1,001 Films: "High Sierra"

High Sierra is a rarity: a major studio crime picture that leaves the city behind, from the days when Humphrey Bogart was still a relatively unknown ugglemug scraping second billing behind a female lead. Bogart's bank robber Roy Earle, sprung from prison in shady circumstances, is immediately dispatched by syndicate bosses to a log cabin in the foothills of the Sierra mountains to prep for a hotel jewellery heist. From the way he wanders from jail to take a breather in a nearby park, and gazes longingly up at the Sierras themselves, we can guess Roy rather likes this freedom lark; from the way he comes to interact with a jalopy full of ordinary folks - broke farmer Henry Travers, and his beautiful, hobbling daughter Joan Leslie - we surmise he's becoming fond of human company, too. Alas, he's but a lowly cog in the machine, heading for a fall - or at least a nasty climb.

In his first of three 1941 films, Raoul Walsh here treats a story co-authored by John Huston as the opportunity for a break from full-on gangsterisms: instead, we're offered rather more nuanced interpersonal business, less interested in the jewellery heist itself (which is dashed off) than in the love triangle the film engineers between Bogart, the unattainable normality represented by Leslie, and the top-billed Ida Lupino as the moll Roy and his gang have holed up with. Roy's new-found reluctance to leave anyone behind is signalled by the prominence afforded to a mangy dog called Pard, and it's this misplaced affection - this vulnerability - that proves this would-be tough guy's eventual undoing: as he puts it himself, "of all the fourteen-carat saps, setting out on a caper with a woman and a dog".

A couple of scenes with a cross-eyed black help makes you realise just how far Hollywood was behind the curve in its representation of minorities, and its relative restraint in other departments (compared to, say, The Roaring Twenties or the later White Heat) may be another sticking point for some, but it's the film that allows Walsh to demonstrate he was every bit as good with actors as he was with action. Bogart (with a filthy-looking tan, delivering the line "you stinking rat" that would be a boon for impressionists everywhere for decades) and Lupino (as a gal who knows she's not good enough for her man, but loves him all the same) make one of the screen's great self-loathing double acts, and Travers, sad-eyed in the back of the frame, is heartbreaking as a downtrodden yet decent man continually let down by life - the kind of figure whose own tragedy might well have been placed centre-stage if this were a Steinbeck novel of the 30s, and not a Warners crime movie of the 40s.

High Sierra is available on DVD as part of Warner Home Video's Humphrey Bogart Collection boxset.