Bogart and Bacall’s first film together might as well have been called Carry On Flirting

You must remember this… Harry Morgan is leaning on the bar wondering how the femme fatale and her wounded freedom fighter husband are doing. Then Slim walks in, wearing two wisps of black satin linked by a hoop around her navel. Harry tells her it’s time he checked on his patient. ‘Give her my love,’ says Slim. ‘I’d give her my own,’ says Harry, ‘if she were wearing that.’ And in real life, as the tabloids would say, he did.

We are talking of To Have and Have Not (1944), in which Harry is Humphrey Bogart and Slim is Lauren Bacall. The director, Howard Hawks, said the movie was just an excuse to do some scenes. Certainly the screenplay he wrote with Jules Furthman and William Faulkner, adapted mighty freely from what he had told Ernest Hemingway was a ‘god-damned bunch of junk’ novel, makes even less sense than Papa’s original. But those scenes still zing: Walter Brennan’s rum-sodden wreck being interrogated by les flics; Bacall crooning ‘How Little We Know’ with the song’s writer, Hoagy Carmichael, at the keys; Bogart ruffled from lethal cool when Bacall tells him that if he wants her, just ‘put your lips together and blow’.

Alas for Hawks, the really big scene he had in mind never made it past his private dream factory. He wanted Bacall, who his wife had spotted modelling in a fashion glossy, for himself. He had her flown from New York to Los Angeles for a screen test. He taught her to lower her chin so that as she gazed upward at the camera she somehow looked both coy and coquettish. He had her learn to lower her voice (by shouting Shakespeare in some Californian canyon). Then he put her under a personal service contract, and set about bedding her.