Increasingly, an unavoidable misanthropy and cynicism about the post-industrialized world had seized American society. Its bitterly downbeat ending became the stuff filmmaker dreams are made of, so Huston knew clearly what the expectations would be for the “criminal melodrama” afterward. Nonetheless when he landed the job of helming the new Bogie and Bacall picture for Warner Bros., in the same year he also made with Bogie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre no less, he inverted what had become the prevailing cinematic language of crime movies made as the war wound down. And while film historians would eventually peg the more obscure Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) as the birth of the movement, it was Huston who in cinematic terms identified many of its trademarks, including Bogart’s star-making turn as the paterfamilias of world-weary gumshoes and Mary Astor as the big screen’s first fatale. While noir is a sometimes nebulous term coined by French critic Nino Frank that was retroactively applied to post-war American crime movies that verged on the nihilistic (produced roughly between 19), the film Frank had in mind when he invented the term was a picture produced before America’s official involvement in World War II: John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941). In many ways, Key Largo is the definitive post-war film. This is partly because Key Largo finds a way, in spite of its hallmark genre era patented cynicism, to be the ultimate cinematic affirmation of the worldview that sprang up for the Greatest Generation following the Second World War. Robinson’s best take on a wiseguy in the part of Johnny Rocco, but with its coherent plotting and lack of sexual innuendo between Bogie and a surprisingly softer Bacall, it sometimes flies under the radar with fans looking for the quintessential post-war noirs. It is definitely a crime picture filled with gangsters, including Edward G. Indeed, while the movie is fondly remembered as a Bogie and Bacall sizzler in the world of booze, broads, and bullets, it is the one “noir” film that they did which is not truly noir. Yet, as great as their two collaborations with Howard Hawks are, To Have and Have Not (1944) and The Big Sleep (1946), I found myself again drawn to their fourth, final, and most underrated shared project, John Huston’s Key Largo (1948). But on the flipside, he was never her patsy either, and each film bucked the odds of a noir hero’s chances for survival when confronted by cool blonde hair (and make no mistake, Bacall was as cool as they came). Much like their legendary off-screen romance, Bogie spent three consecutive noir films matching wits with the much younger Bacall and never once seemed her senior or superior. But how could she when her earliest films always had her squaring off against Humphrey Bogart? He was too much an equal for the dame-est dame who ever lived to be lured to a cataclysmic end. Often described as simply “the voice,” this is the woman who possessed that confidence-annihilating siren call a quintessential femme fatale who somehow never proved fatal.
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