Key Largo (1948)

It is recommended that you watch Key Largo late at night, with the lights turned off and a violent thunderstorm raging outside. This was my experience. When real rain mixes with the hurricane raging outside of John Huston's Key Largo hotel, the effect is a sort of movie magic that even Dolby Digital can't improve. In fact, there is no need for surround-sound when the house rumbles with real thunder and the characters on-screen shutter.

Key Largo is one of those 1940's pot-boilers that twists so tightly around its characters that you can practically see the sweat squeezed from them. Humphrey Bogart plays a military hero visiting a Key Largo hotel to make a connection with the family of a buddy lost in the war; already waiting at the hotel is Edward G. Robinson and a trio of goons who have taken the hotel hostage as they wait for transport to Cuba. The goons have great screen-goon names like Toots and Curly, with the colourful noir personalitites to match. When a hurricane rolls in, the key players are trapped in the hotel, each waiting for the opportunity to take the power position, exchanging rich 40's dialogue as the spotlight shifts from person to person. Staggering to think that this movie was whipped off by John Huston in the same year as Treasure of the Sierra Madre (an unapproachable classic); what did he do in his downtime?

The highlight of Key Largo is unquestionably the pairing of Bogart and Robinson, each providing the other with a worthy adversary to connive and grind against. In fact, if you consider this to be a Bogart vehicle, the role of Johnny Rocco, the "heavy", was a crucial casting decision: who has enough presence to control the hotel at times by sheer will of personality and also has enough star power to match Bogart on the marquee? Edward G. Robinson, with a face built sour and incomplete without a cigar, is ideal. This is the first Robinson film I've seen, so surely it must say something about his screen magnitude that I was delighted when he showed up, late in the first act, as the infamous Rocco.

This is the last of the Bogart-Bacall movies on my list and I've devoured them all equally. However, Bacall takes a background role in this film, playing the female lead on paper, but often spending a lot of time downscreen from Claire Trevor, Robinson's broken-down moll-girlfriend. It's Trevor who steals a lot of the picture, as the faded starlet who has hitched herself, disastrously, to Johnny Rocco's corrupt inner circle. There is a scene late in the picture when Rocco forces her to sing for what she wants most and then ridicules her for doing so. In many ways, Bogart's response to this humiliation is the heart of the picture.

Key Largo is one of the great hidden gems on the Monday Project list. It was on the list from the very beginning, stemming from a bit of a man-crush on Bogart and Huston, but it doesn't seem to carry the "Hollywood classic" pedigree of its contemporaries (Maltese Falcon, Sierra Madre, Casablanca, To Have and Have Not). As a result, it was no great priority, but instead was a surprising late-night discovery on a cable TV station. Even with commercial interruptions (a rarity in the Monday Project), it's the sort of perfect movie-movie that seems to be transmitted from a Hollywood long gone: immediately engrossing and ultimately unforgettable.