The New Pictures

Key Largo (Warner), with which Writer-Director John Huston follows Treasure of Sierra Madre (TIME, Feb. 2), is no match for that magnificent picture. But as intelligent melodrama it is very good and as moviemaking it is one of the best pictures of the year.

Ghosts of the '20s. Huston and Co-Writer Richard Brooks have updated (and all but completely rewritten) Maxwell Anderson's nine-year-old play about a disillusioned veteran of the Spanish Civil War, and how he recovered his courage. McCloud (Humphrey Bogart), a veteran of World War II, comes to one of the Florida keys to see the widow (Lauren Bacall) and hotelkeeper father (Lionel Barrymore) of his best friend, who died in battle. He finds them the virtual prisoners of a gangster named Rocco (Edward G. Robinson), his gunmen (Thomas Gomez, Harry Lewis, Dan Seymour) and his wretched mistress (Claire Trevor). These interlopers are living ghosts of the 1920s, slipping back into the U.S. from Cuba. Barring the pathetic-mistress, who is half drowned in liquor, they are mortally dangerous people.

At first, McCloud takes no risks. The war has left him too drained and cynical for acts of courage. But as one outrage after another teaches him what these characters are really made of--they are of a piece with all he used to fight--and how confident they seem of returning to power in his country, McCloud changes. Loathing, rage and his very fear of them force him to heroic action, and restore his leverage on living.

As a study of different kinds of courage under sharp melodramatic stress, this is a remarkably good screen play. But the script is far surpassed by the way Huston and his cameraman Karl Freund and the players get it on to film. Huston takes such expert, type-tired players as Bogart, Robinson, Barrymore, Trevor and Gomez, and gets such performances from them that they seem like new people. He draws a simple, sharply individualized performance out of Lauren Bacall. His gift for catching the realities of danger and violence is unique; Bogart's quietness and caution is a hundred times as true and exciting (and as brave, for that matter), as the conduct he is usually required to pretend. And Huston is a master of atmosphere: the whole picture reeks not only of immediate danger but of deep Florida's heat, remoteness and sleeping cruelty. Key Largo is so absorbing and skillful that you scarcely realize one remarkable achievement: it is shot mainly indoors and, save for one time lapse, as continuous action.

"The Good Old Days." The most inventive of current directors, Huston knows as much about visual storytelling as any living man. Yet he has no weakness for the visual wow. He can contrive unforgettable images such as Robinson's bestial lolling in the bathtub (easily the most efficacious tub shot in movie history) or his death under Bogart's bullets, as obstinate as the rearing snake he suggests. But such images are never merely "pictorial" or "effective." Huston's style, so transparent that it would be very hard to describe, is unimitative and inimitable. It stamps Huston as the ablest American now directing pictures.

Key Largo has one grave weakness. Through the thinnest possible mask of melodrama, it is trying to speak to everyone in the postwar world who is disheartened; to show how a brave and intelligent man can and must regain reasons for living and for fighting. In this admirable attempt, it succeeds only part way. It may be that gangsters simply cannot be made to symbolize enough.

"Rocco," Huston says, "was supposed to represent a sort of evil flower of reaction. In other words we are headed for the same kind of world we had before, even down to the gang lords . . . There is great talk of the good old days and prohibition; in other words, return to the old order . . . I tried to make all the characters old-fashioned (the gangster's moll is out of the '20s), to brand them as familiar figures, and to suggest they were ready to take over again."

To some extent these intentions remain clear and powerful. But a good deal of the power has been lost, as with grounded wires. In spite of Jack Warner's promise that nothing important would be cut, the strongest and thematically most necessary speeches in the play were lopped out after Huston had finished and left town. "Why, goddamit," Huston shouted when he learned of it, "they cut the very gizzard out of it!" Key Largo is Huston's last picture for Warner Bros.

Fighting Father Dunne (RKO Radio), a St. Louis priest (circa 1900), gets interested in newsboys who are tough and toughly used. Thanks to a disconcerting, downright embarrassing skill at cadging, badgering and sharp dealing in the interests of a good cause, he manages to found a home for them--first a ramshackle old wooden one, at last a portly new brick one. The boys, needless to say, are mischievous little devils but angels at heart. The one exception (Darryl Hickman) is ruined by the influence of his particularly villainous father (well played by Joseph Sawyer).

As the priest, Pat O'Brien is skillful, experienced, and excusably languid. The picture's attractiveness, such as it is, comes from good sets nicely photographed, and from its deeply old-fashioned story and general treatment. But that, in turn, becomes pretty hard to bear; you fully expect a ragamuffin, religiously moved, to whisper Hully Chee.

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