered for the film. It stars Humphrey Bogart, Walter Brennan and Lauren Bacall in her film debut; it also features Dolores Moran, Hoagy Carmichael, Sheldon Leonard, Dan Seymour, and Marcel Dalio. The plot centers on the romance between a freelancing fisherman in Martinique and a beautiful American drifter which is complicated by the growing French resistance in Vichy France. Ernest Hemingway and Howard Hawks
To Have and Have Not Key West and Cuba in the 1930s, and provides a social commentary on that time and place. Hemingway biographer Jeffrey Meyers describes the novel as heavily influenced by the Marxist ideology Hemingway was exposed to by his support of the Republican faction in the Spanish Civil War while he was writing it. The work got a mixed critical reception. The novel had its origins in two short stories published earlier in periodicals by Hemingway ("One Trip Across" and "The Tradesman's Return") which make up the opening chapters, and a novella, written later, which makes up about two-thirds of the book.