High Sierra

Still early in the film noir cycle, Raoul Walsh’s High Sierra adds plenty of melodrama to an otherwise tough crime film starring the still-rising superstar. Humphrey Bogart as the complicated gangster Roy Earle. Recently out of prison on a governor’s pardon arranged by the aging gangster Big Mac (Donald MacBride), Earle is obligated to lead a heist of a ritzy mountain resort so he travels to rendezvous with his new heist associates in California, befriending fellow traveler Pa Goodhue (Henry Travers) and his family along the way. While preparing for the robbery, Earle finds himself tugged between two women: his ostensible moll Marie (Ida Lupino), who loves him, and Pa’s disabled daughter Velma (Joan Leslie), who doesn’t, even after Earle pays for expensive surgery so she can walk normally again. Walsh establishes an underlying sense of doom throughout, so it’s no surprise that the heist doesn’t go smoothly, and Earle ends up trapped by police in the mountains before all is said and done. With his youthful face and silver sideburns, Bogart appears somewhat ageless here, while Lupino shines as the loyal girlfriend whose wish for Earle is simple peace. Note the tenacious little canine named Pard who adopts Earle as his master right up to the end.