The Gun Runners

“A man can’t do wrong if it ain’t in him to do it.” While The Gun Runners isn’t the most well-known of Don Siegel’s many noirs, it’s an excellent adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not. (It’s the third film adaptation of that novel.) Audie Murphy plays Sam Martin, a charter boat captain desperate for cash who reluctantly takes a gig with Cuban revolutionaries smuggling guns. His devoted drunk of a first mate Harvey (Everett Sloane) keeps Sam grounded, and his wife Lucy (Patricia Owens) always waits on shore for Sam’s return even as the aggressive Eva (Gita Ford) acts on her attraction to Sam’s natural goodness (“Are you a baby or just a baby face?”). Set between Key West and Havana, the film is built around a national celebrity at the time of release: Murphy was America’s most decorated World War II veteran and a Medal of Honor winner for valor, so revered by the public that Hollywood found roles for him in their productions, especially Westerns. The presence of a national war hero in a film about the degradation of postwar masculinity gives the film a profundity often unappreciated by viewers.