High Sierra Review

High Sierra — 

High Sierra (1941)

This is the film that rocketed Humphrey Bogart from the supporting cast to bona fide stardom. He had been working in Hollywood throughout the 1930s and became a familiar face in Warner Bros gangster films but only as a supporting player with few lines or ability to show what he could do.

At the time, Warner Bros was known as THE gangster movie studio with an enviable line-up of major stars including James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, and Paul Muni . Their supporting stable of players was also very comprehensive and Bogart played well in the shallow roles assigned him by studio magnate Jack Warner. That is, until 1936, when superstar Leslie Howard demanded and got Bogart for Petrified Forest, playing the part of the heavy, gangster Duke Mantee. This performance made people sit up and take notice but it wasn’t until Raoul Walsh requested Bogart to play the protagonist Roy Earle in this movie that he had his big breakthrough.

Bogart did a good job with the complex character Earle who has dreams of changing and becoming socially desirable, however, the storyline indicates that fate has other plans for the born loser.

Earle is a competent bank robber a la Dillinger and is sprung from a long prison term by a bribe to the Indiana governor which earns him an unexpected pardon. Upon release he is hurried over to meet with his contact in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in rural California. He learns he is to be the trigger man in the robbery of a toney resort that has plenty of ice in the safes.

Bogart's Roy Earle is a man outside his time, obsolete, too far along in life to change and facing the rapidly advancing future with trepidation. He has met a dirt poor Okie family with a comely daughter (Joan Leslie) with a club foot. Bogart is smitten by the innocence of the 20 year-old Velma, and resolves to court her; he offers to pay for an operation to cure the foot, which is eagerly accepted. Once she is cured, she forgets about Bogey and invites her old boyfriend to California. Bogart falls back on the old reliable Ida Lupino who plays a street smart dance hall girl.

Meanwhile, the help for Bogart’s upcoming caper is really substandard and Bogart, professional as he is goes through with it but a glitch occurs and they have to lam out. The two helpers roll their car over and die in a fiery wreck while Bogart and Lupino head out to  fence the jewels but find him dead. Bogart has a half million dollars worth of ice and hardly enough cash to live on. Meanwhile the police are circulating reports and setting up road blocks. He robs a drug store and gets identified and the police tree him up on the slopes of Mt. Whitney.

John Huston, one of the best writers in Hollywood, wrote the screen play based on WR Burnett’s book. This screenplay has a few flaws but it showcases Bogart just as he was stepping into stardom. One of the flaws was using a cute mutt as the linchpin in the second half of the plot. WC Fields knew how kids or dogs could steal scenes and refused to work with them and this dog steals every scene so that is a flaw,, taking away from Bogart and Lupino. The scenes showing the “ideal” girl who proves ungrateful are uneven and maudlin compared to the terse scenes when Bogart is truly in charge. The scenes between him and Ida Lupino are much more dynamic. They were trying to illustrate the complexity of Earle’s character torn between the ideal and reality, but could have thought it through and staged it a bit better.

Apart from Bogart and Ida Lupino, there is a rich supporting cast from Warner's stable including Henry Hull, Henry Travers, Joan Leslie, and Cornel Wilde among other familiar faces. Bogart drives a '37 Plymouth Business Coupe in a harrowing car chase before he is brought to bay on the slopes of craggy Mt. Whitney.

Directed by Raoul Walsh (White Heat) the movie makes good use of the scenic beauty of the Sierra Mountains with dark cinematography that makes it foreboding in the manner that would soon develop into film noir.

The Warner Bros DVD is presented in pristine black and white, in 1.33:1 theatrical format, and the running time is 100 minutes, even. There is a 15 minute featurette "Curtains for Roy Earle," giving the back story on the making of High Sierra and Humphrey Bogart's ascent to stardom.