Hollywood, partly inspired by its own early history, created and maintained the myth of California as a promised land which provided opportunities to people who couldn’t find a good life in other parts of the United States. One such individual is the main character in High Sierra, a 1941 film directed by Raoul Walsh, known as one of the earliest examples of the genre that would later become known as film noir.
That character is Roy Earle (played by Humphrey Bogart), a notorious bank robber from Indiana who gets a pardon after eight years in prison. The pardon was bought by his old acquaintance, an old and ailing mob boss Big Mac (played by Donald MacBride), who needs a man of Roy’s experience to pull off a heist of a hotel safe in a California mountain resort. When Roy arrives at a nearby camp, he sees that Big Mac indeed needed someone like him, because two of the men who will take part – Babe Kozak (played by Alan Curtis) and Red Hattery (played by Arthur Kennedy) – are young amateurs who even allow themselves to fight over Marie Carson (played by Ida Lupino), a former taxi dancer who happens to tag along as Babe’s girlfriend. As they prepare for the heist, Marie begins showing interest in Roy who, however, has set his sights on Velma (played by Joan Leslie), the daughter of the Goodhues, an impoverished family that arrived in California in search of a better life and whom he met and befriended by chance. After learning that Velma suffers from a clubfoot that made her a cripple, he even volunteers to pay for the operation that would allow her to walk normally. But his hopes of getting enough money to start a new life with Velma are getting dashed due to bad luck, incompetence and greed by his partners in crime. Ironically, it is only Marie who remains the one he could rely on.
High Sierra is best known as the film that made Humphrey Bogart into a proper Hollywood star. He had already had a successful career as a supporting player, starting with an impressive role as gangster Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest. After years playing villains or supporting characters in gangster films, Bogart finally got his big chance after James Cagney and George Raft, actors specialised in gangster roles, decided to pass on the role of Roy Earle fearing typecasting. Bogart built his performance on his previous work in The Petrified Forest. Roy Earle, just like Duke Mantee, is inspired by legendary real-life gangster John Dillinger, whose name is even mentioned in High Sierra. But Bogart made the new character more complex. With a Marine-like haircut and from a distance, Roy Earle looks old and is actually the oldest-looking character in Bogart’s entire filmography. He is also world-weary and strangely sentimental, spending his first moments of freedom by simply sitting in a park. While a violent man, capable of acts of brutality that involve beatings, robbery and murder, he is also capable of acts of kindness, including those that would ultimately bring about his doom.
Despite being billed under Ida Lupino, Bogart left such a strong impression in his role that the next grand role – Sam Spade in the film noir masterpiece The Maltese Falcon – would become his, just as John Huston, screenwriter of High Sierra, would use his experience to make his grand directorial debut with the same film. Ida Lupino, a British actress who would ultimately become one of the most celebrated actresses of Classic Hollywood and one of the first to become an accomplished director, is really impressive in her role. Her character starts as a typical gangster moll and “damaged goods” with the potential to become a noirish femme fatale, but in the end shows a great deal of vulnerability and genuine affection for the character of Roy, whom she begins to see as a kindred spirit, someone desperately trying to find a new life. Lupino and Bogart had great chemistry together, despite, by some accounts, not getting along on the set. That, on the other hand, can’t be said for Joan Leslie, a young actress who looks the part, but fails to genuinely create chemistry with Bogart; his character’s infatuation with a woman who might be half his age might create a certain unease among sections of today’s audience. Most of the problems can be attributed to the script that failed to properly explain the cause of Roy’s infatuation (and it could have done so by suggesting that he might have entered prison as a young man, ultimately losing track of his proper age). The script is also slightly rough around the edges in displaying the relationship between Roy and his young confederates and switching his romantic allegiance from Velma to Marie.
Most complaints about High Sierra, however, are, at least today, centred on Algernon, the character of the camp’s handyman, played by African American actor Willie Best who is introduced as some sort of comic relief and portrayed in a way that conforms to the racist stereotypes characteristic of the era. What ultimately redeems this film is the confident direction by Raoul Walsh, one of the most versatile and talented film makers of Classic Hollywood. He makes the noirish story look slightly less noir, in some ways affected by changes that began to affect America with the Second World War and the subsequent end of the Great Depression. California, even its mountainous areas, is presented as a “cool” and attractive place to live and the Goodhues, a family affected by the same issues as the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath, arrive not at a filthy transient camp but at the house of their relatives who are prosperous enough to afford a piano. But few audiences at the time paid much attention to these details, being more impressed with the good acting and the exciting finale that took place at authentic mountain locations. Walsh was so happy with his work that in 1949 he directed a Western-themed remake, Colorado Territory, starring Joel McCrea and Virginia Mayo. In 1955, a colour scene-for-scene remake, I Died a Thousand Times, was produced in Cinemascope, starring Jack Palance and Shelley Winters.
RATING: 6/10 (++)
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