HIGH SIERRA

by Kevin Koehler

It's hard to imagine Humphrey DeForest Bogart as something other than a movie star. Yet for ten years, he treaded water in supporting roles, spending much of that time doing imitations (albeit good ones) of his memorable Duke Mantee performance from The Petrified Forest.

And then came High Sierra and everything changed.

Before America had other things to worry about (ie: Adolf Hitler), it was still working out its love/hate relationship with pseudo-Robin Hood, depression-era hoodlums (John Dillinger and the like). By 1941, Warner Brothers had practically cornered the market deifying and demonizing these "angels with dirty faces." Raoul Walsh had humbly served the cause in his previous The Roaring Twenties; here, he directs Bogie in the role of existential anti-hero Roy "Mad Dog" Earle. It would be a defining film in the transition from the James Cagney-style gagster pictures to the dawning era of film noir (which Bogart would come to define).

Newly-released from prison, Roy has a debt to settle with the crime boss to whom he now owes his freedom – payment, as it so often does, comes in the form of one last score. There's apparently thousands of dollars of jewelry in need of stealing and no one but Roy qualified to make sure it gets done right. Per custom, things do not go according to plan as Bogie falls in love (twice), people get shot, and our Mad Dog faces destiny on the doomed high sierra from which the film takes its title.

It's not a great film. Bogart talks in his sleep during a crucial scene, which is probably the most overused narrative cheat in the history of celluloid. Man's best friend figures much too prominently and awkwardly in the plot as a literal harbinger of doom (both the film's "dogs" are cursed); additionally, there some "I'se be catchin' ma feets nah, Boss" style racial stereotyping that is just plain embarrassing.

There are some great moments, though. Earle's emotional castration at the hands of the formerly club-footed Velma (Joan Leslie) is painful to watch (an aside: Bogie would later revisit this device - the transformative power of miracle surgeries - in Dark Passage; it's worth rememberinh that Bogie's father was a successful surgeon and rumor has it Bogart himself had botched surgery on his lip after an incident in the navy). Bogart, consistently sympathetic notwithstanding some unsavory violent acts (no easy feat) is always a pleasure to watch - it's easy to forget how ground-breaking his naturalistic performances were at the time...until you watch some of his co-stars ham it up with the overly-theatrical line delivery popular at the time.

Thankfully, they're not the show - Bogart is, despite getting second billing under co-star Ida Lupino. In the same year, Bogie would re-team with the writer of this film - John Huston - for the iconic director's first feature, the noir classic The Maltese Falcon. A year later, Bogart and Michael Curtiz got together in Casablanca, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Interesting footnote: Walsh, Bogart, and Lupino previously collaborated on the schizophrenic They Drive By Night, probably best known for Lupino's bizarre courtroom outburst "the doors made me do it." Incidentally, Ida Lupino was somewhat of a trailblazer for female directors. Only the second woman to be admitted into the DGA, her 1953 film The Hitch-Hiker is considered a minor classic of film noir. It has been chosen for preservation by the National Film Registry.

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