High Sierra

DIRECTED BY: RAOUL WALSH - WRITER: JOHN HUSTON, W.R. BURNETT, TONY GAUDIO
STARRING: HUMPHREY BOGART, IDA LUPINO, ARTHUR KENNEDY, JOAN LESLIE - RELEASED: I94I

Roy Earle in Raoul Walsh’s High Sierra is a man without a country. He’s been in jail too long, so that a new generation of soft young people has come up behind him. He's reprising his role as Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forrest, a man who knows he's "just rushing toward death", a phrase borrowed from John Dillinger, to whom Bogie bore a physical and character resemblance. He doesn’t understand the new generation and calls them “jitterbugs” after the dance sensation of the day. Worse than that, they don’t seem to have the character of the older generation. In an extended conversation with his new crime partner, they bemoan the passing of the older, tougher guys of the past, now dead or in Alcatraz.

A new caper is being planned; a jewel heist from a fancy hotel in Rio Vista (read Palm Springs). When Roy meets the new crew he’s to work with, he immediately lays down the law; he knows they’re green material, but he needs the money. Hanging out with them is Marie (Ida Lupino), a pick-up from a dime-a-dance joint in LA. Earle knows women are trouble on a crime caper and tells her to get lost. She manages to work her way into his affections, because like him, the world she left behind was no world at all. When he tells her he was planning to “crash out” from prison before he got parole, she understands that their situations are alike.

Earle’s already got a “decent” girl he’s met on his way there. Velma (Joan Leslie) is a sweet young girl with a club foot that Earle identifies with; His own “club foot” is his criminal past. Earle gets a LA doctor he knows to take a look at Velma’s foot; the doctor says an expensive operation will fix it, so Earle springs for the cost. This sub-plot is a lesson that good deeds seldom go unpunished, something Earle has never learned, because he's never done a good deed before.

That’s the real enjoyment of this film, the myriad philosophical asides and aphorisms that pepper the dialogue. This is a cynic's film, those without a heaping dose of skepticism about human nature will not enjoy. Also not enjoyable is the character of Algernon, the black factotum at the mountain lodge where the criminals are staying. The other characters never speak to him without a patronizing attitude and just in case we don’t get the point, his eyes are crossed. That he accurately predicts the final outcome of the story is another irony out of many in the film.

The story sails along without dead spots because Bogart’s in every scene. His performance in this film is spot-on for the character he plays; this film along with The Maltese Falcon made him a leading actor. His art was to be able to play subtle gradations of emotion and thought. He knew every trick, from subtle eye movements to scratching his head. But he also brought an indefinable character to his roles, a gravitas that made him able to carry a whole film on his back. He had some help this time in Ida Lupino, who, when she had something to work with, could make a role come alive. In High Sierra, she’s the lost soul, with no family and nothing to fall back on, just like her little dog. If the film seems a tad drafty it's because after the two leads, the star power dims considerably, with perennial second-banana Arthur Kennedy bringing up the rear.

High Sierra has a dignity to it, it stands for old Roman virtues, honor, grit, and pride. The heavy hitters behind it; John Houston writing and Raoul Walsh directing, knew that America would be involved in war in a matter of months (Britain had already been at war two years), and so the martial values were the ones that were hammered in.