Key Largo

Sunday, March 30, 2008

If there's one thing I've really been fucking up on my K2K, it's been trying to watch a broad range of movies. Instead, I keep falling into my usual nerd trap of obsessing over one actor, or director or genre or whatever. So here's another John Huston / Humphrey Bogart collaboration.

It's another pretty good tough guy flick, although I saw it under less than ideal conditions and maybe I would have liked it more in other circumstances. This one has the benefit of featuring Edward G. Robinson playing an evil bastard. In a nice, odd detail, they introduce his character sitting in a bathtub with a fan blowing on him.

This one is less un-PC than some of the other Huston films I've seen, and it in fact tries to shed a positive light on the native American characters. But they are also kind of relegated to plot device and victim roles, and it comes off as a little condescending. But it's a huge step above Bogart slapping Petter Lorre around in The Maltese Falcon because he's gay.

I wonder if this one had a different ending originally. There's a lot of talk about risking one's life to save others, and Bogart's character is reluctant to do so until the very end. He gets plugged during the final shootout, so I figured it was going to end with him dying nobly to save all the others. But then the film ends with him wounded, but alive and steering his boat back to Key Largo. Feels a little like something the studio might have insisted upon.