High Sierra: Crashing Out

The one-two punch of High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon, released later the same year, transformed Bogart from a sulky foil—required to cringe and tremble in a showdown with James Cagney in The Roaring Twenties (1939), and play second banana to George Raft in They Drive by Night (1940), both also under Walsh’s direction—into the screen’s peerless embodiment of self-possession, skepticism, independence, and weathered romanticism. Bogart’s still-lowly standing in the eyes of the studio is advertised in High Sierra by his second billing, despite his leading role—a snub urged by producer Hal Wallis on the grounds that Bogart’s association with B pictures might hurt the film’s prospects, and that Ida Lupino, riding high after her juicy femme fatale role in They Drive by Night, was a better bet for enticing audiences.

Raoul Walsh, one of Warner’s top directors, was a natural fit for this project: a master of both gangster movies (he had pioneered the genre with The Regeneration in 1915) and westerns, known for rousing adventure and rowdy comedy but equally at home with darker strains of fatalism, and clear-eyed about America’s perverse love affair with violent men. Walsh’s style is robustly physical; his is a warm cinema that invites you in, sometimes breaking the fourth wall to do so. Watching his films, you are caught up in the movement—the boisterous swirl of a crowd or the hurtling flight of a fugitive—and you do not admire his compositions so much as feel them, as though you were sharing the same space as his characters. The energy in Walsh’s films does not come just from sweeping action, but from intimate conversations and exchanges of gaze; from people flirting and arguing, as much as from brawls or derring-do. Of all the Hollywood directors associated with classically masculine genres, Walsh may be the one whose female characters most convincingly live and breathe on-screen, and whose men are least afraid of showing their need for women. They know the value of loyalty and affection in a world dominated by fighting, rivalry, and betrayal. Below the surface in many of Walsh’s films, an undercurrent of melancholy tugs at his characters like an ebb tide.

Roy Earle has little of the dry, scathing wit and needling intelligence that would later become Bogart’s trademarks, but the character illustrates how disenchanted middle age suited the actor better than youth. Famously, the patrician Humphrey DeForest Bogart had sealed his tough-guy credentials with his performance as the snarling, on-the-lam gangster Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest, a role he played on Broadway in 1935 and reprised on-screen the next year. With that convincingly brutish performance, he cast off the last shreds of his early typing as the juvenile second lead who bounds onstage with a tennis racket (a past slyly alluded to when Roy Earle, casing a country club for a heist, picks up a racket for camouflage). But as Duke Mantee he is still trying too hard: glowering furiously, his hands clutching his sides like rigid talons, rapping out shrill dese-and-dose dialect. By High Sierra, he has acquired ease, economy, and a repertoire of idiosyncratic mannerisms that convey a stylized naturalness: hitching up his belt, twitching his upper lip back from his teeth, slurring his words. Most importantly, he has found his essential stance as an observer; he dominates the scene by watching, listening, and reacting to others with the precision of a seismograph needle. Walsh is often associated with kinetic, physical performers such as Cagney and Errol Flynn, but he uses Bogart’s stillness and potent minimalism to set the film’s grave pace and give the story ballast.

Bogart was only forty when he made High Sierra; his temples were bleached to evoke Dillinger’s signature look, the film’s way of thumbing its nose at those moralizers who had shot down the earlier biographical project. But Roy is already an old-timer, commiserating with other grizzled veterans over how times have changed, how, as the boss Big Mac (Donald MacBride) says, “all the A1 guys are gone.” Now they are stuck with “young twerps, soda jerkers, and jitterbugs,” like the hotheaded punks Red (Arthur Kennedy) and Babe (Alan Curtis), who squabble over Marie (Lupino), the “dime-a-dance girl” they picked up in Los Angeles. The movie gangsters of the early thirties were young and hungry, blasting their way to the top with raw aggression, while High Sierra looks ahead to the valedictory tone that would take over the genre after World War II, filling it with rueful, aging men looking to pull one final job and retire. Roy is an old-fashioned, gallant desperado who has outlived his time: softhearted toward dogs and women, sneeringly tough with a crooked ex-cop or a nervous small-timer.

Nostalgia pervades the film, for both a lost world of agrarian innocence and a vanished age of outlaw glory. The bandits who roamed the Great Plains during the Depression—Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker—became media obsessions and folk heroes partly because they preyed on the banks that people blamed for their economic distress, but also for their refusal to suffer the humiliating deprivation that was robbing so many Americans of their pride. In the public imagination, they became Robin Hoods—like Roy Earle, who robs haughty country-club swells of their jewels and pays for an operation to cure a young woman’s clubfoot. Just as, in 1950’s The Asphalt Jungle—another film co­written by John Huston from a novel by Burnett—the hooligan Dix Handley yearns for a lost horse farm in Kentucky, Roy dreams of returning to his Indiana home, a bond between him and the family he meets headed to California in a jalopy after losing their Ohio farm. (They cross paths after a near collision when a jackrabbit runs out on the road—perhaps a descendant of the jackrabbit that flew through Walsh’s windshield when he was driving in the desert in 1928, costing him an eye.) Roy’s foolish reverence for middle-class respectability and “decency” inspires a grotesque fantasy of marrying the daughter of the family, Velma (Joan Leslie), who is happy to accept his charity but repelled by him as a suitor.

Despite Walsh’s association with two-fisted, knockabout adventure, the first half of High Sierra is far from action-packed. The characters kill time waiting around for the go-ahead for their big job; a savage brawl between Babe and Red happens offscreen. These scenes at the mountain lodge are marred by the egregiously racist characterization of Algernon (Willie Best), a Black employee who lazes around the place. In his longest scene, when Algernon tells Roy about the jinxed dog Pard, Best reveals glimpses of a more natural, relaxed, and sly charm behind the demeaning stereotypes of minstrelsy. Some other details grate on modern eyes and ears, such as the word cripple, applied to a mildly disabled woman; or the way men fling orders, insults, and clouts at women. In the last case, however, one can find an implicit critique of misogyny, since the most abusive men also turn out to be the weakest and most untrustworthy. (Curiously, although the censors of the Production Code office submitted reams of objections to the script, they seem to have missed the implications of the ménage à trois between Marie, Red, and Babe, or of the fact that she leaves them to move into Roy’s cabin.)

Under Walsh’s direction, actresses such as Lupino, Ann Sheridan, and Virginia Mayo played women who have been both toughened and tenderized by life, weary from fending off male aggression, yet unabashed in their yearning and generous in their devotion for the right man. In 1964, Walsh told Cahiers du cinéma that, in all his films, “the whole story revolves around the love scene.” These scenes range from the hilarious, freewheeling, affectionate verbal sparring between Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett in Me and My Gal (1932) to the moving simplicity of the reunion between the aging outlaw John Wesley Hardin and his wife (Rock Hudson and Julie Adams) in The Lawless Breed (1952), their restraint intensifying their overwhelming emotion. In High Sierra, we see long before Roy does that he belongs with Marie, a fugitive from an abusive home who understands the longing to “crash out,” and the way this dream of escape “keeps you going.”

A slip of a woman with big, smoky eyes and a charcoal-soft voice, Lupino played a lot of hard-luck waifs for Warner Bros. There is always a hint of steel in these bruised flowers, and the steel would show more and more in coming years, both on-screen and off-. Lupino adored Walsh, who directed her in four films, including one of her best showcases, the noir melodrama The Man I Love (1946). He also let her shadow him on set and in the cutting room, picking up the skills she unexpectedly revealed in 1949 when she took over from the ailing Elmer Clifton to direct Not Wanted, the first of her seven films. She emulated Walsh’s no-fuss, clean, and direct style, and for her greatest movie, The Hitch-Hiker (1953), she returned to the Alabama Hills, where some of High Sierra was shot. So did Stuart Heisler, when he directed I Died a Thousand Times (1955), another adaptation of High Sierra scripted by Burnett. Walsh himself helmed a looser remake, the superb Colorado Territory (1949), which recasts the story as a western, a natural genre shift that deepens the elegiac tone, with a ruined ghost town serving as the main setting. Star Joel McCrea anchors the film’s graceful action and mood of stoic melancholy, and the lean, stripped-down script adds a bitter twist to the tragic ending. Again, the outlaw makes his last stand in a fortress of rock, from which there can only be one way down. The same year, in White Heat, Walsh literally exploded this romantic trope of the defiant outlaw who meets his inevitable end on “top of the world.”