High Sierra (Keep Case Packaging)
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Movie Reviews of High Sierra (Keep Case Packaging)
Movie Review: Bogie Goes From Bad To Good Guy
Summary: 4 Stars
Here is 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 softie.
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.
There are so many different angles to this story, it's always interesting to see.
Movie Review: Life on the edge
Summary: 3 Stars
This famous 1941 film not only cemented Humphrey Bogart's superstar status (after spending most of his earlier years playing only supporting heavy roles), but it also signaled the end of the long run of Warner's gangster movies since the early Thirties and the beginning of the studios' move to film noir. Unfortunately, without much of a knowledge of its revolutionary status today it does not play either as one of the better gangster films or one of the better noirs; the director, Raoul Walsh, does not seem fully in control of the material. The central plot involving a recently released convict (Bogart) and his small gang stationed up high in the Sierras to rob the safes of a luxury lodge is terrific, but all of this is intercut with kinds of bizarre other elements: a comic lodge employee (Willie Best), a monkey-faced dog with a curse, a screaming hotel guest wearing what looks like taffeta wings, and, worst of all, a subplot involving a poor family of Ohio farmers traveling westward whose lives keep intertwining with Bogart's. Bogart idealizes the disabled granddaughter in the family, Joan Leslie, as the very repository of all that is good and sweet in the world, and pays for her leg to be operated upon; once she's healed, he discovers she doesn't want to marry him but rather hook up with some sort of lounge lizard from back in Ohio. Neither the lounge lizard nor his pals seem all that bad; they're just really annoying, but Bogart takes their presence as a terrible betrayal, just as he does Leslie's desire to dance all over the place now that her leg is better. So instead he turns to the nervy gun moll in his gang, Marie (Ida Lupino, as intense and riveting as ever).
All this plays as if it were too scrupulously adapted from a much longer and more comprehensive novel, which is exactly the case: the ever-faithful John Huston keeps far too much from the W. R. Burnett novel published the year before. (This film marked the first collaboration between Bogart and Huston.) What redeems everything is the great work by Lupino and, especially, Humphrey Bogart in the central role: much leaner than he has ever elsewhere seemed and able to bring all kinds of warm shading to his aging gangster, Bogart makes you genuinely like this dangerous murderer. The final section where Bogart is actually cornered by police for hours up in the craggy otherworldly high Sierras is genuinely thrilling, and the location shooting was extremely rare for the time.
Movie Review: Good acting; weak plot
Summary: 3 Stars
Humphrey Bogart is always a pleasure to watch. Here, he's the tough but sensitive guy who has just been issued a parole and returns for another jewel heist. Along the way he falls in love with a sweet farm girl with a club foot, pays for her operation and pals around with her old-timey family in between meeting mobsters to plan for the job. The yokels he's been assigned to work with him have picked up a dime-a-dance girl in LA. (Ida Lupino). He wants her to go home but somehow she convinces him to let her stick around. Then, a very cute, but allegedly bad-luck dog attaches himself to Earle(Bogart).
Earle proposed marriage to Velma, the farm girl, after her foot is fixed but she is improbably attached to a slick guy with a pencil mustache (always a bad sign in these pictures) who drinks too much and she tearfully refuses Earle's proposal, much to the dismay of Pa who knows who's who. So Earle falls back on Marie, the dance hall girl and quickly falls in love with her. Well, he's been in prison for eight years so I guess he's sorta vulnerable in the romance department.
Mixed in with this human-interest strain of the plot, is the actual crime. It goes from bad to worse, no doubt due to the presence of Pard, the bad-luck dog, and Earle finds himself stranded in a cranny of the highest peak in America, with an audience of hundreds, including Marie, awaiting the outcome at the bottom.
It's a pretty bad story and the only reason I hung in there were the nice performances of both Bogart and Lupino. Lupino, especially, was very convincing as the tough but pathetic girl who had nothing in the world but this criminal she met up with in the motel in the Sierras.
If you can stand the plot, or if you are a died-in-the wool Bogart fan, you will probably like this. He certainly made better films later.
Movie Review: High Sierra DVD Review
Summary: 3 Stars
A good old movie. This film was remade in the 1950s as "I Died a Thousand Times" with Jack Palance. The 1.33:1 black-and-white picture is of average quality.
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