Today marks the 68th anniverary of Key Largo‘s release in 1948. In celebration, we are revisiting our fond thoughts on the film as a definitive post-war marriage of noirish nihilism and tough guy patriotism. This article originally ran on Aug. 18, 2014, the week of Lauren Bacall’s passing.
Last week, we lost two screen legends in the span of 24 hours. Den of Geek has written extensively on the one that touched the heart of nearly every child for the last 35 years, but the other loss was equally profound: Lauren Bacall, one of the last great movie stars from Hollywood’s Golden Age, passed away just a month shy of her 90th birthday.
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. 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. 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 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).