Key Largo

Richard Brooks and John Huston's screenplay for Huston's Key Largo eschews the lofty blank verse of Maxwell Anderson's original play, concentrating instead on the simmering tensions among the many characters. Humphrey Bogart plays Frank McCloud, an embittered war veteran who travels to Key Largo in ...more

John Huston's Key Largo shares crucial similarities and differences with Archie Mayo's The Petrified Forest, also starring Humphrey Bogart but made 12 years earlier. The two plots are similar -- a group of people held hostage in a remote locale by a gangster on the run -- but the differences between the two movies, and Bogart's roles in them, reflect changes in the world and in perceptions of evil and how to deal with it. Where The Petrified Forest was steeped in romantic notions of ...more