Key largo movie cast full#

Warner Brothers costume stalwart Leah Rhodes was credited with the wardrobe in Key Largo, a film whose costume design meets the unique challenge of any work set across a single day where a character’s unchanging costume-and how it’s worn and unworn over the course of that day-are very telling. To demonstrate just how much Bogart inhabited his parts, the vessel was named Santana, sharing its name with the actor’s personal fishing boat.

It was Howard Hawks who contributed Key Largo’s ending of a gunfight at sea, dusting off an unused finale idea from To Have and Have Not. Huston worked with Richard Brooks to adapt for the screen, making McCloud a World War II veteran who finds his redemption in courageous action rather than death. Key Largo was based on Maxwell Anderson’s play that ran from November 1939 through February 1940 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, starring Paul Muni in the central role of Spanish Civil War deserter King McCloud. One of the film’s key scenes (no pun intended) and the sequence that has been cited as directly responsible for Trevor’s Oscar centered around Gaye’s boozy, reluctant, and off-key a capella rendition of Libby Holman’s signature hit “Moanin’ Low”, falling apart as she recognizes how much her life parallels that of the abused lover singing the song. Like many gang chiefs in Warner Brothers’ early fare, our hero’s foil “the one and only Rocco” was pulled from contemporary headlines, borrowing mannerisms, affectations, and even favorite alias from the recently deceased Al Capone and biographical details from the recently exiled Lucky Luciano.Įven Lucky’s main squeeze Gay Orlova would inspire Rocco’s torch-singing moll Gaye Dawn, a performance that would land Claire Trevor a well-deserved Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Johnny Rocco gives Frank McCloud what for, see?įrank: Yes, I had hopes once, but I gave them up.įrank: A world in which there’s no place for Johnny Rocco.

Robinson in his fifth and final on-screen pairing with Bogie. Now, he’s on the other end of the gangster’s gun, standing tall among his fellow hostages to challenge their torturer, the domineering bully Johnny Rocco played by Edward G.

Key largo movie cast full#

Just a dozen years had passed since Bogie had exploded onto the big screen with his star-making role in The Petrified Forest (1936) as a Dillinger-esque criminal holding a cafe full of people hostage in the Arizona desert. Frank has seen enough of the world to know that the five hard-nosed thugs and their abusive boss are hardly in the hot and humid Keys for the deep-sea fishing as they claim. The man’s gregarious father, James Temple (Lionel Barrymore), runs a resort hotel that he co-operates with his son’s widow, Nora (Lauren Bacall), who appears instantly smitten with the newcomer. Key Largo‘s hero of the hour is Frank McCloud-that’s Frank, by John, out of Ellen-a former Army major traveling the country on his way to live the seafaring life aboard a fishing boat as “life on land’s become too complicated for my taste.” His last stop is Key Largo, specifically the Largo Hotel, to visit the family of one of the fallen soldiers from his command. No longer Warner Brothers’ resident “sniveling bastard” who gets plugged by the end, Bogie had now developed his own personal brand of cinematic heroism, the honest but laconic man-of-the-world who’s seen enough to be cynical when we-and our femme fatale du jour-meet him, until he ultimately finds his ideals in time to triumph over evil by the end.

The claustrophobia of our characters’ forced isolation against the looming summer storm outside and the raging tension inside made it particularly impactful viewing during months in lockdown.īy this point, Humphrey Bogart had been firmly established as one of the biggest stars in the world, having risen over the decade thanks to iconic roles in movies like The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, and most recently The Treasure of Sierra Madre, to name just a few. Released today in 1948, John Huston’s moody noir Key Largo marked the fourth and final of Bogie and Bacall’s on-screen collaborations, closing out their celluloid romance the way it began in To Have and Have Not (1944) with a talent-packed cast (including Dan Seymour as a heavy heavy) in a tropical locale shrouded in shadows, storms, and gunplay. Humphrey Bogart as Frank McCloud, taciturn war veteran and former newspaperman Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall on the set of Key Largo (1948) Vitals