Winds of Fate

I can understand why John Huston decided to make a movie in which Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart’s powerful personalities are confined to smallish, overcrowded rooms. There is dramatic combustibility in such a tactic. Unable to bully or maneuver their way out of scenes, each man in 1948’s Key Largo is forced to deal with the other. The fact that neither gains the upper hand over the other – that is, prior to the film’s climax – is entirely the point on display here. Trapped in a hotel together, forced to wait out a terrific hurricane that rages just outside the building’s fragile windows, Huston intentionally restricts this pair of hyper-masculine, action-oriented men in order to teach them both a lesson in humility and to remind them that a person’s ability to control their own fate is limited.

Thanks to his guns and his gang, it initially seems like Robinson is completely in control of the film’s plot, but once the hurricane arrives, all bets are off – and Robinson, who is suddenly equally as powerless as the others, knows it. The rotten weather cages the armed and the unarmed alike. Bogart seems to understand this when he growls, “You don't like it, do you (Robinson), the storm? Show it your gun, why don't you? If it doesn't stop, shoot it.”

Of course, Robinson cannot shoot the weather any more than he can plug the people trapped in the hotel with him (he needs all of them for something). The fact the cruel and well-armed gangster is fairly powerless – or has his power limited by things entirely beyond his control – is pivot on which the entire film swings. As for the storm, it is the ultimate illustration of humanity’s powerlessness. It arrives randomly and wreaks equally random destruction – and not just on the hotel buildings.

Robinson as the smug gangster.

Tertiary characters in Key Largo do not fare well and their fates are meted out with almost the same sense of randomness that powers the storm’s creation. Consider, the fate of the two Seminole Indians, enticed to turn themselves in after escaping from prison. They come to the hotel because Lionel Barrymore’s character tells them he will make certain the local authorities deal fairly with them. Both Indians are framed by Robinson for a murder they did not commit and are subsequently gunned down by the local sheriff. The other characters blame the deaths on Robinson’s trickery, which obviously plays an important role. However, Robinson would not even be at the hotel were it not for Key Largo’s geographic location – off the coast of Florida –and the storm that prevents his departure. Thus, an unforeseen confluence of seemingly random events plays a critical role in the fate of the two men.

Of all the characters, Bogart’s cynical war-veteran seems to understand more than most that even matters of life and death are largely chance. Though it is never fully explained, the film strongly suggests that Bogart survived the hard-fighting at Monte Casino and Lauren Bacall’s husband did not through the exercise of sheer luck. This is partly why Bogart rejects the war hero mantle, is willing to ascribe it to the dead husband and arrives at the hotel tired and world weary. For him, Key Largo is literally the end of the road, a way to escape his listless post-war existence on the mainland and to try to start fresh.

His trajectory runs him smack into Robinson, another character interested in a fresh start. Only Robinson is trying to get back to the mainland after being kicked out of America because of his involvement in organized crime during the depression. On opposite sides of the law and on opposite paths, the two men can only glare at one another as they simmer and slowly come to an unhappy boil in the close confines of the hotel. The firecracker interactions between these two titans of studio cinema are a large part of what makes an otherwise straightforward film dramatic and irresistibly interesting.

A pair of tough guys...

This is also the fourth and final film Bogart and Bacall made together. In critical terms, it is the second-best after The Big Sleep. However, in terms of chemistry between the famous husband and wife team, Key Largo is the weakest of the four. Bacall is oddly silent for most of this film. What little acting she is called on to do, she does with her eyes – most of which is quite good, but her plain-Jane routine is a terrible waste of the sultry sexuality we saw in To Have and Have Not, and we cannot help but feel like any actress could have played this rather uninteresting role.

The husband and wife, not sparkling together.

Robinson’s one-time glamorous girlfriend (played by Claire Trevor) is far more exciting.

Trevor’s character was a big deal during the days of prohibition – talented, beautiful, famous and highly sought after. But a life on the run with Robinson has reduced her to a nervous alcoholic, with passable good looks and a shaky voice that is forever scared of its own sound, lest it upset her endlessly irritable partner. When Robinson forces her to sing for some whiskey, she absentmindedly lapses into “Moanin’ Low,” a sad tune whose lyrics describe a woman trapped in an abusive relationship. She begins the song full of gusto, but as the meaning of the words penetrate her addled mind, her performance falls apart under the weight of the realization she is singing about herself. It is terrible moment, portrayed with incredible power by Trevor, who won as Oscar for this performance.

Trevor belts it out.

Trevor is also noteworthy here because she is the only other character than Bogart who is changed by the film’s plot. Backed into a corner and repeatedly reminded of his inability to alter his situation, Bogart frets and fumes and eventually decides that a man has to take advantage of whatever crumbs of opportunity come his way and fight to clear his own path as best he can. In doing so, he seemingly rejects the attractive logic of pragmatism and offers up that humanity’s destiny should be shaped by more than the sum of any equation: “When your head says one thing and your whole life says another, your head always loses,” he concludes. Trevor agrees, and for the first time in what must be a long time, she begins to push back against Robinson and work within her own opportunities to shape the outcomes of her fate.

All does not end well for everyone in this tale that no one seems in control of, but by pushing back, a few of these characters learn how to resist the winds of fate as much as possible. Huston's overall message seems to be that life is random, tough and unfair, a set of circumstances that makes the "pushing" all the more important. Bogart says he fought the war to rid the world of men like Robinson's character. At the end of the movie, Bogey is still fighting, and his decision to do so is invigorating. In between, the powerlessness experienced by everyone in the hotel is palpable and humbling, and the randomness of events is terrifying. We cannot control everything, the hurricane seems to be saying with every rattle of the windows, but a person should be ready to act in the moments when they can control some small thing...

Everybody Wants Something

With a title like The Asphalt Jungle, little is left to the imagination in terms of what this 1950 film noir is ultimately trying to convey. And if you had any doubts, they are quickly erased during this tour of America’s post-war urban landscape, in which the unnamed city is portrayed as a seedy and dangerous place, populated by a criminal element that operates well beyond established norms.

Within the city’s criminal community, social Darwinism functions in a kind of kill or be killed, rob or be robbed, fleece or be fleeced fashion. A person is allowed to keep as much or as little as they can hold onto. This sort of movie can very quickly devolve into cliché, so thankfully John Huston and Ben Maddow’s screenplay is clever enough to realize that crimes have motives and the criminals who commit illegal acts usually want something beyond the loot (IE – their behavior and crimes are a means to an end, not ends in and of themselves).

Each of the characters in this picture are presented as deeply complex people, all of whom are angling to get something. In some cases, the aims are nobler than others. Sterling Hayden is driven – almost single-mindedly – by the urge to secure enough money to repurchase his family’s lost horse farm back in Kentucky. He willingly joins in the film’s robbery plot, confident it will land him the cash he needs to turn his dream into reality. Sam Jaffe, the man who masterminds the caper, is much less idealistic: “One way or another, we all work for our vices,” he quips at one point.

In the case of Louis Calhern’s character, his vice saunters onto screen in the form of a certain Marilyn Monroe. Much is made of Monroe’s appearance here, but little of the unique combination of glamour, titillation and humor that would later translate into a white hot presence on screen is apparent in this outing. She is simply the “other woman” in a movie that devotes a great deal of time and energy to asking a pretty typical film noir question: Why do men make bad choices?

An early glimpse at a star

In the end, the answer boils down to the original metaphor. That is, like the creatures of the actual jungle, the civilized men living in The Asphalt Jungle’s metropolitan city often operate under the twin impulses of self-interest and self-preservation. To continue following this metaphor, the complicated web of allegiances and desires that forces the characters together and drives the plot are an emotional ecosystem that functions in similar fashion to the food chain in the wild. Bookies, crooked lawyers, policeman and blond bombshells – they all have a role to play in the concrete state of nature explored in this picture, and much of that role depends on how other people play their equally important parts.

In it together, for their own reasons

Faced with the rotten fruit of this reality, the city’s Police Commissioner offers this piece of lofty rhetoric to the audience:

“People are being cheated, robbed, murdered, raped. And that goes on 24 hours a day, every day in the year. And that's not exceptional, that's usual. It's the same in every city in the modern world. But suppose we had no police force, good or bad. Suppose we had... just silence. Nobody to listen, nobody to answer. The battle's finished. The jungle wins. The predatory beasts take over.”

There is a sense of desperation in these words that feels right, but ultimately I believe the film’s central heist is a vehicle to explore how the state of nature described by the commissioner is ultimately amoral and random (like a society of animals in a real jungle). After all, the police do nothing to foil robbery or prevent its execution (the institution of the police itself is depicted as corrupt and self-interested). The cops merely stumble across the crime by accident – the random discharge of a gun alerts them – and then swoop in to try to clean up the mess after it has already been made. In this sense, they are little more than janitors who sweep away the proverbial mess that occurs when a lion encounters an antelope, and the difference between the jungle of vines and trees and the jungle made of concrete boils down to the fact that the latter cares about appearances – some would say the illusion of order – while the former unconsciously embraces the chaos and untidiness of existence.

Dead within sight of his dream

This is not Huston’s best film – not by a long shot. However, what we have here is classic – in the sense it inspired a host of other films and television programs – and compelling. The plight of the film’s intertwined fates is intricate and interesting, and the ultimate futility the picture’s final scene leaves audiences with is both profound and disturbing. The world is ugly and chaotic, the movie seems to say, and the ardent are damned along with the capricious. The metaphor of the jungle might be somewhat clumsily used in the picture, but it feels right nonetheless.

Fool's Gold (Learning What Really Matters in Life)

Greed is certainly an interesting topic, given the recent collapse of the world economy due to what Gordon Gecko notoriously deemed “good” in the contemporary classic Wall Street.

John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre may be separated from Wall Street by more than 40 years of filmmaking, but the former’s depiction of how wealth can pervert human personality is equally as powerful as Oliver Stone’s tome to excess (a movie which ironically encouraged a generation of filmgoers to want to become stockbrokers).

I doubt anyone can watch The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and walk away with a strong desire to take up a pick and shovel and go gold-mining. The audience’s lack of enthusiasm has plenty to do with gold-mining being antiquated and back-breaking work, of course, but I suspect part of the reluctance stems from the film’s depiction of the incredible amount of violence that surrounded the trade. In the dusty and desolate landscape Huston paints, finding and then mining the gold is only half the battle.

Along the way, you have to take pains to disguise what it is you are actually doing – lest the government or some other prospector swoop down – and you have to forever be on the lookout for being robbed by your fellow miners. Then, having successfully mined the substance, you have to transport your gold across a godforsaken land populated almost entirely by bandits and Indians, all of whom are more than willing to knock you on the head and to take away your hard-earned stash.

Paydirt

As interested in these physical rigors as the film is, the real meat of Huston’s efforts comes when the movie focuses on how the sudden acquisition of wealth fosters a dangerous kind of paranoia and desperation that can eventually compel good people to commit violence.

Even more to the point, the film essentially argues “honor” among coworkers and friends is little better than that among thieves – if gold is involved somewhere in the equation. This is due primarily to the emotional qualities gold possesses for those who seek it.

Gold is a means to an end, a kind of cipher, in which “gold” stands in for whatever larger dreams a man may have. Thus, when Humphrey Bogart’s character talks about dreaming “about piles of gold getting bigger and bigger and bigger” it is not the gold he is really thinking of, but all the pleasures the metal can provide. Such is the power and attraction of the dream fulfillment gold promises, as long as “there's no find, the noble brotherhood (between men) will last. … But when the piles of gold begin to grow... that’s when the trouble starts.”

Our main prism for the trouble is the aforementioned Bogart.

When the film opens, the normally classy Bogie is so down and out he physically yearns for a cigarette a man has nonchalantly tossed on the street. Desperate and almost without pride, Bogie makes an attempt to grab the still-smoldering bud, only to lose out to a street urchin. Eventually, he meets up and forms a kind of hobo partnership with Tim Holt, but the alliance fails to alter their luck. Both men are taken advantage of by an unscrupulous contractor who recruits them to do back-breaking work and then fails to pay. When the pair eventually stumbles across the man who owes them the money, they beat him savagely – but crucially, they only take what cash is owed them, and no more.

They decide to try their hand at gold mining after they come across a kooky old man – played by Walter Huston, the director’s father – who has been in the business all his life. The old man seems to have a feel for how the expedition might turn out, but he goes along anyway because for him the act of mining is an end in and of itself (whereas Bogart and Holt want to strike it rich).

The fun does not really get started until the men strike gold. From that point on, Bogart’s greed-driven descent into paranoia is something to behold. He mutters to himself expertly, sweats and exhibits the incredible physical picture of a man no longer in control of his own thoughts or emotions. No assurance is enough for him as the world becomes a darker and more dangerous place (now that he has something to horde and protect). Such is the power of Bogart’s performance, when he robs his partners and leaves one for dead, the audience is unsurprised and shocked at the same time.

Mad with Fever...

Having metaphorically lost his head for gold, Bogart is eventually decapitated by bandits within sight of his final destination. Ironically, the bandits who kill him care little for material wealth. The act of thieving and stealing is an end unto itself for them. So little are they interested in valuables, they do not recognize Bogart’s gold when they discover it and they let the precious powder scatter in the wind (they are only interested in selling Bogart’s mules to buy more guns so they can commit more robberies).

The bandits’ endless cycle of violence is less greedy than the miners’ perpetual quest for wealth, but it is no more purposeful. Well before the trio set out to Sierra Madre, the old man makes it clear he has struck it rich many times before, only to lose it all and begin the process over again. Bogart and Holt ignore this insight, convinced they are powerful enough to avoid repeating the same mistake. They are wrong, and what the film seems to be saying about their incorrectness is that anyone who ties themselves to a purpose no bigger than themselves is doomed to eke out a life in which the selfish cycle never ends – and consequently happiness never arrives.

Ending conflict means establishing familial ties

In contrast, there is a beginning, a middle and end to family life, and this, albeit very subtlety, seems to be the only bit of hope the film dangles in front of an audience who has just witnessed the worst of what human psychology has to offer. The old man shrugs off the loss of his gold and chooses to live out his twilight days among the local Indian village, where presumably he will take a wife and settle into his role as the physician. In similar fashion, Holt will go to Texas, where it is strongly implied he will take up with the wife of the prospector who died defending the trio’s mining camp. The survivors of this tale of greed, in other words, are all men who chose to settle down, begin a family and live a life of steady occupation and reward.

In that sense, this film is blindly simplistic and fairly predictable.

Greed is bad. The iniquitous meet an ugly kind of frontier justice. Those who understood the ill effects of gold eventually sought to regulate their appetites and establish a more simple – and safe – way of life. Reality, of course, is much more complicated than this, much more upside down. But this film is not about reality. For all its grit and grime, this is a fairy tale of a movie – a lopsided and ugly one, to be sure, but a fairy tale nonetheless. And as such, it is a towering achievement that leaves the audience with a profound sense of insight at its conclusion.

I suspect if you showed this film to the men in gray suits who routinely plunder the markets from their corporate towers, they would chortle at the naiveté located at the picture’s heart. In the world of Wall Street, more often than not, the paranoid and greedy Bogart’s win, and the spoils of their twisted labor do not idly blow away in the winds of fate. If life were more like the movies, we would not have to live with the results of such morally bankrupt calculations.

Together, They are Better People

The African Queen is a perfect example of the sort of finely tuned moviemaking that seems to have virtually disappeared from Hollywood these days. Made with just the right amounts of romance, adventure and humor, the film manages not only to defy classification, but also please just about every conceivable demographic of viewers in the process.

Although it is well-regarded, what seems to have been missed in all the adulation the film attracts is the very mature way in which it depicts love as a kind of expert social partnering, in which the man and the woman rise to new heights because of the attributes and demands of the other. Without this, the film could almost be ordinary.

The whole of the 1951 picture stands much taller than its constituent parts thanks to timeless performances from screen legends Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn. People who like to talk about inspired casting should watch this movie.

According to John Huston, the film’s director, the warm comedy we see on-screen was completely absent in both the C. S. Forester novel and the script derived from it. Rather, the humor radiated naturally from Bogart and Hepburn, who got along so famously they could not keep their playful banter in their trailers and off the film’s set. For this, we should thank them. Forester’s novel is a grim and rather straightforward enterprise, and like much of his work, it possesses a kind of juvenile flair that does not make a good foundation for portraying courtship in anything like believable terms.

Chemistry is a word often thrown at the feet of romantic duos in movies, but this is what it looks and feels like when it is present in a picture – and genuinely felt by the requisite actors – and not the paid creation of a studio publicist or the whimsical invention of a movie critic. Bogart, in particular, is worthy of praise.

His performance as gin-soaked riverboat captain who begins the proceedings with a nearly toxic combination of loose morals and low education is a host of delightful contradictions throughout. Allowed to play with a range of emotions unavailable to him in other films, he shrugs off his usual debonair self and deftly displays a pleasant mixture of strength and vulnerability, intelligence and naiveté, and stoicism and sweetness – sometimes even in the same scenes.

Hepburn is her usual intelligent and whippet-like self, gradually bending but not breaking to Bogart’s charms until just the right moment. I have always liked the way she draws out her sentences as if she is not sure what conclusion they will reach, and here it serves her character’s brazen – but ultimately forgivable – machinations toward her opposite.

The action of the film centers on the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 and the nascent threat the Germans could pose to British interests in Africa. When Hepburn, a British Methodist missionary intent on bringing Jesus to the Dark Continent, loses her brother to a German war party, her soul fills with righteous patriotism and singular purpose: She will exact her revenge by destroying the Louisa, a German steamer that controls a nearby lake. Unfortunately for her, to achieve her aim, she must convince Bogart, an agnostic and rather unpatriotic Canadian, to risk life and limb – not to mention his boat, the tiny African Queen -- for distant King and Country.

While these details are important, as an audience we are more invested in what is happening between Bogart and Hepburn and we follow their journey down the dangerous river and toward their inevitable confrontation with Germans because we want to see what happens to them as a couple much more than we want to see the Louisa sunk.

Love contains a great many things, but one of the most important is that the couple should augment each other in such a way that they bring out the best of the other. Films often fail to depict this facet of love, largely because writers and directors are more interested in exploring the power of attraction and the contrived drama that surrounds courtship. And while The African Queen certainly depicts attraction and courtship, it would fail to be a great film if it stopped there.

Bogart thaws the puritanical block of ice that is Hepburn’s missionary with his earnestness and worldly commonsense, while she civilizes his character’s coarseness and convinces him to believe in noble purposes and act selflessly. Separately, both begin the film on opposite poles of the human spectrum. Through their flirtation and courtship, they converge together in the middle, where both are happier and inherently more human. By the time they embrace as man and wife at the end, they are better people precisely because of their relationship with each other. This is ultimately what makes the film so charming: We witness the growth of two people into one better person.