Key Largo (1948)
In 1938, John Huston was hired as a contract screenwriter at Warner Bros., where he wrote the script for High Sierra (1941), a gangster movie for director Raoul Walsh and starring Humphrey Bogart. He directed The Maltese Falcon (1941), a superior detective movie, from his own screenplay, which was his first directorial effort, that same year. He joined the armed forces in 1942, and became a lieutenant in the Signal Corps. In 1944, Huston wrote, directed, and narrated a documentary, The Battle of San Pietro, and he made reference to the battle in his postwar feature Key Largo.
After the war, he coauthored the screenplay for The Killers at Universal; he was uncredited because he was under contract to Warner and could not officially work at another studio. Producer Jerry Wald persuaded him to adapt Key Largo, a play by Maxwell Anderson, for Warner Bros. It had opened on Broadway in November 1939, starring Paul Muni. After reading Anderson’s opus carefully, Huston despaired of turning this heavy-handed, preachy antiwar play into a viable movie. It was composed in blank verse, no less. The play lasted only 105 performances on Broadway and then folded like the proverbial ninety-eight-cent card table, but Huston was committed to the project, since he was a contract director at the studio.
Anderson’s play deals with King McCloud, an American who volunteers to fight for the loyalist cause against the fascists during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939)—not the Spanish American War, as some commentators on the play erroneously state. When McCloud sees that the loyalist cause is lost, he flees from the battlefield, but his fellow American companions-in-arms stay on and are killed. Once back in the United States, McCloud goes to visit the family of one of his dead American comrades, who run a small hotel in the Florida Keys. Some gangsters have taken control of the hotel as a hideout, and he stands up to them, losing his life in the bargain. He displays the kind of courage he lacked while fighting in Spain and atones for his cowardice at that time.1
Huston coauthored the screenplay of Key Largo with Richard Brooks, who would follow Huston’s lead and move up from being a scriptwriter to a writer and director of such movies as The Blackboard Jungle (1955). Huston and Brooks decamped to the Florida Keys to collaborate on the screenplay, since Huston was convinced that soaking up the atmosphere there would aid them in writing a more authentic script. They began by moving the setting of the story from 1939 to the post–World War II era. Moreover, they made Johnny Rocco a mob boss who sneaks back into the United States after he has been deported to Cuba by the U.S. government as an undesirable citizen. It was Brooks’s suggestion that they model Rocco on Charles “Lucky” Luciano, a mobster deported to Cuba in 1946. Rocco, of course, was also based on Al Capone, who retired to Florida in the late 1940s and died there of advanced syphilis a year or so before the movie was made.2
Huston comments in his autobiography that, in bringing the play up to date, he and Brooks were depicting Rocco and his hoods as serving notice that the “underworld was on the move” in postwar America. Indeed, one of the gangsters in Key Largo predicts that when Rocco gets back on top, “it will be just like old times.”
Edward G. Robinson thought that returning to Warner Bros. after a six-year absence to play Johnny Rocco, a heartless killer like Little Caesar, would give his career a boost. As a matter of fact, James Cagney would follow Robinson’s lead and return to Warner a year later to make the gangster picture White Heat for the same reason.
Humphrey Bogart, who played in Huston’s The Treasure of Sierra Madre (1948), plays Frank McCloud (King McCloud in the play), a World War II veteran who comes to Key Largo to pay a visit to the Largo Hotel. The proprietor is James Temple (Lionel Barrymore), who is confined to a wheelchair. James Temple is the father of George Temple, McCloud’s deceased army buddy; Nora (Lauren Bacall) is George’s widow. Claire Trevor, who played Bogart’s old flame in Dead End, is Gaye Dawn, Rocco’s erstwhile moll. Trevor remembers basing her portrayal of Gaye on “Luciano’s mistress, Gay Orlova, an American showgirl [she] met in London in the early 1930s.”3
The musical score is by Max Steiner (White Heat), and the cinematographer is Karl Freund, who worked with Fritz Lang in Berlin during the silent period. He won an Academy Award for The Good Earth (1937). Freund employed atmospheric shadows and bizarre lighting at times to transfigure the otherwise fairly commonplace hotel setting into a living nightmare. For example, Freund arranged the frightening setting, depicting a hurricane raging outside the hotel, with lights flickering and dimming, plus windows shattering and shutters banging.
Thomas Leitch praises Key Largo as “one of the great gangster films,” and well he might. In Little Caesar, “Edward G. Robinson had almost single-handedly established the . . . gangster film genre.”4 In Key Largo, as Rocco, Robinson plays a ruthless gangster, like Rico in Little Caesar. Rocco plans a comeback as a gangland leader, aiming to terrorize law-abiding citizens, just as Rico had done during the Prohibition era.5
John McCarty reports that some critics found Key Largo “stagey” at times.6 On the contrary, John Tibbetts compliments Huston, saying that, except for a few exterior scenes, Huston was wise to retain the “play’s claustrophobic atmosphere by confining the action to the hotel interiors” because this helps to create tension.7
Like Wyler in Dead End, Huston primarily utilizes a single principal setting in filming a play. He rarely strays from the hotel setting throughout the film. Huston extends the action by staging scenes throughout the building, from the hotel lobby to the individual suites on the upper floors. The movement back and forth between the playing areas keeps the movie from being static or stagey. Finally, the shootout aboard the motor launch in the ocean at the film’s end underscores the fact that Huston has made a cinematic film out of Anderson’s play. Shooting lasted from December 1947 to March 1948.
Carlos Clarens says it is “rumored” that the showdown at sea was filmed by Raoul Walsh, but he gives no source for this information.8 It is true, however, that Huston lifted the shootout for Key Largo from the final pages of Ernest Hemingway’s novel To Have and Have Not, which Warner Bros. had filmed in 1944, without using the shootout in that film. Huston told Time magazine that he had “tried to make all the characters old-fashioned, to brand them as familiar figures from gangster films of the past,” implying that they were ready to take over again. Certainly the racketeers in the film behave as if they were in a gangster film of the 1930s—not only Robinson, but Marc Lawrence, Thomas Gomez, and others.9 Although Rocco’s stay in the United States is temporary, he asserts more than once that he will be coming back when the time is right: “I’ll be back on top one of these days!”
When Key Largo was submitted to the Breen Office, Stephen Jackson, Breen’s chief consulter, wrote to producer Jerry Wald that he was concerned about Robinson’s performance. Robinson was associated with the 1930s gangster cycle, which had caused a great deal of trouble for the censor’s office. Wald replied that the film had a moral point to make, that is, that the gangster was the “symbol of everything we are trying to avoid going back to.” Breen overruled Jackson’s negative response to the film, since he sensed that Jackson was too inflexible in evaluating gangster films. Jackson, who was a judge before joining Breen’s staff, was known as the “hanging judge” in the industry.10
The movie begins with a printed prologue: “At the southernmost point of the United States are the Florida Keys, a string of small islands held together by a concrete causeway. Largest of the remote coral islands is Key Largo.” The first scene to follow the prologue shows Frank McCloud arriving on a bus at the old, isolated Hotel Largo to see George Temple’s widow and father. Writes Huston, “I think Key Largo is best remembered by most people for the introductory scene with Eddie Robinson in the bathtub, cigar in mouth.”11 Scott Hammen adds, “By the time Robinson rises from the tub, still chomping on his cigar, and wraps himself in a silk bathrobe, his character has been completely defined for the moviegoer familiar with gangster pictures.”12
Meanwhile, downstairs, McCloud relates some incidents about George Temple to James Temple and Nora, explaining how George died heroically in the Battle of San Pietro, a campaign about which Huston had made a documentary entitled The Battle of San Pietro. “The massive casualties, the ruined church, the improvised cemetery” are all in Huston’s documentary.13 McCloud admires George Temple and has nothing but contempt for Rocco, who attempts to provoke McCloud by handing him a gun and telling him to try and kill him. McCloud declines to have a gunfight with Rocco, so he tosses the gun on a chair, explaining that “one more Johnny Rocco in the world is not worth dying for.” Rocco ridicules McCloud for being a coward: “A live war hero—now I know how you did it!” Then Deputy Sherriff Clyde Sawyer (John Rodney), whom Rocco is holding captive, impulsively grabs the gun and fires, but he is shot dead by Rocco. It seems that the gun Rocco gave to McCloud had no bullets in it. Gaye Dawn, running true to form as a dumb blonde, says, “A live coward is better than a dead hero.” More to the point is Nora’s comment to McCloud: “Maybe this is a rotten world, but a cause isn’t lost as long as one person is willing to go on fighting.” McCloud insists that he is not willing to fight Rocco’s kind.
Rocco demands that Gaye, a lush, sing the old standby she used to warble as a nightclub singer in her heyday in exchange for a drink. Gaye struggles through “Moanin’ Low,” her voice flat and off-key. Revolted by her wretched performance, Rocco cruelly refuses her the drink. She is crushed and humiliated. Without a word, McCloud goes to the bar, pours a drink, and hands it to the grateful Gaye. Rocco is furious at being overruled and slaps McCloud around, but McCloud does not retaliate. McCloud’s action demonstrates his innate courage, and his compassion for the woefully mistreated Gaye.
Rocco is a bully, but when a ferocious hurricane batters the hotel, he is terrified by the force of nature. Huston employs the hurricane to prefigure the violence that will erupt at the movie’s climax. Meanwhile, another mob boss shows up with his entourage to purchase the counterfeit money Rocco has smuggled into the country. Ziggy (Marc Lawrence) buys the boodle of “funny money” and departs with his gang. Then Rocco demands that McCloud be skipper of the motor launch that will transport Rocco and his henchmen back to Cuba.
Rocco refuses to take Gaye along, and she surreptitiously lifts Rocco’s gun from his pocket and slips it to McCloud. (Hell has no fury like a woman scorned.) En route to Cuba, McCloud summons the kind of courage he demonstrated in combat and confronts Rocco and his gang. The intrepid McCloud outmaneuvers and kills Rocco’s gang, leaving Rocco hiding below deck. Rocco is waiting for his chance to take aim at McCloud, who is on deck, but McCloud shoots Rocco as he comes up the passageway, pretending to surrender. “The death of Johnny Rocco was intended to signify the end of an era,” writes Barry Gifford; the days of the old-time gangster were over. “Organized crime moved into the modern world,” and there was no place for the Johnny Roccos of yesteryear.14
Edward G. Robinson again playing a gangster kingpin modeled on Al Capone (left) in John Huston’s Key Largo (1948), with Humphrey Bogart (center) as his nemesis. Lionel Barrymore as James Temple and Lauren Bacall as Nora look on.
Key Largo was a commercial success, although some reviewers merely thought it to be just another gangster flick. Jay Nash and Stanley Ross were right on target in calling it a “production against which most crime films can be judged and few can match.”15 Nevertheless, Huston decided that it was to be his last film for Warner Bros. Not only was he put off by Jack Warner’s refusal to allow him to direct the projects he chose, he was “dissatisfied with the studio in general.” Huston continued, “Its great innovative period was in decline,” the days when Warner pioneered in the gangster genre, and the musical comedy genre, too.16
John Huston decided to become an independent filmmaker, making a deal with a studio for each film that he wanted to make, one picture at a time. While he was shopping around for his next property, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) offered him Quo Vadis, but historical epics were not his cup of tea. He instead selected a project for which he was more suited and made a movie for MGM that turned out to be a major achievement.
The Asphalt Jungle (1950)
“The postwar crime cycle signaled the comeback of the gangster film,” writes Jonathan Munby; “its return to popularity had been delayed by Hollywood’s commitment to supporting the war effort” by making war pictures.17 Huston contributed two gangster films to the renewal of the gangster genre. The first was Key Largo; then came The Asphalt Jungle, called the “granddaddy of the big heist films.”18 More recently, Dennis Lim has credited Huston with “creating the template of the heist film” by codifying its formula: “A criminal mastermind recruits a motley crew of outcasts with distinct personalities and functions”; the robbery sequence is precisely choreographed; and the “makeshift brotherhood dissolves, overtaken by paranoia and greed.”19
The Asphalt Jungle was derived from a novel by W. R. Burnett, sometimes called the poet laureate of American crime fiction. Burnett also authored the novel on which Little Caesar is based, and he coauthored the screenplay for This Gun for Hire. As a screenwriter, Huston had already adapted Burnett’s novel High Sierra for Humphrey Bogart in 1941. “Burnett almost seems to write for me,” Huston once observed.20
Louis B. Mayer, the pompous vice president of MGM, was not pleased that Dore Schary, the production chief, had green-lighted The Asphalt Jungle. Mayer took one look at the script, coauthored by Huston and Ben Maddow, and snapped, saying, “It is full of nasty, ugly people, doing nasty, ugly things. I wouldn’t walk across the room to see a thing like that.”21 But Nicholas Schenck, president of MGM’s parent company, Loew’s, sided with Schary, emphasizing to Mayer that MGM was still churning out too many bland movies, and not enough tough, gritty films like The Asphalt Jungle.22 Schary furnished Huston with one of the studio’s best cinematographers, Hal Rosson (The Wizard of Oz); together they turned out a “dark, claustrophobic film without a ray of sunshine filtering through” in most scenes.23
Ben Maddow, Huston’s writing partner, agreed with him that a screenplay should be faithful to its literary source, which is certainly true of Huston’s script for Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Maddow’s script for William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust (1949). There is little wonder that the screenplay for The Asphalt Jungle follows the novel so closely. What’s more, Huston resisted making the changes to the screenplay suggested by Joseph Breen, the industry censor. Breen reminded Huston that the Motion Picture Production Code stated, “Methods of crime should not be explicitly presented: Theft, robbery, safecracking . . . should not be detailed in method,” because such a detailed depiction of a crime might lead to its imitation in real life.24 But the code was beginning to lose its bite in the 1950s. Hence, Huston was able to convince Breen to let this particular caveat pass.
Still, Breen had another complaint about the script to which he held tenaciously. During the course of the movie, Alonzo Emmerich, a crooked lawyer, commits suicide. Although suicide was not specifically forbidden by the code, Breen contended that suicide was prohibited by divine law and should be forbidden in motion pictures. When Emmerich kills himself in the screenplay, he does so calmly and deliberately, so Huston could not maintain that Emmerich was not in his right mind when he shot himself. Huston therefore altered the scene so that Emmerich hopelessly attempts to write a suicide note to his wife but is too agitated to complete it; he tears it up and discards it. The lawyer is thus shown to be in a state of turmoil at that moment and incapable of rational thought. That was sufficient to indicate, for the censor’s purposes, that Emmerich “was not in his right mind” when he took his life.25 Breen accepted the revised version of the scene and approved the screenplay. Furthermore, the code was amended the following year to include suicide among the actions discouraged.
Huston elicited a high degree of ensemble acting from a group of supporting players who rarely got the opportunity to give performances of such substance. Sam Jaffe took the role as Doc Riedenschneider, a German American and the mastermind of the armed robbery; Louis Calhern is the corrupt lawyer Alonzo Emmerich; Marc Lawrence, who played a mob boss in Key Largo, is Cobby, a bookie who has connections with the mob; Jean Hagen is Doll, a former dancer in a clip joint and Dix Handley’s melancholy mistress; and Sterling Hayden is the brooding loser Dix. Huston had trouble selling Hayden to Schary because Hayden was an irritable loner in real life; his resume also included some mediocre movies, as he had been in more turkeys than Stove Top dressing. Withal, he gives a commanding performance in The Asphalt Jungle. Dix grew up on a Kentucky horse farm, on which the banks have foreclosed, and he earnestly yearns to go home again before he dies. The only actress in the cast lacking experience was a young Marilyn Monroe, who made her first notable movie appearance in this picture as Em-merich’s feather-brained mistress Angela.
Huston shot the movie in just forty-nine days and was quite satisfied with it when it was finished. He made a short promo for the film, in which he addresses the audience, saying that the movie is about a little band of criminals and their relationships with one another. “You may not admire these people, but I think they’ll fascinate you,” he says.
The key players in John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950); bottom row, left to right: Sam Jaffe, Louis Calhern, Jean Hagen, and Sterling Hayden.
In postwar gangster pictures, the city has become more dark and disturbing than ever before. Huston portrays the city (which goes unnamed, but is probably Chicago) as a grimy, hostile wilderness, little different from a jungle. Although the city in the film is identified as being in the Midwest, the movie was filmed in Los Angeles.
The movie begins with a gray dawn that casts light on a “wasteland of train tracks, desolate-looking warehouses, dingy oil storage tanks, and grimy alleys full of rubble.”26 Then Rosson’s camera picks up a thug prowling down deserted streets, hiding behind a pillar next to a train track from a passing patrol car; it is Dix Handley.
We soon cut to Doc Riedenschneider, recently released from prison, emerging from a taxi and entering a shady bookie joint. He goes down a long dark corridor to meet with Cobby, the bookmaker, in his grubby office. Doc arranges through Cobby to have an audience with the patrician lawyer Emmerich. Doc confers with Emmerich, not in his house in town, but in his riverside cottage, where he keeps his nubile mistress, Angela. He agrees to underwrite the expenses of setting up the heist in return for the right to fence the diamonds Doc intends to steal from Belletier’s Jewelry store. Doc describes the heist as the “biggest caper ever to be pulled in the Midwest.” He explains that three key members of the gang will be paid a flat fee up front for their services, “like house painters”: the safe cracker, Louis Ciavelli (Anthony Caruso); the getaway driver, Gus Minissi (Jamew Whitmore); and the gunman, Dix Handley.
Emmerich is in cahoots with a private eye named Brannom (not Brannon, as some critics spell it). He informs Brannom that he is broke and intends to keep the diamonds for himself to finance his high living for the rest of his life. He plans on leaving for parts unknown with the loot as soon as possible, thereby double-crossing Doc and the rest of the gang.
Huston portrays the actual diamond heist in eleven minutes of nearly wordless screen time. The movie’s “meticulous and spellbinding robbery sequence set the standard for every heist film to come in the gangster genre.”27 When Louis blows the safe with nitroglycerin, he inadvertently triggers a hidden burglar alarm, and police sirens can be heard almost immediately coming toward the jewelry store. But the gang finishes collecting the jewels from the safe before leaving. Louis is fatally wounded in a scuffle with a security guard, and the thieves retreat from the scene by crawling through a sewer.
Doc and Dix head for Emmerich’s baronial mansion in town, where Emmerich confronts them in the company of Brannom. In his sitting room, Emmerich informs Doc and Dix that he is broke and could not raise the funds to defray the expenses of the caper as he had hoped. A shootout ensues between Dix and Brannom, in which Brannom is killed and Dix is seriously injured. Dix and Doc depart, planning to meet with Emmerich after he promises they can soon settle their accounts. Meanwhile, Doc holds on to the jewels. Emmerich plays cards with his bedridden wife. She ruefully admits that she is scared of the criminal types that he associates with. In the best-remembered line of dialogue from the film, Emmerich responds to his wife, “There’s nothing so different about them; crime is only a left-handed form of human endeavor.”
One by one, Doc’s partners in crime are tracked down by the police and cajoled into confessing their part in the robbery. Two policemen arrive at Emmerich’s mansion in town and tell him that they have reason to believe that he is involved with the gang that committed the robbery. His answers to their questions are evasive. After they leave, he flees to his cottage on the river, but the police follow him there and arrest him. He asks them to permit him to write a letter to his wife, and he retires to the next room to do so. In despair, he cannot bring himself to complete the letter and destroys it. He then takes his gun from a drawer and shoots himself, unable to face disgrace and ruin.
When he hears of the suicide of Emmerich, the death of Louis, and other misfortunes, Doc reflects that these mishaps that have followed in the wake of the robbery are the results of blind accident: “What can you do about blind accidents?” As Steve says in Criss Cross, “It’s Fate; it’s in the cards.” It is part of the German ethos that Fate influences people’s lives. Doc speaks of the intervention of blind accident in one’s life; putting it another way, he speaks elsewhere in the movie of one being influenced by one’s vices. He is saying that flawed human beings must sooner or later reckon with their flawed characters. This will be apparent in Doc’s fate by film’s end.
As the police close in, Doc hires a taxi to drive him to another big town, out of the reach of the local cops. He stops in a diner for some supper and immediately becomes smitten with a young teenage girl who is gyrating to the music of a juke box. She is not particularly alluring and is dressed in a rather plain outfit. Thus, Huston is implying that Doc’s interest in this nymphet is purely sexual. As Doc says early in the film, “We all work for our vices.” Doc’s vice is tender-aged girls, just as Emmerich’s vice is extravagance, as Huston notes in the promo for the film, mentioned earlier. Doc does not notice that two policemen are observing him through the window of the diner. When he leaves the establishment, they frisk him and find the jewels, which are sewn in the lining of his coat. If he had not lingered to watch the nymphet, he could have gotten away before the police noticed him. Fate, he believes, has allowed blind accident to assert itself in his life while he was preoccupied with the nymphet.
The most compelling scene in the picture is the last one, when Dix, mortally wounded, endeavors to return to his roots by driving to Hickory Wood Farm in Kentucky, with Doll by his side. Weakened by his loss of blood, he staggers into a bluegrass field on the farm and breathes his last breath. “In the film’s final shot, he lies dead in a wide Kentucky meadow, while three horses graze around him, nuzzling his body.”28 Dix had hoped to escape the corrosive atmosphere of the asphalt jungle by his flight with Doll to a cleaner rural environment, but for Dix, brutalized by a life of crime, it is already too late.
Munby believes that The Asphalt Jungle is one of Huston’s finest achievements. The film’s “action takes place in a nameless urban environment,” although one can recognize the cityscape of Los Angeles, highlighted by the City Hall Tower in the opening credits, with the city’s “suburban sprawl.” The gang put together by the German criminal genius Doc Riedenschneider is “comprised of various social misfits,” including an Italian American safe cracker “with mouths to feed and rent to pay,” and a seedy bookmaker. “The gang constitutes a false community brought together in the common interest of committing a crime,” a gang that will inevitably disintegrate when things go wrong.29
W. R. Burnett applauded the movie as “without a doubt one of the best films of this genre.”30 John Huston pointed out that Sam Jaffe won the best actor award at the Venice Film Festival as the “good doctor who has the brains of the gang” but could not tear himself away from the sight of a young girl shaking her backside, “thereby causing his own downfall.”31 This brings into relief how Huston took pains to give the characters a human dimension. After all, Huston explains, “Unless you understand the criminal, there is no way of coping with him.”32