La Grande Évasion

"High Sierra" was the film that changed the course of Bogart's career and lifted him up to stardom…

As Earle, Bogart was expanding on the criminal characterization he had already mastered in a dozen earlier films, giving it greater depth by adding contrasting elements of warmth and compassion to compensate the dominant violence…

Bogart helps a clubfooted girl, Velma (Joan Leslie), who repays him only with disregard and indifference…

Bogart's interpretation already showed signs of the special qualities that were to become an important part of his mystique in a few more films…

Here, for the first time, was the human being outside society's laws who had his own private sense of loyalty, integrity, and honor… Bogart's performance turns "High Sierra" into an elegiac film…

As a film, "High Sierra" has other notable qualities, particularly Ida Lupino's strong and moving performance as Marie, the girl who brings out Roy Earle's more human emotions…

The movie was remade as a Western, "Colorado Territory," with Joel McCrea and Virginia Mayo, and as a crime film in "I Died a Thousand Times," with Jack Palance and Shelley Winters in the Bogart and Lupino roles… Neither came up to the stylish treatment given "High Sierra" by director Raoul Walsh from an exceptionally good script by John Huston and W. R. Burnett

For reasons unexplained you have been pardoned, after eight years behind bars you're still quite hardened, but there's a soft side you present, there's a kindness with intent, but there are times, when anger rages, and you're darkened. Old habits can be difficult to break, and so an offer of a caper you do take, driving down to California, meeting up with guys quite amateur, plus a lass who's called Marie, who's hard to shake. Naturally things don't go quite as you had hoped, as a gun is drawn and you feel your provoked, triggers pulled and bullets fly, public enemy, the bad guy, as you head into mountains, with quite steep slopes.

A sublime film. Probably one of the most melancholic pictures ever made in the classic period. It is one of the earliest and strongest portraits of the tragic hero, so recurrent in Walsh's filmography. Bogart's character, a mournful, resigned old-timer who witnesses the gradual downfall of the world as he knows it, dresses in black all through the film, like the mute and only assistant to his own funeral. As other Walsh anti-heroes –notably White Heat's Cody- he must reach the heights before him dies. One wonders what would have been of the Bogart, Cagney, Flynn or Raft persona without their significant roles in the Raoul Walsh films. It's remake, Colorado Territory, is even better.

Aw, the film that launched stardom for Humphrey Bogart and changed him from the perpetual villain to the "good guy."

The movie doesn't feature a lot of action but it keeps your interest. You have two women in here: the hard-boiled Ida Lupino and the soft-and-sweet Joan Leslie. Both are entertaining to watch and both demonstrate a few surprises in the personalities of the characters they are playing. Bogart does the same: goes back and forth between tough guy and softy.

Another key member of this unusual crime story/film noir is "Pard:" a little dog! Human supporting roles are supplied by some familiar and solid actors such as Arthur Kennedy, Alan Curtis, Henry Hull, Henry Travers, Barton MacLane and Cornel Wilde. Most of the people in here, including "Pard," are that endearing but there are so many different angles to this story, it's always interesting to see.

Humphrey Bogart's screen name in High Sierra is Roy 'Mad Dog' Earle. But it's clear from the outset that if Bogart is anything he's not crazy. Bogart may have been a wild guy in his youth, but he's now a middle-aged man who is fully aware that he can't do anything else, but continue in a life crime. He's got the resume and the reputation for that and nothing else. What else can he do, but accept an offer to crew chief a heist at an expensive resort hotel in Nevada.

He can't pick the men he'd like, they're probably all dead or in the joint. He gets some young punks assigned to him by Barton MacLane who is acting as a middleman for boss Donald MacBride out on the west coast. Bogey gets Alan Curtis, Arthur Kennedy, and an informant at the hotel, Cornel Wilde. Curtis and Kennedy are getting their hormones in overdrive over Ida Lupino.

On the way west Bogey meets up with a near do well family headed by Henry Travers and he starts crushing out on teenager Joan Leslie. They represent to him a simpler time before he took up crime as a living.

The first half of the film sets up the characters, the second part is the robbery and it's aftermath. In that second half High Sierra moves at a really good clip. Not too many went out for popcorn when it was shown in theaters back in the day.

High Sierra was one of three films that George Raft turned down and were given to Humphrey Bogart that established him as a leading man. The other two were The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca. Raft must have had some agent back in the day.

Of course Bogart is playing a gangster, but this one is a three dimensional character and a fine piece of work. It represented a big advance from some of the villains he played at Warner Brothers during the late Thirties.

High Sierra was directed by Raoul Walsh and another Hollywood icon director, John Huston, co-wrote the screenplay. There's a lot of similarity with this and Huston's later classic, The Asphalt Jungle.

High Sierra was remade twice, as a western with the miscast Joel McCrea in Bogart's role and in the Fifties as I Died a Thousand Times with Jack Palance. I daresay it could be made again quite easily for this generation, it's story is timeless.