Frank McCloud travels to Key Largo to see the widow and father of his old WW2 pal but when he arrives at the hotel they own he finds it taken over by a group of mobsters and the old man and girl being held virtual prisoners. On top of having to deal with the deadly Johnny Rocco, a hurricane's moving in on them.
A storm's a'coming, and I don't just mean the weather!
Classic noir by The Treasure of the Sierra Madre director John Huston and the last to pair husband and wife team Bogart and Bacall on the big screen.
Lionel Barrymore, the great-uncle of Drew, plays the wheelchair bound father-in-law of Bacall. It's an excellent performance made all the more convincing by the fact that Barrymore himself was confined to a wheelchair by arthritis.
Edward G. Robinson is Rocco, the ultimate ageing gangster who wants nothing more than a return to the good old days of prohibition. The character was written as a cross between Al Capone and Lucky Luciano with Claire Trevor, Rocco's heavy drinking mall, being based on Luciano's real girlfriend. If James Cagney became king of the gangsters in films like White Heat and Angels with Dirty Faces then Robinson, Little Caesar himself, was emperor.
The production was filmed almost entirely in a mock-up hotel at Warner Brothers and the lack of expansive sets (a little unusual for a Huston film), together with the threat of the storm, gives a feeling of building pressure and impending doom and allows for some great dialogue between the two main characters.
In a clever, if cruel, bit of direction Huston only told Claire Trevor that she was going to sing on the day of filming. Trevor wasn't a singer and had had no rehearsal, on top of that she was terrified of singing in front of Bogy and Robinson who were massive stars. The result was that her performance was nervous and shaky, exactly the effect Huston was after.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040506/?ref_=tttr_tr_tt
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