High Sierra (1941) ***

Release Date: January 21, 1941

Running Time: 100 Minutes

Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Ida Lupino, Alan Curtis, Arthur Kennedy

Directed By: Raoul Walsh

Humphrey Bogart was primarily known in his early career for playing gangsters and other various lowlifes. These early pictures he would play gangster #3, then gangster #2 before finally settling in as lead gangster, head of a group of nefarious baddies destined to go down in a blaze of glory in the final reel. 1941 marks the end of an era for Bogart. It wouldn’t be the final performance in this type of a role but it would be the beginning of the era when he would stop being known as just another gangster actor and would branch out heavily into other roles such as The Maltese Falcon, several war pictures (All Through the Night, Across the Pacific), and of course Casablanca. He had one gangster film for Warner Brothers left in him, The Big Shot, but that plays more like an afterthought than an epithet. It seems fitting that this transition would be marked with the film High Sierra, a film that, when summed up could appear like just another B-movie crime film but is actually so much more.

Bogart stars as Roy Earle, a bank robber for hire who is suddenly and unexpectedly paroled from prison. His benefactor is Big Mac (Donald MacBride), an aged gangster with serious health problems. Mac wants Earle to do one final job for him, robbing a California Resort Hotel with the assistance of a couple of hired guns and an inside man, Mendoza (Cornel Wilde), the desk clerk who is tasked with alerting the men when the time is right for the robbery. Roy doesn’t much care for Mendoza as he sizes the man up as a coward and a reminder of when he put his trust in a similar person causing the whole order to go south.

Along for the ride is Marie (Ida Lupino), a dance hall girl who came with one of the hired guns. Roy wants her gone immediately but she pleads her case and he relents, allowing her to stay. As a sort of mascot for the group, A dog named Pard soon takes a liking to Roy but Roy is warned that the dog brings bad luck having been cared for by two previous owners who subsequently died. Roy doesn’t believe in such superstition and takes in the dog. It is a decision he will come to regret.

Roy is not written as the typical cold hearted criminal. It is true that he is a killer and he demonstrates that when the situation demands it of him by not hesitating to pull the trigger on someone. But before we are ever shown the harder side of his character we see a different side, one that the police would hardly scribe to the man. Early in the film, while traveling from prison to the hideout in Nevada, Roy has a near collision on the road with the family of Velma, a young woman with a club foot whose traveling to California. The surgery needed to correct the defect is too expensive for the family but Roy is smitten with Velma and arranges for the surgery to be paid for out of his own money. He falls for the woman and is devastated that, while very grateful to him, she doesn’t love him back. Marie, in turn, has fallen for Roy after things turn sour between her and the man she came to Nevada with in the first place.

The actual heist that all of this is leading up to really isn’t much of the story at all. Predictably things don’t go off without a hitch leaving the police on the lookout for Roy. Even though Roy goes on the run with Marie and Pard, it’s fate that leads to Roy facing off with the pursuing law officers alone, just as he began the film, on the steep rocks of the Sierra Nevada mountainside. Like most of the men Bogart has portrayed up to this point, he is a loner, destined to go out that way.

What really elevates this film above the many MANY other gangster films of the day is just how well developed Roy is as a character. This is no generic gangster that populated such films as Brother Orchid, Angels With Dirty Faces or The Petrified Forest. In those films Bogart was menacing but one-dimensional. Here, almost from the first scene, we see Roy Earle as more than just a criminal. He has principles and a low tolerance for abuse to women. When Red, one of his hired gang, abuses Marie, Roy steps in and puts Red in his place, stopping short of killing the man. Later, when spurned by Velma who is holding out for her man out east, Roy doesn’t take repayment for the expensive surgery he paid for. Instead, he leaves the family behind and seeks solace with Marie, the two becoming lovers.

Bogart is in fine form here in the lead. Something as simple as a short haircut went a long way toward selling him as older than he really was. He was just over forty when filming this movie but looks at least a decade older. But it’s not just the look that sells this character. Bogart carries himself differently here than he would playing a younger man. Just in the way he walks, the looks on his face when he’s sizing up those around him, conveys his world weariness. This is a stellar performance from an actor many people dismissed as having little range. 

There is plenty of action in this film but that is not what this film is all about. Boiled down it is a tragic character study about a man who has chosen to be a criminal but has a real soft spot in his heart. He is capable of great kindness but the circumstances he has put himself in have permanently locked that part of a normal life away from him. It magnifies the tragedy when we see him truly happy in the presence of Velma, hopeful she will love him even after hearing her heart belongs to someone else. He doesn’t truly fall back into bitterness until after even he cannot ignore that it will never happen between them. The light leaves his eyes and we know from that point onward what the final trajectory of his story will be. But knowing that doesn’t make the journey any less exciting or fulfilling.