The last movie Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall would make together, and the best between Bogart and Edward G. Robinson, Key Largo remains an actor's noir, 75 years after its release. chlopinions looks back:
It was supposed to be a nice trip. At least it starts that way. Frank McCloud heads out to sunny Key Largo to meet the father, James and widow, Nora , of a friend who served with him and was killed in WW2. Nora and James run a hotel, which is closed—or supposed to be—for the season, and both treat Frank as a member of the family.
But there are guests at the supposedly closed hotel, who soon make their presence aggressively known. After offering Nora and James a sum of money they just couldn’t refuse, notorious gangster Johnny Rocco and his gang have been holing up at the establishment, hiding from the cops. Yet there’s a hurricane bearing down on the archipelago, and when the fuzz comes sniffing around the joint on the hunt for a different pair of perps, Rocco’s goons get nervous.
Johnny gives Frank a gun with which to kill him early in the action—the catch is, he must also die in the process. A heroic sacrifice. Frank refuses, and his refusal is couched as a disgrace; the ghost of Frank’s dead war hero friend looming. Although no-one in their right mind could really blame him , his shirking of an opportunity for heroism still sits uneasily, and the gangster mocks him relentlessly.
Frank’s “redemption” comes in an act of simple—yet, brave—human decency. Johnny, who gets off on committing these acts of humiliation, persuades his alcoholic ex-songstress moll Gaye to sing an old torch song by promising her a drink afterwards. She sings; he doesn’t deliver. Frank, despite the daunting volume of bad guys with guns who are watching him, strides behind the hotel bar, pours a drink, and gives it to her.
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