Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
A hurricane swells outside, but it's nothing compared to the storm within the hotel at Key Largo. There, sadistic mobster Johnny Rocco holes up - and holds at gunpoint hotel owner James Temple, his widowed daughter-in-law Nora, and ex-GI Frank McCloud.
Key Largo is a taut, stage-bound thriller elevated enormously by its performances — Edward G. Robinson's Johnny Rocco is one of cinema's great villain turns, and Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall anchor the film with magnetic presence. The plot is essentially a one-location pressure cooker, effective but not especially intricate, and the ending resolves things in a fairly conventional manner for the genre. Cinematography is competent noir work from Karl Freund but not visually distinctive. Novelty is moderate — it adapts a Maxwell Anderson play and works a familiar noir formula, though the ensemble dynamics and Robinson's performance give it real character.