The Mackintosh Man/Key Largo
Two of John Huston’s lesser known films. I could say a lot on each, but will focus on them as examples of early-stage technology, with “technology” here not meaning technology, but rather some mixture of techniques used to get a specific result from the audience. The slasher film is technology: steady cam, kill-by-kill, blood, sexuality, survivorship. You know when you are watching a slasher film. Even when in a primitive state the technology elicits at least a mild form of the desired reaction.
A disclaimer: The idea of technological progress may appear below; note that by technological progress I don’t mean progress.
First, MacKintosh Man, which came out in 1973, starred Paul Newman, and was scripted by Walter Hill. Paul Newman plays a character who may be several things, but who goes to prison for stealing jewels, escapes, tracks a communist agent, and visits Malta. The technology being developed here is that of the modern action-thriller, in the vein of the Jason Bourne or Mission Impossible movies. The framework is already in place: a central figure of charisma and mystery, a twisty plot that spans multiple locales, a terse romance. There are also the seeds of the giant set-pieces which will eventually become the technology’s central element. At one point Newman’s character escapes from jail with the help of smoke bombs, a hydraulic crane, and some light motorbike usage. Later he stages another escape, from a safe house turned unsafe, scrambling across a scenic… moor? I think it’s a moor, rippled by eerie skeins of green ice. A dog is set to pursue him; he jumps into a stream to escape, the dog follows - this almost has to be the origin of No Country for Old Men’s chase-dog-river scene. There is also a car chase, Huston’s only, done with two old, beat-up cars rushing between close-set dry stone walls along the western Irish coast.
For modern purposes, these set pieces are of course - of course - completely inadequate: they lack the scale and daring and visceral punch needed to take our breath away. That is not to say that they are not effective in other ways. The moor chase, scored dissonantly by Maurice Jarre, is desperately lonely. But emotions such as loneliness would eventually be pared away, and sorted into other genres where audience demand for them was higher; thus, efficiency. In the meantime the spectacle on offer is quite austere; combat is rudimentary, the car chase is nothing more or less than two cars driving fast (“fast”). Bullitt had come out five years earlier, and in Hong Kong the wu xia martial arts extravaganza was already well-developed. As in technology more generally, in film the future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed.
Key Largo is perhaps a more interesting case. MacKinstosh Man had budgetary and logistical restrictions not shared by its big box office descendants. But Key Largo was based on a play, and the effects it reaches for are obtainable essentially for free. Humphrey Bogart plays a World War Two veteran who arrives at a remote hotel (in Key Largo) that has been taken over by gangsters, headed by Edward G. Robinson’s kingpin. The gangsters need to meet up with some other gangsters to make a transaction; they hold Bogart captive along with the hotel’s owner and his daughter-in-law until the transaction can be completed. This captivity, which makes up the film’s long middle section, is arranged by Huston as a series of no-win situations, of a type that will be familiar to anyone who has watched any Tarantino or recent prestige cable. Example: provoked for this or that reason, Robinson hands Bogart a gun, and tells him to shoot him - the catch being that Robinson has a gun of his own, and if Bogart shoots Robinson will shoot. It is in short a Mexican standoff, the quintessential Tarantino device (you can see the influence of Key Largo, with its long talky standoffs, throughout Tarantino, most explicitly in The Hateful Eight).
Once Tarantino has maneuvered his pieces into place, he puts us through the wringer. Key Largo does not. There is nothing in it to even come close to the tension of, say, the opening scene in Inglorious Basterds. (or, on cable, the closing scenes of the third season of Deadwood). That is to say, the technology of tension has grown in leaps and bounds since the 1940s. Our entertainments can now torture us with greater efficacy. This had to be, I think, a two-sided progress. Just as films had to innovate new techniques to worry us (more explicit and sudden violence, more complexly vulnerable victims), we had to develop hides thick enough to dull the pain of these aggressions until they became at least mildly pleasurable. In doing so we’ve rendered earlier works such as Key Largo tame.
To develop this just slightly further - I don’t mean tame only in terms of violence. Take Key Largo’s marquee scene, the one in which Claire Trevor, playing an alcoholic ex-showgirl who serves as Robinson’s moll, is forced by him to sing in exchange for a drink. Trevor is washed up, and in no position to sell the torch burner he requests, but she wants the drink very badly, and so she works her way excruciatingly through an off-key rendition of Moanin’ Low. Her humiliation is acrid. It’s the film’s only hard scene to watch, and the difficulty that it still presents for a modern audience indicates perhaps that our tolerance for violence has increased to a greater degree than our tolerance for shame. Still, you need only contemplate what Jennifer Connelly is subjected to in Requiem for a Dream to realize that even in this less calloused area, we are still able to withstand seeing things that we couldn’t previously have withstood.
In other areas, however, our sensitivities have increased, or we would to think that they have. There is a subplot in Key Largo involving a pair of Seminole brothers, who are eventually gunned down by the police for no good reason. The movie - those behind the movie - seems to think it grants their deaths ample dignity by having the guilty officer express his regret later on. But the regret is voiced and we suspect soon forgotten. Will he go to jail for homicide? The way the brothers die, offscreen and unmourned (the contemporary NYT review doesn’t mention them), and the casual concern expressed for them after are the most disturbing things in the film as viewed today.
