by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s “feature” was Key Largo, a heavy-breathing melodrama from Warner Bros. in
1948 that in a sense was a last hurrah for their classic style. It was the last
film Humphrey Bogart made for Warners as an exclusive contractee (he had just
renegotiated his contract to be non-exclusive and indeed would make only two
more Warners films in the eight years left in his career, Chain
Lightning in 1950 and The
Enforcer — another gangster movie — in
1951), the last film director John Huston made for Warners as an exclusive
contractee, and the last film Bogart and his real-life (fourth) wife Lauren
Bacall made together (though there would be a fifth Bogart-Bacall joint
project, a 1955 TV remake of his star-making movie The Petrified
Forest with Bogart repeating his role as
gangster Duke Mantee, Henry Fonda taking over Leslie Howard’s role as
burned-out poet Alan Squier and Bacall in the Bette Davis role of Gabrielle
Maple, waitress and would-be artist; and at the time Bogart caught his fatal
cancer Columbia was planning to team him and Bacall in a Cold War spy melodrama
called Melville Goodwin, U.S.A.
which was ultimately filmed with Kirk Douglas and Susan Hayward as Top
Secret Affair). It was also the end of the
line for Edward G. Robinson’s long line of gangster roles that had begun when
he arrived at Warner Bros. in 1930, got cast as a Prohibition-era beer baron in
Alice White’s vehicle The Widow from Chicago and then got his star-making part as Enrico Caesar
Bandello in the classic Little Caesar. Though Robinson, like Bogart and James Cagney, got to play a number of
parts on the right side of the law (notably his blockbuster hit Bullets
or Ballots in 1936), he remained most
famous for his gangster parts, and here he’s billed second and playing someone
with a similar name to his part in Little Caesar — only instead of “Rico” he’s “Rocco” and instead of
a kill-crazy hit-man who gets his fellow gangsters as pissed off at him as the
cops are, in this one he’s playing a character based on the real-life “Lucky”
Luciano.
Like Luciano, the fictional Rocco once controlled virtually all of
America’s organized crime, used his money and power to get his stooges elected
to public office so he could control things and operate with impunity, only
eventually he was caught and deported from the U.S. as an “undesirable alien” —
“like I was a dirty Red or something!,” Robinson exclaims in disgust, a line
that (like much of this movie) is rich in ironies given how many people
involved in it were part of Hollywood’s progressive communities. Huston, Bogart
and Bacall all had liberal reputations (indeed, they and Katharine Hepburn had
been the key organizers of Hollywood’s Committee for the First Amendment,
organized in an unsuccessful attempt to stop the House Un-American Activities
Committee investigations into Communists in Hollywood and the resulting
blacklist) and Robinson was even farther Left than they; he got himself called
before the committee four times and ended up on the blacklist himself until
Right-winger Cecil B. DeMille got him taken off it so he could play Dathan in
the 1956 film The Ten Commandments.
I first saw Key Largo as part of
a long-term festival in San Francisco in 1970-71 of Warner Bros. films
sponsored by the Surf Interplayers revival house, and at the time it seemed a
bit of a disappointment; I thought of it as the sure-fire commercial hit Huston
and Bogart had to offer Jack Warner to be allowed to make their immediately
previous film, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Seen now, it’s a film with some weaknesses but
overall it’s a marvelous example of the Warners and Huston styles, a capable
melding of the conventions of the gangster movie and the film noir — and watching it a day after Whirlpool (even though it was made a year earlier) it gave the
air of the professionals pushing the amateurs and wanna-bes out of the way and
saying, “Here’s how a film like this should really be done.” The plot deals with an out-of-the-way
resort on the Florida Keys, the Largo Hotel, owned by Johnny Temple (Lionel
Barrymore, playing the sort of crusty-old-curmudgeon role he’d been
specializing in for decades, especially once his chronic arthritis got so bad
he ended up needing a wheelchair — his presence here at least partially makes
up for his being passed over in favor of the much weaker, but also much
cheaper, Charles Waldron as General Sternwood in The Big Sleep).
Bogart plays Frank McCloud, an Army major who
served in the Italian campaign in World War II with Temple’s son George, who
died in combat. Bacall plays George’s widow, Nora Temple, who’s still living at
Key Largo with her former father-in-law. Frank has come to the Largo Hotel to
hang out with Johnny Temple and share with him information about his dead son,
but when he arrives he finds the place is closed to the public and has been
taken over by a gang of thugs: Richard “Curly” Hoff (Thomas Gomez), Edward
“Toots” Bass (Henry Lewis), Angel Garcia (Dan Seymour, who earned his place in
film trivia by being the only actor to appear both in Casablanca and the Marx Brothers’ spoof of it, A
Night in Casablanca) and Ralph Feeney
(William Haade). They’re alternately serving and being terrorized by a
mysterious “Johnny Brown” who’s staying in Room 11 of the Largo Hotel, whom we
first meet puffing away on a cigar and sitting in a bathtub with a fan blowing
air at him to attempt to cool him off in the hot, sticky Florida heat. He is,
of course, Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson), gangster who’s sneaked back into
Florida from his redoubt in Cuba to deliver a mysterious small carrying box containing
a “shipment” of something he’s supposed to sell to another crook, Ziggy (Marc
Lawrence), before he returns. Key Largo is also being threatened by an incoming
hurricane, and the captain of the boat that brought Rocco and crew to Key Largo
sneaks away and takes the boat because leaving it in the bay off the key would
mean risking its destruction in the hurricane. The basic issue of the plot
casts Frank McCloud as a typical Bogart character, disgusted and cynical — he’s
upset that the end of the war didn’t bring about the perfect world the
politicians who got us into it told him and his fellow servicemembers he would,
and as in so many of Bogart’s films starting with Casablanca the question is how long will it take for him to
regain his former idealism and go after Rocco, and what’s going to trigger him
to do so. (At one point, when Nora is trying to reawaken his idealism by
referencing his past as a freedom fighter in World War II, I felt like joking
that he’d say, “No, I wasn’t the
freedom fighter. That was that other guy, the one who left Casablanca with my
girlfriend and left me alone with Claude Rains.”) Like The Petrified
Forest, Key Largo was based on a stage play (Paul Muni and Uta Hagen
were the original stars) by a “name” writer (Robert Sherwood in The
Petrified Forest and Maxwell Anderson here)
who was attempting to use a gangster story as a frame on which to hang a lot of
metaphors and philosophical musings about the human condition, and James Agee
called out Anderson and the screenwriters, Huston and Richard Brooks, on it
when the film was new: “I rather doubt anyhow whether gangsters can be made to
represent all that [Huston] wants them to — practically everything that is
fundamentally wrong with post-war America; so the picture is weak in the way it
was obviously intended to be strongest.”
Nonetheless, what’s wrong (or dubious)
about Key Largo pales by
comparison with what’s right about it: the leads — including a key character I
haven’t mentioned above, Claire Trevor as Rocco’s alcoholic girlfriend and
ex-singer Gaye Dawn, whom he sadistically makes sing her old nightclub feature,
“Moanin’ Low,” in front of all the other principals as his price for letting
her have a drink (he then reneges but Frank gets her the drink, risking Rocco’s
wrath, and it’s partly Rocco’s treatment of her and partly the death of two
Native American petty crooks, and a police officer who was looking for them, at
the hands of Rocco’s gang that propels Frank into action against the gang — are
absolutely perfectly cast and totally right for their roles. The camera is kept
in almost constant motion (though the fact that virtually all the movie, except
for a few establishing shots from a second unit in Florida and a final action
scene at sea — stuck for an ending, Huston went for help to director Howard
Hawks, who suggested he include the climactic shoot-out at sea with which
Ernest Hemingway had ended his novel To Have and Have Not but Hawks hadn’t used in his film version with
Bogart and Bacall three years earlier — takes place in two rooms at the Largo
Hotel and thereby betrays the piece’s stage origins) and Huston and his
cinematographer, Karl Freund (veteran of the German Expressionist classics of
the 1920’s and Universal’s horror films in the 1930’s) went out of their way to
find oblique camera angles — which pissed off Jack Warner because those took
more time to set up and light than the standard angles and resulted in the film
going over schedule and budget. Key Largo is also filled with “in” references; when Frank recalls his wartime
service with George, the battle he describes is at San Pietro, Italy — which
Huston filmed for an Army war documentary during World War II — and when Frank
agrees to take Rocco and his gang back to Cuba (fully intending to shoot and kill
them all once they’re underway), the boat they use is named Santana, also the name of Bogart’s real boat (though the
real Santana was a sail yacht and
the one in the movie is a powered fishing boat).
Though the basic material
isn’t anywhere nearly as profound as its makers clearly hoped and intended it
would be (Agee, a friend of Huston’s, claimed in his contemporaneous review
that “some of the points Huston most wanted to make were cut out of the picture
after he finished it”), Key Largo
is a solid Hollywood thriller, expertly directed and showcasing its stars
effectively, and ending up in an action climax directed well enough that Huston
can make us believe in one of Hollywood’s sillier clichés: the lone attacker
who goes after the dastardly gang of crooks and, despite being hopelessly
outnumbered, nonetheless manages to prevail through sheer star power as well as
cunning and guile. One story about its making is that Claire Trevor wanted a
voice double for the scene in which he would sing her old cabaret song to the
other principals; Huston not only refused but insisted that she sing the song
“live” on set instead of pre-recording it and he sprung the scene on her without giving her time
to prepare — thereby getting the tense, nervous performance he wanted. (He also
deserves kudos for not having
Trevor look like the usual slatternly Hollywood portrait of an alcoholic woman:
she’s decently dressed, her hair is well coiffed, and only her overall
twitchiness and desperation when she demands booze gives it away that she’s an
alcoholic.) Visually, Key Largo
is everything I was hoping for and didn’t get from Whirlpool; though the hurricane is disappointingly (and
unrealistically) short and more could have been made of it, Freund’s lighting
and oblique angles and Huston’s high-tension direction create a noir atmosphere even in a story that is a bit too
black-and-white (with good-good heroes — despite Bogart’s stock-in-trade
moments of disillusionment and doubt — and bad-bad villains) to work as truly
great film noir. But overall it’s
a crackling-tough thriller of the kind they really don’t make anymore, and
there’s one moment in the movie that unwittingly rang all too true today: when
Frank is sounding off on how nobody cares about people like Rocco anymore and
he’s able to maintain such an air of respectability “he might even get elected
President,” of course I couldn’t help bitterly, laconically joking, “He did.”
