| | High Sierra, a typically brawny screenplay by John Huston, from a novel by prolific Chicago crime writer W.R. Burnett, gives us an interesting character in a curious capture of American life. Bogart's just-released notorious ex-con "Roy Earle" goes straight back to a life of crime, hoping for a big heist from the vault of a rich mountain resort, but runs into trouble with inexperienced partners and a couple dames, one the gutsy girlfriend (played very well by Ida Lupino) of one of his partners, and the other a young, very pretty country girl whom you get the feeling he sees as standing for everything good and pure that he's been unable to have.
It's almost hard to imagine anyone but Bogart being able to play the role with such utter conviction, expression, and subtlety that we not only believe he's capable of violence, but also that he wants to give it up...except that he's also unable to change his own uncompromising character. It's an excellent portrayal.
Apparently this was one of the last gangster movies, cranked out in high volume in the 30's. It comes on the cusp of WWII, where the old Tommy guns would be supplanted in cinema by Mausers and machine guns. The feeling of an end coming for the old gang is in fact presented very clearly in High Sierra: Roy's still game, but just for one last big score he can retire on, and, as he and his dying boss work out, all his old buddies are either dead or in prison, and it's clear their places can't be filled by the inexperienced young punks available. It's a bitter swansong for the once glamorous gangster era.
There's that feeling of holding a last snapshot of old ways here in other aspects as well. The rural areas Bogey cruises through have an odd feeling of quaint isolation, as if they've been stranded and kept back in time, to a simpler age of idle dime and drug stores--he literally collides with them as he's making what you get the feeling is what he sees as a fairly hopeless escape attempt. You see this also early in the movie, where he stops by his childhood farm, chatting comfortably over the fence with the current owner about the local water hole and so forth...until a suspicion comes to the owner, and Roy has to clear out. The old idle, innocent days are gone.
The feeling is particularly sharp in the crippled country girl he falls for, Velma, played by Joan Leslie. He's helplessly attracted to her youth, beauty, and innocence, even as you--and probably he--know this can't possibly work out. Her old farm hand father gets along with Roy like peas in a pod, but its the commiseration of two people who know their time is over. Her urban slickster fiance, a successful insurance agent and avid be-bopper, is the final blow driving the point home.
Even the dramatic ending action sequences are a conflicting mix of old and new. Parts of the car chases are almost comically sped up, like an old silent film, to make the cars seem faster; but the finale, shot on-location outdoors, instead of on a sound stage, is a new step, with the accompanying rough edges of dodgy sound, flooded lighting, and less than optimal camera angles.
But the grit and dirt and shattering ending are in harmony with the tough character of the central figure, a guy who doesn't really want to be bad, but couldn't be called good. Bogart could do that better than anyone, and High Sierra made the most of it, at with a sense of historical timing that seems, to this ignoramus at least, just as incredibly spot-on as what Casablanca pulled off, and almost more so, since instead of only capturing and holding it up for view, it actually felt ahead of time part of the great change to American society that would come with the war that the country would join at the end of the year. |
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