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 a violent, menacing and unpredictable man but 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 and she and Roy go straight to the heart.

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.