Bogart Went to the Top for the First Time in HIGH SIERRA!
Written: Dec 08 '00 (Updated Aug 14 '01)
Product Rating:
Pros: The movie pairs Bogart and Huston for the first time.
Cons: Director Walsh's robust action scenes may appear quaint to some, and his touch sentimental.
The Bottom Line: In HIGH SIERRA, released nine months before THE MALTESE FALCON, Bogart adds a sensitive side to his tough guy: the screen persona by which we admire him ever after.
As Roy "Mad Dog" Earle, a second lead named Humphrey Bogart clawed the heights of Stardom in Raoul Walsh's HIGH SIERRA (1941). The sympathetic irony, of course, was that neither Earle nor Bogart, in their "real lives," were mad dogs. And how that fact was subtly conveyed explains the film's appeal, and a probable reason for Bogart's ascent.
For ten years, with time off for bad behavior on Broadway, Bogie served Fox and Warner Brothers in a series of pot boiling gangster films. Most famously he was Duke Mantee, recreating his stage role, in Robert Sherwood's THE PETRIFIED FOREST (Mayo, 1936). Playing Mantee he dynamically headed a gang of robbers on the lam, but in the other parts (i.e., ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES, Curtiz, 1939), he was often cast as a second or third banana thug, who only sneered his way in a one dimensional way to a bad end.
In HIGH SIERRA, for the first time, Bogart becomes the quirky, laconic, complete human being on screen who we love as an icon: the father of Sam Spade and Rick several years later.
[I note that in an Internet Movie Data Base entry, women like this movie somewhat better than men.]
Part of the reason for that humanity is no doubt due to the screen play John Huston co-wrote with W. R. Burnett, from the latter's novel of the same name. Both Huston and Bogart came from well-off families; both had gone through scrapes and hard times; both had developed a feeling for the underdogs of our Society. They became friends and partners, making beautiful movies together.
And although the movie is not "film noir" in a conventional sense, HIGH SIERRA does provide, in Bogart's Roy Earle, a model for what that genre's anti-hero would become.
It all began with HIGH SIERRA:
A legendary gangster of the 1920's and 1930's, Roy Earle has had an "arranged" release from a long prison sentence back east. Without spelling it out much, the film suggests that the Great Depression and the New Deal have changed America in ways which make Roy Earle a dinosaur. He becomes the reluctant pawn of one Big Mac (Donald McBride), who in return for springing him, wants Earle to lead a gang in a heist of a wealthy, rustic resort in the mountains of the West. Earle, standing out in his nearly bald prison haircut and awkward clothes, needs the money, but in his eyes we can see his foreboding.
[Part of Bogart's hold on us is that here, and in many films after HIGH SIERRA, he seems to be concealing some terrible pain deep in his gut, which is reflected from moment to moment in his face.]
Earle does what one would have done in the late 1930's. He drives west, stopping in his boyhood home town, and other places along the way. At one of them, he meets Velma (Joan Leslie), the crippled daughter of a poor family. Earle falls in love with her virginal features, and he is overcome with pity at her future. When he has a chance, he brings her together with a colleague, Doc Barton (Henry Hull), an expert crime doctor from the old days, who agrees to perform an operation.
At the gang's first meeting in a cabin in the mountains, Earle is infuriated at his partners in the caper, Babe Kozak (Alan Curtis) and Red Hattery (Arthur Kennedy), a couple of young punks. They have brought with them a tough, abused waif, Marie Garson (Ida Lupino). Until Earle turned up, Marie has had only her little dog to love. When Earle first tries to get rid of her, and then protects her from his partners, she falls for him, one more complication he doesn't need.
It is the contrasts between a virginal but shallow Velma, and the self-destructive but loyally honest Marie, with hard bitten, disciplined but secretly romantic Roy Earle which provides the emotional center of HIGH SIERRA. In that conflict, with the help of Writer Huston, Director Walsh and innovative producer Mark Hellinger, Humphrey Bogart creates his quintessential Hero (part Hemingway with a sensitive center), which has resonated through every decade since -- and is still with us.
Inevitably, the crime is botched, and the survivors scatter. After a disastrous stop to see Velma walk, with Marie and the dog close behind, Earle, now dubbed "Mad Dog Earle" by the newspapers and radio, heads straight up Mount Whitney for the frenetic climax.
Some find HIGH SIERRA dated, complain about sentimental devices such as the little dog, but as a film about a man whose expertise is denigrated by a new generation (which happens in every decade), much of its power remains.
And it deserves our attention for what it harbinged.
Bogart would go on to make with Director Huston THE MALTESE FALCON (1941), ACROSS THE PACIFIC (1942), THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948), KEY LARGO (1948), THE AFRICAN QUEEN (1953), and BEAT THE DEVIL (1954). In other words, three quarters of the films that represent Bogart at his best. And Huston and Bogart were close friends until the day Bogart died.
HIGH SIERRA was remade, almost scene for scene, as I DIED A THOUSAND TIMES (Heisler, 1954), starring Jack Palance and Shelly Winters as Roy and Marie; and as a Western by Raoul Walsh himself: COLORADO TERRITORY, in 1949, with Joel McCrea, Virginia Mayo and Dorothy Malone.
Rent the original, and watch a legend being created.
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