The USPS has issued a set of four stamps honoring great film
directors and the films for which they are most remembered. The four selected
are: John Ford (The Searchers), John Huston (The Maltese Falcon), Frank Capra
(It’s a Wonderful Life), and Billy Wilder (Some Like It Hot). We will be
exploring the lives and work of these directors over the next several weeks. In
this post LR Simon reviews Key Largo (1948).
The first time the audience sees ex-Major Frank McCloud
(Humphrey Bogart), he’s riding a bus headed for Key Largo, and we see his
reflection in the bus’s rearview mirror. This is our first symbolic clue that
McCloud’s past informs his character and therefore also his future. He knows
that change is difficult—at one point in the film he says, “Your head says one
thing, your whole life says another; your head always loses.”
McCloud plans to tell George Temple’s survivors how he died
and where he is buried. James Temple (Lionel Barrymore) and Nora (Lauren
Bacall) operate the Hotel Largo, which is where most of the film’s action takes
place.
Six other characters have taken up residence at the hotel,
one of whom stays in his room upstairs. These guests are soon revealed to be
gangsters involved in counterfeiting. Their boss, Johnny Rocco (Edward G.
Robinson), is in the country illegally, but has plans to return to his life in
the States. He reveals his ruthlessness in several ways—keeping the hotel
closed to the Seminoles who have traditionally stayed there during hurricanes,
challenging McCloud to a duel but handing him a weapon that is later shown to
be unloaded, and blaming the death of the deputy on a couple of Seminoles
wanted by the police for escaping from custody.
Most heartbreaking, however, is the scene in which Rocco
makes the oft-inebriated Gaye Dawn (Clare Trevor, an Oscar winner for her
performance) sing a cappella for a drink; when her performance doesn’t meet
with his approval, he refuses to supply her with alcohol. In a quiet but
powerful rebuke of Rocco’s behavior, McCloud fixes a drink and gives it to
Gaye. Trevor repeatedly asked Huston for rehearsal time, but the director kept
delaying, insisting they had plenty of time; he gave her no warning before they
shot the scene, and he used what they shot. The lack of rehearsal kept Trevor’s
performance of the song rough and unpolished, and the scene is one of the most
powerful on film in any era. The scene also shows what it takes for a person to
make a significant change in their lives—Gaye is the only major character to
significantly change the direction of her life by film’s end.
While Key Largo is a gangster film, Huston eschews some of
the types of scenes that are usually expected of the genre—there are no chase
scenes and no love scenes, for example. The director and actors create all the suspense,
and they do so in confined spaces—a hotel boarded up for a hurricane, and later
aboard a boat. The film inherits the confined spaces from the play on which it
is based. Huston almost always chose good material to adapt to film, and Key
Largo is no exception.
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