It’s been a week of celebrity deaths. Lauren Bacall died yesterday, God rest her soul, a sad event which has inspired reminiscences from entertainment writers around the world. Reflecting upon Bacall’s breakout and now iconic role as Slim in Howard Hawks’ 1944 classic, To Have and Have Not, the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis observes that Bacall’s presence in the film “draws on both feminine and masculine qualities that suggest an excitingly capable woman.” Slim is a thief and possible prostitute with a heart of gold who falls in love with Humphrey Bogart’s character, Harry Morgan, and later helps him smuggle members of the French resistance out of Vichy-controlled Martinique. Slim is Harry Morgan’s not-quite femme fatale in this noir-ish world of danger and deception.
In Arts of Darkness: American Noir and the Quest for Redemption, Thomas Hibbs defines American film noir as a counter to American optimism:
“Instead of the narrative moving toward an affirmation of the American dream, of the efficacy of democratic virtues and the resiliency of the communal foundations of American life in the family, the dream becomes a nightmare, and the vices of greed, envy, and lust predominate. Faith in progress is seen as naïve, replaced by a haunting sense that misdeeds of the past cannot be overcome or rectified. Noir characters are highly susceptible to irrational passion; in their dependence on circumstances beyond their control, they exhibit a potentially fatal vulnerability. Characters find themselves trapped in a sort of labyrinth, in the midst of which they embark upon a quest to solve a set of mysteries, usually involving both a crime and a woman.”
Slim is the woman who helps Harry Morgan escape the labyrinth, but in doing so she embodies a witty but, contra Dargis, dark distortion of both masculine and feminine qualities, evincing the vices of greed and lust and cunning that enable her to fight her way through her and Harry’s nightmarish world. If in Slim Bacall portrays, according to Dargis, “an erotic emblem of American wit and war-ready grit,” she also serves as the femme fatale of the America founded on democratic virtues and the power of the family. Leaving this dream of America high and dry, Slim sails into the night with Morgan at her side, whistling away.
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