Translating Hemingway into film: To Have and Have Not

Hemingway's 1937 novel, To Have and to Have Not,  is essentially what today we would call "linked stories," 4 stories about the same character, Harry, a charter-boat captain in the Keys (ex-Miami cop), each can stand independently (a certain benefit in the time years ago when there was a huge market in magazines for short stories) but that together make up something like the narrative arc of a novel (though they are actually told from different points of view - 3, I think, narrated by Harry; one, not). Essentially the breakdown is: Part 1, Harry stiffed by a guy who charters the boat and then runs (or flies, actually) off w/out paying the bill. 2: Harry is shot in the arm while dumping a load of smuggled liquor. 3 (maybe I have 2 and 3 reversed): Harry, hard up for $, agrees to smuggles into the US from Cuba a dozen Chinese laborers, but double-crosses the smuggler, shoots him to death, and offloads the men back in Cuba; and 4: Harry makes a deal with Cuban mobsters to use his boat for some nefarious purpose (still reading this section). Thinking about the adaptation to film - the more "faithful" adaptation, in fact - Michael Curtiz's The Breaking Point (1950), you can see that MC and his writers used all 4 plots, but each w/ a significant change and in a newly created narrative sequence (e.g., the shooting occurs at the end, as Harry confronts the mobsters  - seemingly Italian in the film). Most or all of the changes are intended to make Harry (an excellent John Garfield) more sympathetic - a good idea, as he's a racist and a double-dealer in the book, a fully likable guy. One major change is to add many domestic scenes, showing Harry as a good dad and a loving though troubled husband (his wife has a cameo in the novel, that's it). A major change - though conceivably introduced in part 4 that I'm still reading - is the intro of a blonde "femme fatale" (Patricia Neal), who tempts Harry to be unfaithful to his wife, and who provokes the wife's jealousy and doubt; again, probably a good addition for box-office reasons. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the introduced material - the domestic and the "femme fatale" scenes - though important to building sympathy for Harry, are full of awkward, cliched dialogue and hammy moments; all the best dialog in the film comes directly from Hemingway. Though EH was clearly at a low point in his career w/ this novel, he always showed the ability to write great, laconic, understated dialog.