High Sierra

 In Raoul Walsh's  High Sierra, Roy Earle has his back against the wall.  But it's not just any wall -- instead, he's cornered by the tallest peak in the United States as it existed in 1941, the year the film was produced, Mount Whitney, a great white escarpment of granite crowned by jagged pinnacles like the jaw of some huge beast.  Earle, played by Humphrey Bogart, never had a chance -- the narrative deck is stacked against him.  But Walsh doesn't make his protagonist's doom thematic or, least of all, atmospheric -- the picture doesn't have the dense, gathering darkness of later film noir.  Instead of darkness, Walsh's film insists that there is a dual aspect to everything -- the mountain wilderness shown lavishly in the picture's first frames is both an emblem for escape and freedom and a vast cul-de-sac, a tower of bare rock that signifies "no exit here".  High Sierra is so vigorously directed, so swift on its feet (the movie is edited with lightning rapidity) that it's only on reflection that the pattern of dualities, hope and gloom, fate and freedom, becomes apparent.  

I have probably written elsewhere on High Sierra and so this comment is, perhaps, superfluous.  I know that I have previously remarked on Colorado Territory, Walsh's near simultaneous re-make of High Sierra as a Western.  Apparently, the subject was close to Walsh and had personal resonance to him -- in the film, he restages the accident that cost him his eye, a mishap involving a jack-rabbit startling a driver and provoking an accident in the remote desert.  The figure of the desperado, a bandit pardoned from a sentence of life in prison only to be immediately trapped in the coils of a doomed robbery, must have had some kind of resonance to Walsh.  In other, more conventional, narratives, Roy Earle would be yearning to go straight and there's a tiny bit of this flavor when the criminal encounters the love interest (or interests) in the film.  But the movie is cheerfully corrupt to the bone:  a vicious ex-cop, probably a police commissioner, has purchased Earle's pardon from the prison in Indiana where he is doing time, in other to coerce him into masterminding a robbery -- the plan is to steal diamonds and cash from a posh mountain resort in the Sierra Nevada.  The movie immediately assumes that the governor of Indiana is for sale and that Earle, a man of his word if a criminal, will execute the plan. Earle is presented as a craftsmanlike robber, a thoroughly professional crook who is forced to babysit two inept and violent thugs (one of them is even called "Baby") and their moll, Marie (played by Ida Lupino).  The fence is a crook called "Big Mac" who is dying of some kind of heart ailment -- "Big Mac" drinks whiskey notwithstanding his sleazy gangland doctor's advice to abstain:  "People say I'm just rushin' to death," the dying criminal says, "But you're rushin' to death too.  So is everyone one."  (The line is a curious echo of the epigraph to a nearly contemporary horror film,  1943's The Seventh Victim, produced by Val Lewton -- the movie begins with a quote from John Donne:  "I run to death and death meets me as fast and all my pleasures are like yesterday.")  Big Mac and Roy and, for that matter, the doctor lament the fact that they are alone professional in a world of unmannerly and reckless baby-thugs.  Saddled with an incompetent gang, Earle's robbery goes awry.  The two childish crooks are killed in a fiery crash after Earle has shot a security guard.  Earle goes on the lam with the Marie (who is packing an intolerably cute little dog with her) but they have to separate.  The inside confederate (played by a very young Cornel Wilde) sings like a bird and the dragnet tightens around Earle.  He flees to the foot of Mount Whitney -- there's a hair-raising car chase up the serpentine dirt road that leads toward the peak.  Earle isn't about to go back to prison.  He blasts away at his pursuers with a tommy-gun and clambers up to an inaccessible ledge under the huge mountain.  As Marie begs him to surrender (and the dog gets loose to run up to Earle), a sniper gains a cliff-top above Earle and shoots him down.  And, then, he falls and falls and falls.  Marie says that Earle's finally "crashed-out" which means to escape to freedom.  The mountains and the wilderness don't care one way or the other.

This sort of movie is as far as can be imagined from today's popular super-hero and comic book pictures.  High Sierra is grounded in failure, not triumph or success.  Battles are fought to be lost.  And the movie was made for adults -- the picture celebrates the notion that people can hold two mutually opposing ideas in their imagination at once.  Mount Whitney, the "pride of the Sierras" is both a spectacular and vast landscape suggesting the freedom of the American West and another, larger prison.  Big Mac dies of heart failure "with a half million dollars in jewels on his bed next to him."  The duality of things is expressed in the film's genre subplot.  After the jack-rabbit almost drives his cars off the road, Earle becomes friends with a family in the other vehicle, Ohio farmers who have lost the home-place and are making for the Golden West.  A teenage girl in that family is lovely, cheerful, and has a club-foot.  Earle falls in love with her after the "meet cute" in the desert and, later, after she's involved in another car crash in LA.  (Cars are instruments of fatality in this film.)  Earle finances an operation to cure her club foot -- it's supervised by the gangland doctor and there's an element of "illegality" about the procedure (as if the doc is arranging for an abortion.)  Once the girl's foot is fixed, however, she doesn't care for Earle, who is after all much older than her -- in fact, and this is shocking to the audience, the girl takes up drinking and dancing when she's spry enough to trip the light fantastic and becomes a kind of hardened floozy.  (And her boyfriend Lon is a singularly despicable character, a smudge of a man with a pencil-thin moustache who's not much younger than Earle.)  Rejected by the girl, Earle courts the moll of one of the bad boys, Marie, a former dime-a-dance girl from San Francisco. She's enthusiastic about him (apparently entirely forgetting her abusive boyfriend who died in the fiery crash), but as soon as we see them together, Marie begins to bicker with Earle.  There's no safe harbor in sight. (Marie tells Earle she had an abusive father and fled from him, "crashing out" of her family, to use gangland parlance -- there's some notion that she may be seeking surrogate for her father in the much older Earle.) The film's many ambiguities are summed up in the figure of Pard, a small grey-white mongrel.  The dog's been trained by an African-American flunky at the tourist camp in the mountains -- the flunky's role is in the vein of a Stepin Fetchit part and shockingly racist.  The Black flunky tells Earle that the dog is a harbinger of doom -- the critter is hexed and everyone who owns the pooch ends up dead, foreshadowing what will happen in the film.  But the dog is also an emblem of domesticity between Roy and Marie and, further, serves the function of providing cute comic relief in the picture.  Walsh proposes that the charismatic little dog with his appealing tricks is also an agent of doom (and this is literal:  the dog serves to identify Marie to the authorities who are hunting the couple.)  Everything in the film is carefully plotted and developed:  in an early scene, the Black factotum at the resort says he'll drain the water from Earle's radiator in his car "cuz it gets mighty cold up here after dark."  At the end of the movie, Earle spends a night lightly clad on the heights of the mountain -- a journalist provides a florid narration of the man-hunt and says that the vast cliff in a "tower of ice" in the night. (John Huston wrote the script with the author of the source novel, W. R. Burnett.)

There's a haunting detail toward the end of the movie.  Walsh uses a montage of maps and speeding vehicles to show how the police are setting up roadblocks in the Owens Valley to surround the fugitive.  The montage is very fast -- in general, the film's editing is extremely swift and uses scarcely visible snippets of film.  One map features at its center the word "Manzanar".  In the year after the movie wa released, Manzanar would become the site of a large and barren Japanese interment camp.  (When I visited the ghostly ruins there, I read the story of a Japanese-American student who was held in the concentration camp -- the student yearned to escape into the high sierra just like Roy Earle.  Mount Whitney is the camp's backdrop.  After the war, the Nisei student was freed, left the camp, and died of exposure trying to climb Mount Whitney.  The Japanese were put at Manzanar precisely because the landscape is a sort of immense prison.)  Of course, all of this was in the future when the movie was released and so the brief shot of the map that reads Manzanar has a curious, and bleak, sort of innocence.