Key Largo

The fourth of six collaborations between director John Huston and Humphrey Bogart (who first worked together on The Maltese Falcon) and the final screen pairing of real-life couple Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Key Largo is a tropical film noir based on Maxwell Anderson's 1939 play. Bogie stars as Frank McCloud, a disillusioned World War II vet who travels to a rundown hotel in the Florida Keys to pay his respects to the widow (Bacall) and father (Lionel Barrymore) of his dead war buddy. Edward G. Robinson plays Johnny Rocco, an exiled gangster hiding out under a fake name with his entourage, who is holding the family hostage as a hurricane approaches. Like the play, the 1948 film is set largely within the confines of the hotel lobby and Huston makes effective use of this constraint to create tension as McCloud is drawn out of his existential detachment in order to take on the gangster and his men. The character of Rocco was inspired by real-life criminals Al Capone (who "retired" to Florida after getting out of prison) and Lucky Luciano (who was deported), and Robinson's casting is reminiscent of his role in Little Caesar (1931), the film that made him a star. Here, the flamboyant gangster and one-time kingpin is now a sneering, deluded has-been driven by ego, who bullies and humiliates his alcoholic girlfriend (Claire Trevor, in an Oscar-winning turn), an over-the-hill showgirl. Huston and co-screenwriter Richard Brooks turned the play into a rumination on post-war America and the disillusionment of soldiers returning to a country that doesn't necessarily have a place for them. Making its Blu-ray debut, this American classic is highly recommended. (S. Axmaker)