“Key Largo was one of my happiest movie experiences,” Bacall would recall. Not only was it in the hands of a different director, but the director was John Huston. In The Big Sleep, Bacall and Bogart’s second film together, the same Howard Hawks wanted to recapture the provocative groove of their previous film, aiming at creating another vehicle for the Bogart-Bacall magic, and worked out the script with the intuitive view of the two characters’ relationship and dialogue in mind. They, of course, had the most intense chemistry when they first appeared together in Howard Hawks’ To Have and Have Not, where “a very knowing, yet actually not widely experienced young woman meets an older man, knows at once what she wants, and proceeds to tempt, tease, and taunt him into an instinctive, erotically charged rapport,” as Todd McCarthy described their love story in Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood. They were made for each other, and had a very special rapport, on and off screen. In the book Bogie: A Celebration of the Life and Films of Humphrey Bogart, Richard Schickel describes Bogart’s scenes with Lauren Bacall as having an “unguarded quality”, something Bogart had never done when playing opposite other women. After the screenplay was written, however, I would say, “Only Bogie can play this role.””īacall and Bogart were at their forth (it would also be their final) film together. I never wrote a scenario with Bogie in mind. “We were friends, but it was the image Bogart projected on screen that made him right for my movies. “Bogart was extraordinary in that,” Huston would say about his experience of working with Bogie on the film. In reality, he hated Roosevelt and Huston told the rest of the crew “to watch how he greeted his teeth when he had to praise him – John loved stuff like that,” Lauren Bacall remembered in her book. In one scene, he had to draw himself from his wheelchair defending Franklin Roosevelt. The actor had been confined to a wheelchair for some years. Lionel Barrymore’s character was in a wheelchair. “Robinson is immediately established as obscene and dangerous, like an animal caught out in the open.” “I wanted the look of a crustacean with its shell off,” said Huston in an interview with Dan Ford, in 1972. He is introduced sitting naked in a bathtub, chewing a cigar. Robinson plays fugitive gangster Johnny Rocco, who takes over the hotel together with his entourage and holds everybody hostage as the hurricane strikes. Humphrey Bogart, as Frank McCloud, is an embittered army major, who visits a hotel in Key Largo, Florida, to meet Nora Temple (Lauren Bacall) and James Temple (Lionel Barrymore), the widow and father of his friend war buddy killed on the front. I think it just feels very entertaining despite or maybe because of the contained, claustrophobic setting of a small hotel in Florida, and all the actors do such a fantastic job playing out their fates during a compressed period of time, during a hurricane, as contrasting characters brought together by circumstance. When John Huston watched Key Largo for the first time years after its release, he told Barbara Thomas in 1978, “I liked the whole picture.” There is something to this film that I really love. Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in “Key Largo”, 1948.
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