“I was the rage.” [by Elizabeth Samet]

Chancing on John Huston's Key Largo the other night, I was reminded yet again that Claire Trevor has been insufficiently celebrated. Her first slightly slurred and lovely line—delivered from the barstool on which she has clearly been perching for a good while—is “Give him a drink.” She has to shout it twice more before the sullen gangsters who have commandeered the hotel in which the film is set will pour the newly arrived Humphrey Bogart a beer. When he thanks her, she turns her attention from the horse races on the radio and replies with the drunken dignity that buoys her through the entire movie, “Think nothing of it.” She then introduces herself to him and to us as “Miss Gaye Dawn.” If you’re paying any attention, you know right then she’s going to steal the movie. Her subsequent exchange with Bogart on the art of playing the long shot seals the deal, and you can’t help but cheer right along with her as she drums on the bar and urges on her horse: “Come on, Lady Bountiful!” Trevor’s characterizations always had the dignity belonging to those prepared to lose it: as a dying prostitute in Dead End (1937), she is one of the few creatures alive in that spectacularly wooden film; as a prostitute (again) in Stagecoach (1939), she survives a John Ford movie without being humiliated—How many actresses can say that?—to ride off in triumph with John Wayne’s Ringo Kid. As the plot of Key Largo unfolds, we learn that Miss Gaye Dawn’s real name is Maggie Mooney; that it was the tyrannical Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson) who changed it years ago and launched her singing career; and that she was a “wildcat” before she became, as Rocco acidly observes, “a lush.” In the scene that undoubtedly won Trevor the Academy Award, she accepts Rocco’s cruel and faithless bargain—her signature song in exchange for the drink she so badly needs—and sings “Moanin’ Low” acappella in a voice trembling with shame. In an interview Trevor revealed her anxiety about filming this scene: she couldn’t sing; moreover, Huston surprised her by assembling the entire cast and crew on the set to listen. Miss Gaye Dawn prefaces her performance with a dreamy recollection of better days: “I was the rage,” she begins. Indeed she was.