A Film Canon

Key Largo inflects the gangster film through high noir, turning on aging boss Rocco's (Edward G. Robinson) recognition that his world is on the verge of an apocalyptic annihilation that doesn't consist in the decline of gangsterdom so much as in its increasingly sophisticated entanglement with law and politics, and concomitant lack of solidarity in the face of their representatives. This divests it of any claim to the fraternal, or even homosocial, rapport encapsulated in his peculiar proximity to his sidekicks ('toots'), with whom he hostages a Florida Keys hotel inhabited only by its proprietor (Lionel Barrymore), his daughter-in-law (Lauren Bacall), and a friend of her late husband (Humphrey Bogart). The result is a very different kind of nostalgia from that evinced by the late 1930s gangster film, less centred on salvation than prophecy, in which the Prohibition period - taken as the epitome of this fraternal solidarity - is elevated to Jerusalem, destined to return, and the Florida Keys attain the panoramic, detached vantage point of its Sinai. Despite Rocco's revolting insecurity, there's a certain pathos to this collaborative fantasy, epitomised by the moment at which his girl (Claire Trevor), whom he hasn't seen for eight years, performs one of her old speakeasy numbers - a generic staple - but without the romantic, accompanying mileu that it connotes, producing an unbearable dismay on the part of both criminals and victims, suddenly united in their recognition of a drastic distance from their pasts. This apocalyptism is reinforced by the imminent arrival of a hurricane and tidal wave, as well as by a claustrophobic intensity that justifies the (conspicuous) use of a sound-stage for most of the action, and is itself compounded by the omnipresent Indian population, for whom a single day's confinement is as oppressive as thirty Caucasian days.