John Huston directs. Bacall and Bogie, Harrison and Barrymore

Key Largo’s opening, minus the racist overtones, is stirring and unsettling. (Unfortunately, the cultural mishandling dates the film from scene one, even bleeding into the soundtrack when the brothers arrive and the younger one speaks English.)

But beyond that, Key Largo delivers tense suspense and a seething setting, serving up another villainous Mr Brown, also known as Johnny Rocco in this film. (This is the second bad Mr Brown I’ve come across in noir; The Big Combo is the other.) Edward Harrison is an old hand at playing villains but manages to add another layer of hatefulness to his Johnny Rocco.

Plot: Set in an off-season sweaty island in the Florida keys in post-WWII America, a disillusioned soldier—Frank McCloud (played with taciturn restraint by Bogart)—arrives at his dead corpsman’s home in Key Largo to visit the soldier’s father, Mr Temple.

McCloud shows up to Dad’s hotel to find the wheelchair-bound father and his buddy’s widow—lovely Nora played by Bacall—at the mercy of Milwaukee gangsters who’ve descended on the place for some “deep-sea fishing” and now commandeer the hotel as the only guests. Soon after McCloud steps foot on this coral island, a hurricane makes landfall, upping the ante.

One of the most riveting characters is Mr. Brown’s gin-infused moll, Gaye Dawn (Claire Trevor), who speaks the truth but slurs.

“It’s better to be a live coward than a dead hero.” Gaye glances at the war widow. “Oh! Excuse me.”

(Gaye is also the fulcrum for McCloud’s success and her boyfriend’s demise; without her, McCloud’s a goner.)

The situation at the Largo Hotel (the real life Caribbean Club) deteriorates quickly as the storm bears down on our fair reluctant hero, his buddy’s widow, his dad, and the group of gangsters plus drunken Gaye. Soon the gangsters show their rods and true colors to everyone (as well as a wounded police officer they’ve got stashed in the back), and the tension cranks up as the shutters come down and the lights go off.

Gaye, singing her lush heart out for another drink, strikes a lonely desperate chord in all of us, and we despise Mr Brown for leering at her humiliation. The storm adds a soundtrack and threat all its own, and the tension mostly comes from wondering which is going to pop off first: the hurricane or Mr. Brown.

I love Barrymore’s Old Man Temple, stoking the flames of the gangsters’ unfamiliarity with and fear of the storm. Who or what are we actually scared of? Like with most noirs, there’s not an easy answer.

The real hero is almost out of the shot, far right

Instead of glossy, rain-drenched alleys and a wind that makes you turn your trench coat collar up, this noir is soaked with the sweaty tense humidity preceding a tropical storm and intermittent flashes of lightning punctuated by rattling thunder. Major Frank McCloud pushes Bogie’s usual standoffish hero so far that we don’t know if McCloud is actually going to take action against the bad guys. He needs an awful lot of goading before he does anything in the very final act. What kind of hero is McCloud? I think one who truly understands, as the others do not, the “rewards” of heroism.

Once McCloud gets the gangsters on the boat, there’s a tense span when the audience wonders if we’ve gotten Major McCloud wrong this whole time. Maybe he’s only going with them so that they’ll kill him and get it over with. Perhaps suicide-by-gangster was the best McCloud could come up with under the circumstances.

But finally, finally, with seasickness as his ally, McCloud takes the upper hand on the upper deck of the Santana, dropping each man when he exits the cabin. Eventually he shoots everyone but the Big Boss, who tries to talk his way out of it, even throwing out his gun before getting shot by the Major.

There’s no remorse for this kind of heartless dispatching of an unarmed man. We’re supposed to think that ridding the world of the evil Mr Browns is earnest work for people like Temple and McCloud (the lofty surnames of Our Heroes). As McCloud puts it, “We were not making all this sacrifice of human effort and human lives to return to the kind of a world we had after the last world war!”

But the point of Key Largo, despite its tidy happy ending, is to show us that this cycle of sacrifice and corruption is part of human nature. But we still have to try to be the hero even if, like McCloud, we think it’s hopeless.

-MH