High Sierra (1941)

Film: High Sierra (1941)
Stars: Ida Lupino, Humphrey Bogart, Alan Curtis, Arthur Kennedy, Joan Leslie, Henry Travers, Cornel Wilde
Director: Raoul Walsh
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Ida Lupino-click here to learn more about Ms. Lupino (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We continue on with our month of Ida Lupino this week with the film that is almost exclusively associated with someone else's legend, even though it's Lupino who earned top billing for the picture.  High Sierra is the final film that Humphrey Bogart ever made where he received less than top billing until his death in 1957, because as hard as it is to believe, at the time Ida Lupino was the bigger star for Warner Brothers.  Her career was on an upswing after They Drive By Night, and the studio wanted to capitalize on that by re-teaming her with George Raft, but Raft turned down this role, which would become one of the bigger mistakes of his career (he would go on to turn down The Maltese Falcon, and if urban legend is to believed, Casablanca, so it's clearly not the biggest mistake of his career).  Instead Raoul Walsh cast Humphrey Bogart in the lead, and though Bogart was resentful of Lupino getting the top spot on the poster (the pair did not like each other, and would never work together again despite two hits in a row), this film cemented him as a leading man in the eyes of audiences, as well as High Sierra's screenwriter John Huston, with whom Bogart would make most of his best pictures.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is a film noir, but one that weirdly doesn't center on the inner city, but instead takes place for long stretches in the outdoors.  Roy Earle (Bogart) is a gangster recently out of jail, is asked to take part in a heist at a luxury hotel, and agrees despite his recent pardon from the governor granting him a new lease on life.  He holes up in the country with three small-time criminals (Kennedy, Curtis, and Wilde), and one of their girlfriends, Marie, who is about as close to a prostitute as 1940's censors would have allowed (she worked at a "dance hall" before the movie).  They also live near a kindly family, the daughter of whom, Velma (Leslie) Roy takes a shine toward despite her clubbed foot.  He pays to have it fixed, but she spurns his advances and so he ends up with Marie, who adores him but he seems largely ambivalent toward even if he eventually finds he loves her.  The crime goes south when someone is shot during the holdup, and two of the three small-timers die in a car accident during the police chase, with the third squealing on Roy & Marie.  The film ends with Roy, on the run, climbing into the Sierra Nevada Mountains but of course because of the Hays Code at the time, he dies in a gunfight, surrounded by a sobbing Marie and an adorable dog named Pard who has been sweet on Roy the whole movie.

The film is engaging if a bit dull for a noir.  It's always hard to tell for a formative movie like High Sierra, which in a lot of ways invented a genre (along with other movies like The Maltese Falcon and Laura)-how do you judge something that was so inventive then but feels dull to modern eyes because so many people have borrowed from it?  But High Sierra has its attributes-the outdoors shots in the actual Sierra Nevada Mountains are breathtaking (there are even shots of the movie near Mt. Whitney, California's highest peak), and the love triangle is actually quite intriguing.  Roy never seems to entirely get over Velma's rejection, clearly picking up Marie as a rebound who ends up being the last love of his life, and while the ending wants them to be the "true soulmates" of the movie, Bogart's performance informs the audience that this isn't the case; either Roy was incapable of ever finding a true love, or his true love had to be someone like Velma, who made him feel like he was better than he was.

Bogart's mesmerizing in the role, and clearly understood the part in a way that Raft probably would have lacked (Bogie, despite his tough guy bravado, was always best playing guys with a rough outer shell but a soft heart).  He'd rarely play criminals after this, but it's a great role to go out on, and he gives the movie's best performance.  This isn't a knock on Lupino (who is only a borderline lead here despite her billing-Bogart gets considerably more screen-time), who is great as a lover who knows she's not his first choice, but Bogart really comes into his own here, and shows the greatness that would eventually lead to him taking on fascinating, complicated work in pictures like Casablanca and Treasure of the Sierra Madre.  Next week we will turn to what might be the most critically-acclaimed work of Lupino's career, and certainly the role for which many (including Warner Brothers) assumed she'd get that Oscar nomination that eluded her her entire career.