“The Breaking Point": Adapting Hemingway’s Critique of Capitalism in "To Have and Have Not

In his chapter on film noir, “The History of an Idea,” James Naremore evokes the numerous literary influences on film noir – not just hard-boiled authors like James M. Cain (Double Indemnity), Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep), and Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon), but also Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway’s novel, To Have or Have Not, has been adapted twice: first, with Howard Hawks’ film of the same name, and then, with Michael Curtiz’s The Breaking Point (1950).

In terms of the novel-to-film translation, Hawks’ film, which stars Bogie and Bacall, is an interesting contrast with Curtiz’s. The latter is much more faithful to Hemingway’s cynical tone and bitter commentary on economic hardship in America, which made this book one of his least popular and worst received. In fact, a famous conversation took place between Hemingway and Hawks, in which the latter claimed, “I can make a picture out of your worst story.”

All that Hawks cared for was the character of Harry Morgan, whom literary critics similarly regarded as the book’s strength. Within Hemingway’s oeuvre, Morgan was considered his most thoroughly realized character and a demonstration of his mastery of “the art of indirect exposition” – or having us infer a character’s inner, psychological state based on his actions, conversations, and relationships (in other words, the same way people analyze each other in real life.) Meanwhile, critics liked neither the book’s anti-capitalist message, nor Hemingway’s experimental literary style. Critic Malcom Cowley disparaged the latter as “lacking in unity and sureness of effect.”

Cowley’s phrase, however, perfectly describes the film noir genre – whose atmosphere is marked by ambiguity, bizarreness, and a distinct feeling of disintegration. The way Hemingway combined literary modernism’s breakdown of the omniscient narrator with social commentary on a gritty world of lost moral meaning is what makes his novel so utterly filmable as a noir. This adaptation, however, wouldn’t be truly realized until Curtiz decided to make The Breaking Point, which relocates the novel to Southern California, but has utterly preserved Hemingway’s cynical tenor, unlike Hawks' To Have and Have Not (1944), where it has been altered in the interest of not blackening America’s image and of making sure audiences wouldn’t feel alienated.

Hawks, of course, would go on to make a seminal noir classic, The Big Sleep (1946), but his interpretation of Hemingway’s novel deliberately and regrettably departed from its noirish themes. Elements were changed specifically to lift morale among audiences. The unwanted, meditative reminders of harsh reality could be left to literature, the studio reasoned. Hawks used his position as director to tell such a completely different story that Hemingway’s original intentions are barely discernable. His variation focuses on the love story, makes Harry more compassionate toward his friend, Eddie, and transposes the setting onto Vichy France, so that Harry is no longer trafficking Chinese immigrants out of Cuba, but helping two French radicals escape the terror of the Nazi occupation. This heroic narrative is totally out of sync with the morally compromised Harry we find in Hemingway’s novel and in Curtiz’s much more faithful version.

Ironic is that Hawks’ adaptation of To Have and Have Not has a lot in common with Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942), another patriotic film that makes a clear distinction between good and evil and has a self-sacrificing American protagonist. (Note: it's important to keep in mind the influence that the Office of War Information (OWI) wielded over the studios and their directors during this period.) Casablanca and To Have and Have Not were two wartime films that upheld the image of a moral America with clear and admirable values. This opposes them to film noir and film gris' signature blurring of good and evil, their atmosphere of anxiety and uncertainty, their protagonists' lack of any moral compass, and what often appears, in retrospect, to have been their inevitable downfall. The reason Hemingway's novel is categorized as a film gris is its premise that a corrupt society is to blame for the protagonist's downfall, rather than the protagonist himself (the case in film noir.) The audience is, accordingly, meant to identify less with the protagonist than with the greater struggle against social and political evil that his downfall evokes.

The point of Hemingway’s novel is how the forces of a capitalistic society shape Harry Morgan’s character and drive his wretched actions. Morgan begins as neither heroic nor malicious. He's just an ordinary man, who, struggling desperately to make end’s meet so that he can feed his family, ends up working on the black market and getting mixed up in human trafficking. While there is a whole host of shady, unsympathetic characters, the evil in Hemingway's novel is not reducible to a human villain. Morgan is up against a system where morality seems to serve no purpose at all. Hemingway’s title starkly reflects the harsh binary that defines society: those who have versus those who do not. In the story, however, there is no solidarity among the “have nots.” In Morgan's case, he instead finds himself resorting to parasitical relationships with “the haves.” We see him conspiring with corrupt lawyers and powerful figures, while exhibiting little to no sympathy for “have nots” like himself – i.e. Eddie and the Chinese immigrants he's trafficking.

Hemingway portrays a society where heroism has no place - where trying to be moral seems no more than a fool’s errand. The character of Harry Morgan is, in other words, a vehicle for a broader social critique; it is for this reason one could say Hemingway’s gritty novel has the prescient seeds of 40’s and 50’s film gris. The Breaking Point, like Hemingway’s depiction, brings the viewer face to face with the ugly underbelly of capitalism, without giving him/her the satisfaction of seeing good, moral, or exceptional people standing up to it. The film’s cynicism makes its portrait of corruption hard to digest, and for that reason, all the more powerful.