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High Sierra
First Published: 1940
302 pages
 About the Book
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About The Movie
Humphrey Bogart emerged, definitively, as the legendary Bogie in 1941, with the release of two films -- John Huston´s The Maltese Falcon and, earlier in the year, Raoul Walsh´s High Sierra. Bogart had been a Warner Bros. contract player for almost five years, with all the soul-killing drudgery that entailed (in 1939, he had to play the bit part of Bette Davis´ Irish stable manager in Dark Victory). But the role of "Mad Dog" Roy Earle in High Sierra was his salvation, a tortured character that fit his moody onscreen personality and inspired a performance that convinced the world he was, indeed, a major talent.
The film´s director, Raoul Walsh, was one of the most fascinating characters in Hollywood history. As an actor, he had played John Wilkes Booth in D.W. Griffith´s 1915 silent epic The Birth of a Nation, but he soon turned to directing and was respected for his taut, unpretentious way of telling a story onscreen. High Sierra is one of his greatest achievements -- tough, tense and visually exciting, an early example of film noir. W.R. Burnett and John Huston did the screen adaption of Burnett´s novel, and Bogart´s tortured Roy Earle is an ideal realization, in both tone and style, of Burnett´s anti-hero.
Ida Lupino plays Marie, the woman who loves Earle, with Alan Curtis and a young Arthur Kennedy as his henchmen. Joan Leslie plays Velma, the clubfooted girl Earle determines to help. Though completely ignored in the Academy Awards race in a vintage year -- Citizen Kane and How Green Was My Valley led the Best Picture nominees -- High Sierra was named one of the year´s 10 best films by the National Board of Review, which also cited the performances of Bogart and Lupino.
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