Key Largo

Seventy-five years after its original release, Key Largo proves that there’s a timelessness to great acting, a visceral thrill to watching legends go toe-to-toe that doesn’t dull with age.

Although the characters are basically stereotypes, they are lent the gift of life by a superlative cast: Robinson as the truculent Little Caesar, Bogart as an embittered ex-Army officer, Bacall as the innocent who loves him, and above all Trevor as the gangster's disillusioned, drink-sodden moll.

Fans of the genre will enjoy the scene in which Robinson's moll sings Moanin' Low, about a woman trapped in a relationship with a cruel man. [06 Aug 2011, p.30]

Key Largo is heaps of fun if you’re willing to go along for the ride, but perhaps slightly more silly than audiences might expect (or creators intend).

A little windy and rhetorical for my taste, but still one of John Huston’s best efforts (1948), a melodrama of ethics that soundly represses the Maxwell Anderson play it was based on (the ending is actually a lift from To Have and Have Not).

What the play was supposed to be about -- which was dim enough in the original -- is even more obscure in the script that he and Richard Brooks (then a screenwriter) prepared, but the movie is so confidently and entertainingly directed that nobody is likely to complain.

The script prepared by Mr. Huston and Richard Brooks was too full of words and highly cross-purposed implications to give the action full chance.