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Returning WW2 vet fights gangsters on the Florida keys

The director of Key Largo, John Huston, co-wrote the screenplay with Richard Brooks, from a play by Maxwell Anderson.  The stage origins of the film are evident, but this strengthens the atmosphere of claustrophobia as the action is played out inside a seaside guest-house boarded-up against a hurricane.

The cast is particularly strong with Humphrey Bogart as the war vet, Edward G. Robinson as the over-the-hill gangster Johnny Rocco staging a comeback, with Claire Trevor as his alcoholic mole and Thomas Gomez as Rocco’s No.2, and Lauren Bacall as a young war widow with the legendary Lionel Barrymore as her father-in-law. Trevor deservedly won a best-supporting-actress Oscar for her role.

For some the returning war vet theme gives the movie a film noir quality – even though the action takes place in a non-noir locale and there is no cross-over between the good guys and the bad guys. I feel the picture is essentially a good-triumphs-over-evil tale laced with a swan-song for the gangster flick and leavened with post-war existentialist angst.

Bogart’s vet, Frank McLoud, shares the angst  of post-war Europe, where many returning to the peace with expectations of a better world that would justify the suffering and destruction, are confronted with the reality that nothing has changed. Disillusioned and bitter, the moral absolutism that underpinned their sacrifice dissolves into a weary relativism where one less Johnny Rocco is not worth dying for.

The climax and resolution of the story complete with a non-noir ending, also give little support to the view that Key Largo is a film noir. As the final scene hits the screen, it is the strength of family and the selfless pursuit of established values that destroy evil, with the existential anti-hero morphing into a hero of the classic mold. As McLoud says: “When your head says one thing and your whole life says another, your head always loses.”

“The shopworn and superfluous ending has all the impact of a stale peppermint upon a man who has ordered a steak dinner.”
– Motion Picture Herald on the film’s release

Even without the cop-out ending, I find it hard to see Fritz Lang’s The Woman in The Window as other than a minor film noir. Although Freudian symbolism abounds and the noir theme of lives destroyed by chance events and small decisions is deftly handled, the movie is slow and ponderous – like the middle-aged law professor protagonist. Definitely one of Lang’s lesser works. Lang’s similarly-themed Scarlet Street (1945), made a year later with the same leads, is much stronger.

To give it credit the picture was popular with audiences and made money, but producer and screenwriter, Nunnally Johnson, was less than impressed, and it was received coolly by the critics.

In an interview in 1975, Lang justified the ending in these words:

This movie was not about evil… it was about psychology, the subconscious desires, and what better expression of those than in a dream, where the libido is released and emotions are exxagerated… [an] audience wouldn’t think a movie worthwhile in which a man kills two [sic] people and himself just because he had made a mistake by going home with a girl…

The irony of the second part of the quote will not be lost on film noir aficionados.

“this etched-in-acid film chronicles the flaws in the American dream…”
– Steven H. Scheuer

“Constant, lambent, virulent attention to money and its effects, and more authentic suggestion of sex than one hopes to see in American films.”
– James Agee

One of the great Hollywood melodramas with an Oscar-winning performance from the luminous Joan Crawford as Mildred. Better than the James M. Cain novel on which it is based, Mildred Pierce under the assured direction of Michael Curtiz, and with stunning film noir photography by cinematographer Ernest Haller, is top-class entertainment.

The story of family tragedy played out against the pursuit of the California dream of wealth and ease through hard-work and ambition destroyed by wastrel conceit and shameless greed, is as strong an indictment of the moral corrosiveness of wealth and privilege as Hollywood has achieved. But it is also a story of profound humanity and the worth of simple decency and personal integrity. Mildred makes tragic mistakes and misplaces her trust and love, but she is always true to herself, and in even in her darkest hour towers above the morass of greed and selfishness that would suck her down.

These frames from the movie illustrate the visual dynamite that explodes on the screen in the film’s most dramatic moments:

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