Crime Scene is a monthly Vague Visages column about the relationship between crime cinema and movie locations. This Key Largo essay contains spoilers. John Huston’s 1948 film features Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson and Lauren Bacall. Check out VV movie reviews, along with cast/character articles, streaming guides and complete soundtrack song listings, at the home page.

*

For this column, in terms of studio productions vs. filming on location, the dividing line tends to be American cinema versus non-American cinema. Pickup on South Street (1953), a famously quintessential New York film, had not a frame shot on location. Detour (1945), a west-to-east road trip, was shot entirely on backlots with a couple of B-roll sections out in California. Of this column’s US-based entrants, only Collateral (2004) — filmed and set entirely in Los Angeles — uses its real-life location as its filmic setting. Meanwhile, the non-US crime films make much greater use of real-life locations: actual Hong Kong for Time and Tide (2000), actual Paris in Bob le Flambeur (1956). Even the one studio-bound film that bucks this trend — Branded to Kill (1967) — was shot in and around Tokyo. In any case, the movie’s impressionistic stylings suit studio filmmaking.

John Huston’s 1948 film Key Largo is yet another classical Hollywood studio system film in which barely a single frame was shot on location. Only a few establishing shots during the first act were produced in the Florida Keys, and there are brief images of a hurricane snippet out of the forgotten Ronald Reagan flick Night Unto Night (1949). The Keys are a largely flat landscape of sea, sand, leisure hotels, fishing boats and mangrove swamps. Rising sea levels from climate breakdown threaten the area’s future; the region has also long been susceptible to hurricanes in the rainy season from May to October. The most powerful hurricane to ever make landfall in recent American history, the Labor Day hurricane of 1935, hit the Keys particularly hard, killing some 400 people. It gets mentioned in Key Largo by a wheelchair-bound James Temple (Lionel Barrymore), hoping to remind Edward G. Robinson’s sneering gangster, Johnny Rocco, of nature’s absolute power. Amidst the sweat, stickiness, humidity and heat of south Florida, a hurricane arrives in the center of Key Largo as a cleansing force. 

Key Largo Essay: Related — Know the Cast & Characters: ‘Florida Man’

Humphrey Bogart, as U.S. Army veteran Frank McCloud, arrives to a Key Largo hotel to visit James and Nora Temple (Barrymore and Lauren Bacall, respectively), the father and widow of a deceased friend he fought alongside in WWII. There, he finds Rocco, a mafioso thought to be hiding out in Cuba, holed up with his gang waiting for a deal to take place, having forcibly hired out the entire hotel. The impending hurricane turns the good guys into temporary hostages of Rocco’s gang, but also forms a crucible against which the other characters can respond to the threat of the main antagonist. It’s not the only Bogart/Bacall picture where the pair are stranded on a tropical island. Their introduction onscreen, in Howard Hawks’ To Have and Have Not (1944), sees the pair fight Vichy France in colonial Martinique in the Caribbean. In that film, also an entirely studio-bound affair, the heat and humidity is powered by the scorching chemistry between the protagonists. In Key Largo, Bogart and Bacall’s relationship largely doesn’t turn towards the romantic, as the heat instead comes from Robinson’s snarling performance and the expressionistic camerawork by Karl Freund.

Key Largo Essay: Related — Soundtracks of Cinema: ‘Heat’

The hurricane presents the central dramatic shift within Key Largo. It forces Rocco to show his face, having secluded himself in the upper floors of the hotel. Much of the film’s first act has the antagonist’s lackeys referring to him with fear in the third-person, meaning Robinson’s eventual introduction, chomping on a cigar in a bathtub, is all the more menacing. The hurricane’s approach coincides with the arrival of two Native American fugitives in the vicinity, and the cops on their tail. James, presented as a friend to the local Indigenous folks, recommends that they turn themselves in, but when Indigenous families are refused safe harbor in the hotel by Rocco’s men, they see it as a betrayal by Barrymore’s character.

Key Largo Essay: Related — Soundtracks of Television: ‘Florida Man’

Finally, the hurricane also throws into sharp relief the differing approaches of Huston’s chief characters: both James and Nora, familiar with the local climate, are accepting of the storm’s strengths, battening down the hatches briskly and without fuss. For them, it’s the price to pay for living in paradise, the occasional reminder amidst the sea and the sand that nature, both earthly and human, is absolute murder. Then, there is Bogart, playing one of his typical antihero roles, who arrives in Key Largo as a drifter that goes wherever the wind blows; the character initially refuses to look after anybody but himself, but he emerges into a righteous man of justice, taking sides after witnessing a little too much of Rocco’s bullying and harassment. For Frank, there is something transformative in the hurricane, perhaps a cleansing, redemptive force, reminiscent of a christening. 

Key Largo Essay: Related — Know the Cast: ‘Detour’

The hurricane also serves to highlight the greed and self-interest at the heart of Rocco’s gang, who seem to have no answers to the storm’s strength, highlighted by the antagonist’s insistence to his ship captain that he keep the boat parked next to a coral reef — at grave risk to ship and people. Rocco is depicted as a corrupter, interested only in capital and money, with no morals or ethics to stop him. Perhaps the weather is a judgment for Robinson’s character.

Key Largo Essay: Related — Soundtracks of Cinema: ‘Triangle of Sadness’

Though most of Key Largo’s action is shot on a studio backlot, Huston finds ways to highlight the hurricane as a Biblical force. The closed shutters provides a simple and effective visual cipher for the group’s forced enclosure, and the director’s grasp of classical Hollywood compositions are on full display, as a repeated motif has one character in the center of the frame with two antagonists on each side, highlighting the claustrophobia inherent to the script, written by Huston and Richard Brooks. Key Largo was adapted from a 1939 stage play by Maxwell Anderson, a playwright who also wrote the screenplay for the 1930 version of All Quiet on the Western Front.

Key Largo Essay: Related — Know the Cast & Characters: ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’

The original play featured a Spanish Civil War deserter who redeems himself by defending a family against Mexican bandits. It’s perhaps interesting to speculate on the differences in politics between Key Largo the play and Key Largo the film, as Anderson had started out as a left-pacifist playwright but later adopted an increasingly libertarian and reactionary view of the world by the time he wrote the stage production. Key Largo the film emerged after WWII, just as Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare was starting to take over Hollywood. Huston, Bogart, Bacall and Robinson would all come under varying degrees of scrutiny by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Key Largo Essay: Related — Soundtracks of Cinema: ‘The Killer’

Much of Key Largo’s dramatic tension emerges from Bogart’s drift from non-commitance to action, combined against the cleansing effect of the hurricane and the avaricious, judgmental harrying of Rocco. A handful of key lines of dialogue suggest that Frank — initially an idealist on his entry to WWII, aiming to rid the world of evil — has been since disillusioned and outcast. It is witnessing evil up close once again in the figure of Rocco that Bogart’s protagonist returns to his previous proactivity. Huston and Brooks (himself born Reuben Sax to Jewish Russian emigrants) were conscious of how anti-semitism, McCarthyism and reactionary politics of repression were all deeply linked, most frequently enabled by powerful, greedy men who would use whatever means of division to get ahead on their own.

Key Largo Essay: Related — Know the Cast: ‘When Evil Lurks’

Key Largo is about a group of people who, holed up against evil, find in themselves a means to fight back and respond. Maybe the hurricane is a complete allegory. After all, the storm was conjured on a studio stage somewhere in the Warner Brothers lot. Perhaps the force of nature that rids the world of Rocco and his ilk lies not in nature but within ourselves?

Fedor Tot (@redrightman) is a Yugoslav-born, Wales-raised freelance film critic and editor, specializing in the cinema of the ex-Yugoslav region. Beyond that, he also has an interest in film history, particularly in the way film as a business affects and decides the function of film as an art.

Key Largo Essay: Related — Soundtracks of Cinema: ‘The Silencing’