"Let me tell you about Florida politicians. I make them, I make them out of whole cloth, just like a tailor makes a suit. I get their name in the newspaper. I get them some publicity and I get their name on the ballot. Then, after the election, we count the votes, and if they don't turn out right, we recount them again until they do"--Edward G. Robinson to Humphrey Bogart in Key Largo.

The gathering force of a hurricane like the one that really did devastate the Florida Keys in the 1930s is a backdrop to the perspiring passions of murderers, molls and Bogart and Bacall. Suffering from post-WWII malaise, Bogart journeys to visit his buddy's widow. He finds her in a backwater hotel in Key Largo occupied by an invading army of gangsters. Brutal Johnny Rocco isn't afraid of any man, but God's fury is different matter.

Hollywood was in turmoil in 1947. The House on Un-American Activities Committee was holding investigations into Communist influences in the film capital. John Huston, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall were high profile members of an opposing group, the Committee for the Defense of the First Amendment. Bogart and Bacall had just flown to Washington with other prominent movie folk to give moral support to Eric Johnson, a spokesman for the Producers' Association, who was going to affirm that Hollywood would never support a blacklist or government censorship. But, they were no match for the maneuverings of skilled House Committee politicians, including Richard Nixon. By the time the CDF returned home, it would appear that they were defending not democracy, but Communism. John Huston said, "Communism was nothing compared to the evil done by the witch hunters. They were the real enemies of this country." Back on home turf, Huston and Bogart replied forcefully with an allegory of power wielded by fascist gangsters against innocent citizens

Key Largo was first a play written in blank verse by Maxwell Anderson. On stage, Paul Muni played a veteran of the Spanish Civil War who deserted under fire and redeems himself in death, defending the family of a true war hero. John Huston was in a rage over the HUAC hearings and didn't want to adapt a play by a reactionary who hated Roosevelt, in poetry, yet. For the proper atmosphere, he and Richard Brooks were hammering out a script in the only hotel in Key Largo, deserted in the off season. Their script was saturated with post-war disillusionment. The criminal boss, Johnny Rocco, was modeled on real-life gangster Lucky Luciano, who had just been deported to Cuba, followed by his loyal mistress, Gaye Orlova. The play's ending was thrown out and a new one was added from Hemingway's To Have and Have Not, since Howard Hawks' film of that name had previously thrown out Hemingway's ending.

Huston's last film, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, had been filmed on location and had gone over budget, so Jack Warner insisted that Key Largo be filmed on the studio sound stage. Cinematographer Karl Freund compensated by using his camera expressively to negate the impression of staginess as much as possible. The cast rehearsed as if for a play, which resulted in an ease with the material, and Bogart and Robinson in particular enjoyed the professional give and take as they created their characters.

This was the fifth film that Robinson and Bogart made together. Robinson said, "When I was the reigning star, Bogie would be slain first and I'd live out another reel before I got it. As the years passed, and Bogart became the reigning star and I was demoted to character roles, I'd get the bullet first and Bogie would live out another reel." Bogart may have eclipsed Robinson at the box office, but he insisted that Robinson get star treatment on the set. And Huston devised a fabulous entrance for him, hot and sweaty, smoking a cigar and wallowing in a bathtub, like "like a crustacean with its shell off."

This was the last of the Bogart-Bacall films. Bacall was still unsure of herself as an actress, and this part was considerably more drab than any of the others she'd played thus far. Bogart was an acting mentor to her, but never gave her advice in front of anyone else. He cautioned her against overplaying, which he hated. "The audience is always a little ahead of you. If a guy points a gun at you, the audience knows you're afraid, you don't have to make faces."