One thief’s moll, Marie (Ida Lupino), latches onto Roy with immediate and unquestioning loyalty because she sees in his reluctance her own shame over her past. Though Big Mac manipulates Roy into falling back into crime, the gangster is depicted as more pitiful than reprehensible, a dying man whose obsession with pilfering rich tourists’ jewels before he passes beyond the veil is a grim reminder that no one ever makes it out of this life. Such glimpses at Roy’s repressed rage belie his attempts to get out of this line of work, though the man radiates earnestness at dreaming of something besides a life on the lam.Īround Roy, others are equally trapped in miserable, dead-end lives. All the while, Roy lightly raps his knuckles against a violin case to simulate the sound of gunfire and Louis’s face goes ashen. When one of his accomplices, Louis Mendoza (Cornel Wilde), starts to show too much enthusiasm for the job, Roy subtly warns the man about the dangers of flapping one’s lips too much in this line of work by relating the story of a rat whose end came at the end of a Tommy gun. No actor before or since radiated world-weariness so intensely, and he suffuses Roy with a self-loathing that only deepens the thief’s flashes of menace. Much of the film’s emotional and psychological weight rests, of course, on Bogart. High Sierra soon becomes less about the robbery itself than the sad spiral into which the characters are locked, with Walsh’s minimal setups leaving ample space for the actors to explore the way that their characters are no less troubled by loneliness just because they’re in close proximity to others. Burnett quickly get much of the exposition out of the way, introducing all of the key players and gathering them together in a mountain hideout where the cramped conditions fuel all sorts of tensions. ![]() Walsh and screenwriters John Huston and W.R. And with High Sierra, Walsh revealed a keen understanding of how to shift the blunter brutality of the mob movies of the 1930s toward the more evocative, philosophically disquieting realm of noir. Two years prior, his ferocious gangster film The Roaring Twenties belatedly sent the pre-Code era of the crime epic out in lavish, excoriating style. ![]() ![]() Roy’s reputation precedes him, and much to his chagrin, because when Big Mac dispatches him to the Sierra Nevada mountains to lead a heist at a ritzy California resort, he finds that even rural farmers have heard tell of his exploits.Ī true journeyman in the Howard Hawks style, Walsh had by this point in his career extensive experience making westerns, comedies, dramas, and even musicals. Pardoned out of prison at the start of Raoul Walsh’s High Sierra thanks to a little string-pulling by aged gangster Big Mac (Donald MacBride), Roy owes his freedom to the fact that his services are needed for a heist that will likely send him right back to the pen. Roy Earle (Humphrey Bogart) is a crook who couldn’t go straight even if he wanted to.
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