Main Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson, Monte Blue, Lauren Bacall, Lionel Barrymore, Claire Trevor, Thomas Gomez
Release Year: 1948
Country: US
Run Time: 101 minutes
MPAA Rating: NR
Plot
Richard Brooks and John Huston's screenplay for Huston's Key Largo eschews the lofty blank verse of Maxwell Anderson's original play, concentrating instead on the simmering tensions among the many characters. Humphrey Bogart plays Frank McCloud, an embittered war veteran who travels to Key Largo in Florida, there to meet Nora Temple (Lauren Bacall), the wife of his deceased war buddy. Arriving at a tumbledown hotel managed by Nora's father-in-law James Temple (Lionel Barrymore), McCloud discovers that the establishment has been taken over by exiled gangster Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson) and what's left of his mob. Also in attendance is Gaye Dawn (Claire Trevor), Rocco's alcoholic girlfriend. While the others bristle at the thought of being held at bay by the gangsters, the disillusioned McCloud refuses to get involved: "One Rocco more or less isn't worth dying for." As he awaits a contact who is bringing him enough money to skip the country, Rocco is responsible for the deaths of a deputy sheriff and two local Indian youth. Unwilling to take a stand before these tragedies, McCloud finally comes to realize that Rocco is a beast who must be destroyed. To save the others from harm, McCloud agrees to pilot Rocco's boat to Cuba through the storm-tossed waters. Just before McCloud leaves, Gaye Dawn slips him a gun -- which leads to the deadly final confrontation between McCloud and Rocco. His resolve to go on living renewed by this cathartic experience, McCloud heads back to Nora, with whom he's fallen in love. Claire Trevor's virtuoso performance as a besotted ex-nightclub singer won her an Academy Award -- as predicted by her admiring fellow actors, who watched her go through several very difficult scenes in long, uninterrupted takes. While Key Largo sags a bit during its more verbose passages, on a visual level the film is one of the best and most evocative examples of the "film noir" school. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Review
John Huston's Key Largo shares crucial similarities and differences with Archie Mayo's The Petrified Forest, also starring Humphrey Bogart but made 12 years earlier. The two plots are similar -- a group of people held hostage in a remote locale by a gangster on the run -- but the differences between the two movies, and Bogart's roles in them, reflect changes in the world and in perceptions of evil and how to deal with it. Where The Petrified Forest was steeped in romantic notions of self-sacrifice, rationalizing the loss of life in World War I, Key Largo implicitly questioned the right of any moral person to withdraw from the responsibility of taking moral action -- and it even questioned the wisdom of self-sacrifice. The Petrified Forest's dreamy poet (Leslie Howard) nobly sacrifices himself to see the capture of the deadly sociopath played by Bogart. In Key Largo, Bogart plays embittered, disillusioned war veteran Frank McCloud, who starts the film with nothing to live for and discovers, in the course of fighting and killing old-time gangster Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson), that there is a reason to remain engaged with the world and with his fellow human beings. The difference between the two movies was the intercession of World War II, in which society encountered the most monumental evil on as large a scale as was imaginable. Made in the wake of the war, with the Cold War and the Red Scare just getting rolling, Key Largo was almost a call to arms to any decent people watching that they were too important to withdraw from battlefields old or new, and that there were still battles to be fought that were worth fighting, as well as winning. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
The movie was supposedly adapted from Maxwell Anderson's 1939 play, but in reality has very little to do with it, although Anderson's name still appears in the credits. The director was John Huston.
Frank McCloud (Humphrey Bogart) visits a small backwater Key Largo hotel run by wheelchair-bound James Temple (Lionel Barrymore) and his daughter-in-law Nora (Lauren Bacall), the widow of Frank's World War II friend. The hotel has been temporarily taken over by notorious fugitive gangster Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson) and his gang, with a hurricane headed Key Largo's way.
Frank at first appears indifferent to the situation, but Rocco's treatment of his alcoholic mistress Gaye (Claire Trevor) and his hand in the murder of two local Indians and a police officer convince Frank that Rocco must be stopped. His chance comes when Rocco forces Frank to pilot the boat by which the gang intends to escape to Cuba. Once at sea, with no hostages to worry about, Frank is able to kill every member of the gang, one by one, Rocco last of all. Frank then returns to Nora.
The subplot turns on Temple's grief over his dead son; he is under the impression that his son died a hero in Italy. McCloud resists telling tales, but at Mr. Temple's urging he relates exactly the story Mr. Temple and the widow Nora want to hear, although it is apparent that McCloud was the actual hero. Nora later says as much: "Only he had it the other way around; it was you on that hill." The climactic, shoot-out scene on the boat is a symbolic recasting of the wartime incident.
In the play, the gangsters are Mexican bandidos, the war in question is the Spanish Civil War, and Frank is a disgraced deserter who dies at the end.
Production
One claim is that much of the film was shot on location at the Caribbean Club on Key Largo in southern Florida.[1]However, the painted sky backdrop on the far side of the tank used in the water shots, distorted perspective of the painted background representing the shore in other shots and the visible wires holding up miniature palm trees during the storm sequence make it clear this was not shot on location.
Robinson had always had top billing over Bogart in their previous films together. For this one, Robinson's name appears to the right of Bogart's, but placed a little higher on the posters, and also in the film opening credits, to indicate Robinson's near-equal status. Robinson's image was also markedly larger and centered on the original poster. In the film's trailer, Bogart is repeatedly mentioned first but Robinson's name is listed above Bogart's in a cast list at the very end.
