John Huston is a filmmaker that constantly amazes me, with every piece of his work that I see bringing something new to the table. It’s worth noting that the film of his that I watched most recently prior to Key Largo was 1979′s Wise Blood, a film, or indeed a difference in film that displays Huston’s variety laden career. If one were to note his earlier work, in the shape of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, or The Maltese Falcon, and then were to see his latter work such as Under the Volcano, or The Dead I would be foolhardy to blame them for thinking the two lists of films represented two different filmmakers. And lets not forget that The African Queen and The Night of the Iguana slot into the middle of his career too. Diverse is perhaps too light a word to describe Huston’s oeuvre.

When your head says one thing and your whole life says another, your head always loses.

Key Largo is a situation based drama set largely within the confines of a hotel as a hurricane blows outside. Former-GI Frank McCloud (Humphrey Bogart) holes up in the hotel, alongside the father and wife of his former comrade (Lionel Barrymore and Lauren Bacall) to see out the storm, alongside an extradited gangster (Edward G. Robinson) using the Florida Keys locale as a stop gap between Cuba and his return to the US. As his secret is discovered things turn violent as we see our three protagonists caught between a ferocious act of a nature, and a ferocious act of mankind.

Key Largo would be the fourth and final collaboration between Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, and as such the chemistry that has built up over the years in which they worked together comes together in this final piece. Bogart provides the usual laidback cool that one expects of him, while Bacall is simply radiant as the mysterious widow that sees him as a replacement of sorts for her deceased beloved. Able support is provided by Lionel Barrymore as the accommodating hotelier and Claire Trevor, the only member of the cast to win an oscar for the film, in her turn as the turncoat moll.

As one would expect with a John Huston film the camerawork is outstanding. One highly original moment consists of a camera being placed on a boat, which is then pulled closer to the figures on screen. Its simple but incredibly effective. I noted during my screening of the film how the entire narrative feels like one long scene, in that each scene has very little in the way of a break, with each one flowing into each other  in real time. This allusion is broken towards the end of the picture, when the action moves away from the hotel, but for most of the films 100 minutes we are rarely given any kind of hold up in the flow of the picture.

Key Largo is a wonderfully evocative picture, that really holds up over six decades on. That Huston produced this in the same year as the magnificent The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is little short of staggering.