MONDAY NIGHT DECEMBER 30 @ 03:45 AM (ET)
High Sierra (1941) is a “caper” film about the preparation, the commision and the aftermath of the robbery of a resort hotel. It stars Humphrey Bogart as Roy Earle, an aging, world-weary career criminal just out of prison looking for one last big score, and Ida Lupino as Marie, the anchorless young woman who finds meaning in her relationship with him. High Sierra (1941) is a very good film, and an important transitional film in the career of Humphrey Bogart. Bogie had spent the previous decade largely playing one- dimensional mugs who wind up getting killed by James Cagney or Edward G. Robinson. But High Sierra serves notice that he’s nobody’s punk any more (and he eventually gets to gun Eddie G. in Key Largo!)
Earle is the most complex character Bogart had played up to this point in his career. Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest (1936) and Baby Face Martin in Dead End (1937) were bad guys with some dimension (perhaps because each was conceived by a playwright, for the stage), but were peripheral characters. Here, the iconic Bogart begins to emerge. the loner with his own code; the anti-hero capable of violence but able to be touched
With men he’s relentlessly aggressive. He keeps his crew in line, violently if necessary. In one scene he warns about the consequences of loose lips with a simple tap tap tap on his machine gun case. But we’ve already seen a different side. He’s generous and affable with an older man, (Henry Travers) known only as “Pa,” who’s traveling with his daughter, and granddaughter Velma (Joan Leslie). Earle brushes off the fact that Pa’s
driving has nearly caused an accident, and he befriends the family (giving a phony name). He eventually pays for an operation for Velma (and proposes marriage, unsuccessfully.) Something about Pa and his family strikes a chord of humanity with Roy that’s first suggested when he’s released from prison. He stops by his boyhood home for a nostalgic last look. There’s a sense that he’s seeking something-his lost youth? Happier times? It’s never made explicit, but it’s there as subtext. We never discover his “Rosebud.”
While High Sierra is a breakthrough film for Bogart, it’s actually Ida Lupino who gets top billing. Her character Marie is the moral center of the film. Early in the film he opens up to her over breakfast. She proves to be sincere and sympathetic, and dedicated to him. And she even persuades him to accept the dog “Pard.”
High Sierra is also a significant transitional film in the evolution of the gangster film. The Maltese Falcon, released in October of 1941 is usually seen as the film that established the Bogie mystique, as well as being considered “the first film noir.” but High Sierra, released in January of the same year definitely set the table. As Fernando F. Croce writes, the “nostalgia from The Roaring Twenties gazes ahead to the antihero alienation of film noir.”1
And finally, screenwriter John Huston would have one more effort after High Sierra (his Academy Award-nominated contribution to Sgt. York) before becoming director John Huston on-wait for it-The Maltese Falcon.
