High Sierra
Directed by Raoul WalshRoy Earle (Humphrey Bogart) is a veteran bank robber paroled from an Indiana penitentiary through the influence of an aging crime boss, 'Doc' Banton (Henry Hull). Sent west to the Sierra Nevada, Earle is tasked with organizing a resort hotel robbery alongside two younger, less disciplined thieves – Babe (Alan Curtis) and Red (Arthur Kennedy). Along the way he encounters Pa (Henry Travers) and his granddaughter Velma (Joan Leslie), a club-footed young woman whose plight stirs something paternal and romantic in the hardened criminal.
The complication of Earle's feelings for Velma – a sentiment she does not return – runs parallel to his growing bond with Marie (Ida Lupino), a young woman drifting in the orbit of the same criminal world. Marie understands Earle with a clarity Velma never could, yet Earle is slow to recognize what is directly in front of him. The heist, when it comes, is ragged and costly, and the law begins to close in, transforming a robbery picture into something more searching: a portrait of a man who has lived too long outside the law to survive within its borders.
High Sierra positions itself at the junction between the gangster film of the 1930s and what noir would become across the following decade. The landscape itself – first the flat Midwest, then the mountains of California – functions as moral terrain, and the film's final movement on the high peaks strips away any remaining ambiguity about whether a man like Earle can find a place in the world. Walsh works with a script co-written by W.R. Burnett and John Huston that refuses sentiment even as it earns its elegiac register.
