Gangster in Key Largo

The fourth (and not last) collaboration of two classic names, John Huston and Bogart. And this is the fourth (and this time last) movie starring the best “spark-jumping" couple on the silver screen, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall (an interesting fact is that a whole quarter century apart in terms of birth year). Key Largo was made in the same year as a different joint project of this couple, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which slightly overshadows it. Which is unfair. The resulting movie suffers a little from being made in a studio and also from being too obviously an adaptation of a theatre play, but many more successful movies could quietly envy the atmosphere of one sweltering hurricane-swept night. And it’s mainly due to Huston. Plus, the whole cast is inspired to give great performances. In the end, this isn’t really so noir, but it’s undeniably a perfect movie. (06.04.2008)

With Humphrey Bogart in front of and John Huston behind the camera, I was expecting a classic noir full of secrets, guns, and witty one-liners. And Key Largo does indeed offer all of that, but the best parts are when it's completely about something else. It tells a story about racial issues, social problems, and, to a great extent, the melancholic post-war moods of people who know it's time for things to finally get better after years of hardship, even though it's not that simple due to opportunistic villains. Ironically, this genre mishmash with strong women of fragile appearance, values of bravery, and mindful actions starts to crumble only in the last act, when it becomes thematically ambiguous and ultimately switches to the usual "Bogart" style. And yet, once it did I strangely no longer desired it and would rather have morosely drowned myself in everything that had come before. (12.01.2022)