This week in Disc Dive, Ida Lupino gets top billing over Humphrey Bogart, in the film that would turn him into a star. Let’s head out to High Sierra.
Title: High Sierra
Director: Raoul Walsh
Released: January 23, 1941 (Theatrical – Sweden)
Runtime: 1 hour 40 minutes
Disc Format: Criterion Blu-ray
Fresh out of prison thanks to a pardon from the governor, Roy Earle (Humphrey Bogart) is immediately recruited by Big Mac for a bank robbery up in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Waiting for Roy at an abandoned logging camp are a handful of amateurs and screwups, including Marie (Ida Lupino), who winds up feeling more like an afterthought than a fully realized character.
As the group prepares for the heist, Roy meets Velma (Joan Leslie), a young woman with a club foot, and quickly becomes infatuated. He decides to pay for her surgery, a decision that does not fit the life he is supposed to be heading back to, whether it makes sense or not.
This was a first-time rewatch for me and while my rating stayed the same, there were definitely things I appreciated more this time around.
Even in black and white, the California landscapes look fantastic. The desert and mountain locations give the movie a much larger scale than a lot of noirs from the era. There’s also some really strong cinematography throughout, with shadows constantly swallowing characters whole. Whether every bit of it was intentional or not, it works.
You can absolutely see why this became Bogart’s breakout as a leading man. Rewatching it now after seeing much more of his filmography, you can see so much of the Bogart persona forming in real time.
That being said, Ida Lupino feels criminally underused. For someone with top billing, Marie never gets enough material to really become the emotional anchor she probably should have been. The movie introduces multiple side plots and character threads that do not really go anywhere, and that time could have been better spent developing her relationship with Roy.
Messier than I remembered in some ways, better in others. It is not top tier noir, but there is absolutely enough here to recommend it.
Seen High Sierra recently? Let me know what you thought of it.