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High Sierra (Warner Brothers, 1941). 100 min. Producer: Hal B. Wallis. Director: Raoul Walsh. Screenplay: John Huston and W.R. Burnett, based on the novel by W.R. Burnett. Director of Photography: Tony Gaudio. Music: Adolph Deutsch. Art Director: Ted Smith. Editor: Jack Killifer. Cast: Humphrey Bogart (Roy Earl), Ida Lupino (Marie), Alan Curtis (Babe), Arthur Kennedy (Red), Joan Leslie (Velma), Henry Hull (Doc Benton), Barton Maclane (Jack Kranner), Cornel Wilde (Mendoza), Henry Travers (Pa). With Elisabeth Ridson, Minna Gowbell, Paul Harvey, Donald MacBride. High Sierra Buy the video now from Amazon.com Many critics consider this a gangster film or a crime melodrama rather than film noir. But with director Raoul Walsh, Humphrey Bogart and Ida Lupino, I had to include it in the classic noir section. The film definitely echoes many of the existential themes common to film noir. Bogart's role is a reprise of many of the gangsters he played in the 30s, particularly Duke Mantee in Petrified Forest, but he had grown considerably as an actor by this point. This role, along with his role as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, cemented Bogart's position as a noir icon--capable of playing both the tough guy and the bad guy. Directed in a spare, flat style, this film is not expressionistic in the German sense, but is still a classic of the genre..--Mike Cable
From Amazon.com--This 1941 melodrama is memorable for both its strong central performances and
their intimations of how the previous decade's crime dramas would evolve into
film noir--no accident, given the solid direction of veteran Raoul Walsh and the
hand of screenwriter John Huston, who teamed with the author of its novelistic
source, W.R. Burnett (Little Caesar). In the central character of Roy
"Mad Dog" Earle, a fictional peer to John Dillinger, Humphrey Bogart
finds a defining role that anticipates the underlying fatalism and moral
ambiguity visible in the career-making roles soon to follow, including Sam Spade
in Huston's directorial debut, The Maltese Falcon.
Earle suggests a prescient variation on the enraged sociopaths that were
fixtures of the gangster melodramas that shaped Bogart's early screen image.
Pardoned from a long prison stretch, the weary robber is clearly more eager to
savor What gives High Sierra its power, however, isn't the crime itself but Earle's collision with the younger, brasher confederates picked to help him, and the hard-edged but vulnerable taxi dancer they're competing for, played forcefully by Ida Lupino, who actually received top billing. Her attraction to the reluctant Earle is complicated by a convoluted subplot designed to showcase then starlet Joan Leslie, but the movie finally moves into its most gripping moments when the wounded Earle, pursued by police, flees ever higher toward the mountains. His final, suicidal showdown would become a cliché of sorts in lesser films, but here it provides a wrenching climax sealed by Lupino's vivid final scene. --Sam Sutherland
High Sierra Buy the paperback edition of the book by W.R. Burnett (Little Caesar) at Amazon.com
High Sierra Image Gallery Click on any thumbnail image below to view larger image.
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his new freedom than immediately swing back into action. But his early
release has been engineered by a mobster who wants Earle to pull off a
high-stakes burglary, setting in motion a plot that is a prototype for
doomed-heist capers--a small, yet potent sub genre that would later include
Huston's The Asphalt Jungle and Stanley Kubrick's The Killing.
