It is definitely a crime picture filled with gangsters, including Edward G. Robinson’s best take on a wiseguy in the part of Johnny Rocco, but with its coherent plotting and lack of sexual innuendo between Bogie and a surprisingly softer Bacall, it sometimes flies under the radar with fans looking for the quintessential post-war noirs. This is partly because Key Largo finds a way, in spite of its hallmark genre era patented cynicism, to be the ultimate cinematic affirmation of the worldview that sprang up for the Greatest Generation following the Second World War. In many ways, Key Largo is the definitive post-war film.

While noir is a sometimes nebulous term coined by French critic Nino Frank that was retroactively applied to post-war American crime movies that verged on the nihilistic (produced roughly between 1945 and 1959), the film Frank had in mind when he invented the term was a picture produced before America’s official involvement in World War II: John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941). And while film historians would eventually peg the more obscure Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) as the birth of the movement, it was Huston who in cinematic terms identified many of its trademarks, including Bogart’s star-making turn as the paterfamilias of world-weary gumshoes and Mary Astor as the big screen’s first fatale. Its bitterly downbeat ending became the stuff filmmaker dreams are made of, so Huston knew clearly what the expectations would be for the “criminal melodrama” afterward. Nonetheless when he landed the job of helming the new Bogie and Bacall picture for Warner Bros., in the same year he also made with Bogie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre no less, he inverted what had become the prevailing cinematic language of crime movies made as the war wound down.

Increasingly, an unavoidable misanthropy and cynicism about the post-industrialized world had seized American society. Whether it was in the automations of an insurance office or at a newfangled supermarket, the modern world GIs came home to in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) was a perpetually rain-sodden dystopia of soul crushing efficiency. It would eventually become so unbearable that we would all be better off if a nuke went off, or as at least prescribed by the Mickey Spillane-based Kiss Me Deadly (1955). But Key Largo had none of that. Rather than a movie centered on the pointlessness of it all, Key Largo found in the coolest anti-heroes of noir a way to articulate without a trace of irony the overwhelming sentiments that a generation would ultimately view as hard-won after the Depression and World War II.

As a day in the life of post-war ex-Major Frank McCloud (Bogart), Key Largo opens on the disillusioned war hero visiting the family of a favorite soldier who died under his command. Thanks to the oft-mentioned George’s sacrifice, Frank comes into the orbit of hotel owner James Temple (Lionel Barrymore) and the too-young-to-be-a-widow Nora Temple (Bacall). They operate the Florida Keys’ largest and most respected hotel, which is still of course a frumpy pit stop on the way to Key West. Nora may have only known George long enough for a whirlwind elopement, letting her immediate and obvious attraction to Bogie play authentically, but both Temples are tragedy-hardened testimonials to the enormously justified sacrifice of all the enlisted men in Europe and the Pacific.

But Bogart, fitting easily into his dual roles of noirish malcontent and the post-Casablanca fluctuating isolationist, is far less convinced about the worth of such deadly sacrifices. This pessimism is viscerally tested not by the Nazis or Vichy sympathizers, but by a threat far more ubiquitous in melodramas of the 1930s, which had come back with a (tommy gun) vengeance following V-J Day: the gangster. In my personal favorite Edward G. Robinson performance, Johnny Rocco is the myth surrounding Lucky Luciano crossed with the thin-skinned vanity of the biblical King Herod. All boisterous pride and eruptive amounts of inadequacy perpetually prepared to explode, Rocco was once on top, see, in the U.S. when he ruled over Prohibition-era gangland like a Roman Emperor. And then the American government threw him out in 1940 like a no-good dirty rat. But Rocco has returned via a steamboat from Cuba, and he is planning to build a National Crime Syndicate like his real-life counterpart, which wasn’t actually dismantled until decades later.