Retrospective: Key Largo

After directing his stomach-churning magnum opus The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, John Huston reunited with Humphrey Bogart for a similarly queasy but less confident voyage to the outskirts of America in Key Largo. The film is poorly served by the comparison to Sierra Madre — Key Largo suffers from ham-fisted melodramatic plotting and a penchant for melodrama that was missing from its broadly but not entirely unsentimental predecessor. The last scene is a drastic tonal departure from the rest of Key Largo, trading suspense and darkness for an unexpected happy ending. If Sierra Madre was a pleasant break from Hollywood convention, Key Largo is a relatively safe reset that luxuriates in genre conventions and Hollywood melodrama.

Yet despite its disadvantages, Key Largo is brilliantly executed. John Huston turns the fairly pedestrian script into a dark and moody maelstrom, assisted by Karl Freund's gorgeous photography and a cracking score by Max Steiner. While the thin plot (which more resembles previous Bogart-Bacall vehicle To Have And Have Not than many films noir) is hard to be invested in, it's almost impossible to imagine Huston directing Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Edward G. Robinson, Lionel Barrymore, and Claire Gomez with anything less than spectacular results. The cast makes the material sing, with Barrymore infusing a maudlin and patronizing scene about the murder of Indigenous people with some genuine pathos, and Bacall failing spectacularly to break her record of being the coolest person ever to appear in a Hollywood film.

Key Largo presents an America triumphant but queasy in the aftermath of World War II. We may have won the war, but victory is hampered on all sides by gangsters like Johnny Rocco and Regrettable But Rare Outbursts of Violence Against Indigenous Folks. Marauding criminals exiled to Cuba return as America uncomfortably settles into its role as the world's new policeman. The ending doesn't serve the material at all, but to witness these characters stuck in a hotel together, crammed into a hackneyed metaphor for America's post-war reality, is a real treat. Key Largo may not reach the heights of noir masterpieces like The Big Sleep or In A Lonely Place, but it's a damn fine lesser work in the pantheon of Warner Bros. crime films.