Key Largo is a 1948 American film noir crime drama directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson and Lauren Bacall.
[5] Key Largo was the fourth and final film pairing of actors Bogart and Bacall, after To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), and Dark Passage (1947).
Claire Trevor won the 1948 Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her portrayal of alcoholic former nightclub singer Gaye Dawn.
Because the winter vacation season has ended and a hurricane is approaching, the hotel has only six guests: dapper Toots, boorish Curly, stone-faced Ralph, servant Angel, attractive but aging alcoholic Gaye Dawn, and a sixth man who remains secluded in his room.
As the storm approaches, Curly, Ralph, Angel, and Toots pull guns and take the Temples and Frank hostage.
They explain that the sixth, reclusive member of their party, is the notorious gangster Johnny Rocco – who was exiled to Cuba some years before.
Rocco then forces Frank, who is a skilled seaman, to take him and his henchmen back to Cuba on the small hotel boat.
As the gang prepares to board the boat, Gaye steals Rocco's gun and covertly passes it to Frank.
[10] Variety wrote that "Emphasis is on tension in the telling...There are overtones of soapboxing on a better world but this is never permitted to interfere with basic plot."
[11] James Agee expected more from John Huston: "...I rather doubt anyhow whether gangsters can be made to represent all that he meant them to--practically everything that is fundamentally wrong with post-war America; so the picture is weak in the way it was obviously intended to be strongest."
[13] Pauline Kael: "Huston fills the rancid atmosphere of the setting--a hotel in the Florida Keys--with suspense, ambiguous motives, and some hilariously hammy bits, and the cast all go at it as if the nonsense about gangsters and human dignity were high drama."
The site's consensus: "Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall are at the mercy of Edward G. Robinson's menacing gangster -- and so is the audience in this enthralling chamber piece."
[16] A high point of the film comes when Robinson's alcoholic former moll Gaye Dawn (Claire Trevor) is forced to sing a song a cappella before he will allow her to have a drink.
[17] The song was "Moanin' Low," composed by Ralph Rainger with lyrics by Howard Dietz, introduced on Broadway in the 1929 revue The Little Show by Libby Holman.
Author Philip Furia, whose books focus on the lyricists of the Tin Pan Alley era, writes that the song is about a woman who is trapped in a relationship with a cruel man, and Gaye slowly realizes as she is singing that she is in that very situation herself.