Rent High Sierra (1941)

Pre-Noir Gangsters. - High Sierra review by Steve

Rural Warner Brothers gangster film which broke Humphrey Bogart as a Hollywood star. He is Roy 'Mad Dog' Earle, a stick-up man who is sprung from prison by a crime syndicate to pull off a heist in an exclusive mountain resort. Roy is an outlaw of the old school who knocked around with John Dillinger in the midwest of the depression. But now the wild country has been tamed and turned into health spas and hotels. Just another racket.

Earle is the most interesting gangster of the American pre-war era. He is violent, menacing and unpredictable but also sentimental, and often kind. When his resentful and righteous anger boils over, he doesn't recognise this brute as himself and soon forgets. He is a man running out of time. Doc says it best: 'Remember what Johnny Dillinger said about guys like you and him. Said you were rushin' toward death'.

Roy is an anti-hero. He is a gunman, but almost everyone else in the film is a monster in some way! The sympathetic characters are the old timers. After Roy arranges for a surgeon to fix the foot of a girl he meets on the road, without her disability she becomes spoiled and cruel. Roy has a woman, a no-luck dame, a taxi dancer from LA. She's played for maximum heartbreak by Ida Lupino.

High Sierra is an intelligent story, a road film heavy with pessimistic, noir atmosphere set in vivid rural locations. The climactic shootout is a blast. There's a poetic, slangy script from John Huston and WR Burnett (from Burnett's novel). It's another tough, fast-paced triumph for Raoul Walsh who made so many classic action melodramas in the golden age.

Great stuff - High Sierra review by sb

FILM & REVIEW Raoul Walsh’s gangster picture that provided Bogart with his breakthrough role into stardom. He plays Roy Earl an aging bank robber who get a pardon from a corrupt Governor who has been paid to free him. Earl’s old boss needs him for a heist on a luxery hotel in the Sierra Mountains so he heads west to meet up with the rest of the gang. Thus includes Marie (Lupino) who wants he shot of but she persuades him to stay. He also gets involved with a family of farmers heading west with a granddaughter with a club foot who initially provides the romantic interest. Needless to say the robbery goes wrong forcing Earl and Maria to go on the run as the net closes with a cracking finale shot on location in the mountains themselves. Bogart is very good portraying Earl as quite a sympathetic figure with Lupino more interesting than the usual dame. The lame girl subplot just gets in the way plus there is one of the most annoying dogs in cinema to put up with but that aside it’s a fine later addition to the Warner Bros gangster cycle. - 4/5