“Anybody got a match?” is how Lauren Bacall introduces herself to cinema. She isn’t announced by the camera, but interjects into the movie.
About 13 minutes into Howard Hawks’ To Have and Have Not, Humphrey Bogart’s character is making his way to his hotel room with a Resistance-adjacent barman, who’s trying to hire Bogart’s boat to pick up a VIP and bring him to Fort-de-France on Vichy-controlled Martinique. There’s a seven-second shot of the two coming up the stairs, and cutting to the right of frame. The moment they go into Bogart’s room, a woman emerges from a door on the left. Her head begins to crane to the right to look at them, and then right when her eyes move up there’s a cut to the inside of Bogart’s hotel room. The camera picks up Bogart in a constant rightward motion until he stops by his window, rifling through his bag. That’s when Bacall’s line hits, and there’s another cut to her standing in the doorway—Bogart dumfounded on the right, Bacall forcing her way into the room on the left. He tosses her the matchbook. Cut to: medium of Bogart checking her out. Cut to: medium of Bacall, the cigarette floating on her lips like a boat between waves. Close-up of Bogart, close-up of Bacall. She lights the cigarette and tosses the match over her shoulder.
Hawks knows he has a star on his hands, and knows the reason why is a coolness, a disaffection. He immediately signed the 18-year-old to a seven-year deal after his first meeting with her, and the swagger of her debut justifies his confidence in the actress. Hawks transposes that instant admiration he felt for Bacall onto Bogart’s not easily impressed face (not for nothing, either, that he gives her the nickname “Slim,” the same one that one that Hawks’ wife at the time, Nancy Keith, had). Most interesting here isn’t just that Bacall is so great out the gate—whose talent is as deceptively natural as “the look”—but that casualness with which Hawks introduces his discovery. There’s no flashy push-in like what John Ford does for John Wayne’s star making moment five years earlier in Stagecoach. Hawks, instead, gives us a voice from off-screen and a body in a doorway.
The way that Bacall moves from being just another background extra briefly crossing paths with Bogart and into the story is remarkable. Hawks not only gives Bacall the room on screen to make herself known, but does so immediately after placing her in the mise-en-scene like a nobody that we’ll never see again. By the nature of filmmaking, Hawks isn’t letting Bacall crash the set and force her way into the picture, but his laid-back direction lets it feel like that really is the case. It creates a spontaneity within Hawks’ deceptively simple frames, and it’s like life is really intruding into the soundstage.
This excitement with actors obviously extends to Bogart, whose self-assurance is beyond magnetic as he pulls the viewer through every scene, but also in the smaller players like Dolores Malone’s brief but pointed role as the wife of the Resistance fighter Bogart smuggles to mainland Martinique, Walter Brennan as Bogart’s alcoholic “helper” on his fishing boat, or most remarkably Hoagy Carmichael, who might as well be playing himself if living in a two-bit colonial hotel as the resident piano man. Hawks’ people aren’t accidental, they force themselves into each other’s lives whether they like it or not, similar to how the war story forces itself on a low-ambition fisherman. Bogart’s character is often interrogated about why he keeps his “rummy” buddy around, which he can’t really explain logically beyond that he likes him, he’s his friend. That’s the key to why Hawks’ film works—regardless of whatever’s going on, the audience is game to keep going just because we like the people we see on screen.