Key Largo grossed $3.25 million, enough to tie with Laurence Olivier's Hamlet (1948) in the annual box-office top 20. Both came in at number 17.
"A tense film thriller has been developed from Maxwell Anderson's play, ‘Key Largo.’ It's a hard-hitting gangster yarn with enough marquee weight in the star names to kick it off strongly at the box office. Emphasis is on tension in the telling and effective use of melodramatic mood has been used to point up the suspense for audience satisfaction." - Brog, Variety
"...the script prepared by Mr. Huston and Richard Brooks was too full of words and highly cross-purposed implications to give the action full chance. Talk—endless talk—about courage and the way the world goes gums it up. And the simple fact is that much of it is pompous and remote." - Bosley Crowther, The New York Times
"...it is exceedingly well acted, and as picture-making most of it is well worth watching as anything you will see this year. Huston manages kinds of vitality, insight, and continuance within each shot and from one shot to the next which are the most inventive and original, the most exciting and the hardest to analyze, in contemporary movies; everything that he achieves visually is so revealing of character, atmosphere, emotion, idea, that its visual and rhythmic rightness and beauty, and the freshness and originality themselves, generally overtake one as afterthoughts. There are a few others so good that I hesitate to say it, but Huston seems to me the most vigorous and germinal talent working in movies today." - James Agee, “The Nation”
"The debt to The Petrified Forest [1936] is obvious, but instead of wallowing in world-weary pseudo-philosophy, Key Largo has altogether sharper things to say about post-war disillusionment, corruption in politics, and the fact that the old freebooting ways of the gangster were about to change into something more sinisterly complex. Huston skillfully breaks up the action (basically one set and one continuous scene), working subtle variations on his groupings with the aid of superb deep-focus camera-work by Karl Freund. And although the characters are basically stereotypes, they are lent the gift of life by a superlative cast." - Tom Milne, Time Out
