High Sierra (Snap Case)
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Movie Reviews of High Sierra (Snap Case)
Movie Review: TOUGH GUY GET BURNED - GREAT LOOKING DVD!
Summary: 4 Stars
"High Sierra" is the story of an convict who is makes parol only to find himself thrown back into the hopper of organized crime. Bogie is the bad guy, tough as nails and raw as meat in a butcher's window. He's got a soft side though, and in this movie it's for Ida Lupino - a largely forgotten but extremely talented actress who's hooked up with two small time operators who are planning a hotel robbery job in the Sierra mountains. Great action and suspense!TRANSFER: VERY NICE! Warner's usual sterling quality is at work here. The credit sequence is a bit rough and there is a bit of instability in the original camera negative but over all this is one fine looking transfer. The gray scale is impeccably rendered. Blacks are black. Contrast and shadows are well balanced. There appears to be very little in the way of age related artifacts. There are NO signs of digital compression. The audio is MONO but nicely rendered.
EXTRAS: A featurette that manages to cover a lot of ground in a very short time and provides a succinct look at the film's backstory.
BOTTOM LINE: This Bogart classic is an absolute must for anyone who appreciates great performances and wonderful story telling. Ah yes, I remember why it is that I fell in love with the movies!
Movie Review: Classic Bogart - Classic Film
Summary: 4 Stars
Bogart fans rejoiced when High Sierra was finally released on DVD. Bogart plays Roy Earle, freed from prison for the sole purpose of getting "that last big score".Bogart does a tremendous job with this complex role showing the 'tough as nails' side he's known for and a kind, gentle man who breaks many of his own rules because of his heart. Although he didn't recieve top billing, it's clear Bogart is the star. It's hard to believe he wasn't Warner's first choice for the role.The DVD isn't overflowing with extras. There's a nice short extra which tells how Bogie came into the role of Roy Earle but that's about it. The picture quality is excellent making it steal and a must for any classic movie lover's collection.
Movie Review: not a great film, but has great moments
Summary: 3 Stars
t's hard to imagine Humphrey DeForest Bogart as something other than a movie star. Yet for ten years, he treaded water in supporting roles, spending much of that time doing imitations (albeit good ones) of his memorable Duke Mantee performance from The Petrified Forest.
And then came High Sierra and everything changed.
Before America had other things to worry about (ie: Adolf Hitler), it was still working out its love/hate relationship with pseudo-Robin Hood, depression-era hoodlums (John Dillinger and the like). By 1941, Warner Brothers had practically cornered the market deifying and demonizing these "angels with dirty faces." Raoul Walsh had humbly served the cause in his previous The Roaring Twenties; here, he directs Bogie in the role of existential anti-hero Roy "Mad Dog" Earle. It would be a defining film in the transition from the James Cagney-style gagster pictures to the dawning era of film noir (which Bogart would come to define).
Newly-released from prison, Roy has a debt to settle with the crime boss to whom he now owes his freedom - payment, as it so often does, comes in the form of one last score. There's apparently thousands of dollars of jewelry in need of stealing and no one but Roy qualified to make sure it gets done right. Per custom, things do not go according to plan as Bogie falls in love (twice), people get shot, and our Mad Dog faces destiny on the doomed high sierra from which the film takes its title.
It's not a great film. Bogart talks in his sleep during a crucial scene, which is probably the most overused narrative cheat in the history of celluloid. Man's best friend figures much too prominently and awkwardly in the plot as a literal harbinger of doom (both the film's "dogs" are cursed); additionally, there some "I'se be catchin' ma feets nah, Boss" style racial stereotyping that is just plain embarrassing.
There are some great moments, though. Earle's emotional castration at the hands of the formerly club-footed Velma (Joan Leslie) is painful to watch (an aside: Bogie would later revisit this device - the transformative power of miracle surgeries - in Dark Passage; it's worth rememberinh that Bogie's father was a successful surgeon and rumor has it Bogart himself had botched surgery on his lip after an incident in the navy). Bogart, consistently sympathetic notwithstanding some unsavory violent acts (no easy feat) is always a pleasure to watch - it's easy to forget how ground-breaking his naturalistic performances were at the time...until you watch some of his co-stars ham it up with the overly-theatrical line delivery popular at the time.
Thankfully, they're not the show - Bogart is, despite getting second billing under co-star Ida Lupino. In the same year, Bogie would re-team with the writer of this film - John Huston - for the iconic director's first feature, the noir classic The Maltese Falcon. A year later, Bogart and Michael Curtiz got together in Casablanca, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Interesting footnote: Walsh, Bogart, and Lupino previously collaborated on the schizophrenic They Drive By Night, probably best known for Lupino's bizarre courtroom outburst "the doors made me do it." Incidentally, Ida Lupino was somewhat of a trailblazer for female directors. Only the second woman to be admitted into the DGA, her 1953 film The Hitch-Hiker is considered a minor classic of film noir. It has been chosen for preservation by the National Film Registry.
Movie Review: Bogart always delivers, but this is nothing special
Summary: 3 Stars
Humphrey Bogart became a legend as a tough guy: he talked fast, asked few questions, and stuck his neck out for nobody. His characters were usually only interested in selfish pursuits, but they usually had a soft spot for a beautiful woman. Bogart's character in High Sierra, an aging criminal named Roy Earle, falls right in line with that archetypal character, and the movie he's in is pretty good, to boot.
Earle, just recently out of prison, is quickly hired to heist jewelry and cash from a hotel in Los Angeles. As he's driving to L.A. from Chicago, he runs into an old couple, Ma and Pa, and their granddaughter Velma (Joan Leslie), who is stricken with a clubbed foot, and immediately catches the attention of Earle. Wouldn't you know it? They are headed to Los Angeles as well. Roy, however, is staying at a resort outside of L.A. along with his two cohorts, who turn out to be a couple of smalltime twits, with the nicknames "Babe" (Alan Curtis) and "Red" (Arthur Kennedy). They've brought along with them a young woman named Marie (Ida Lupino), who becomes immediately infatuated with Earle.
Roy doesn't return Marie's affections, however, as he is there to do a job and then get out. He's not much interested in crime anymore, and would like to retire to a farm in Indiana like the one he grew up at. Earle makes a couple of visits to L.A. with several things on his agenda: to scope out the hotel, to meet with the guy in charge, and to pay for an operation that will fix Velma's foot, and hopefully convince her to marry him. Well, things don't always go as planned, and the case is no different here, as Earle ends up running from the law, who are quickly on his tail, and looking to bring this famous criminal down very publicly.
High Sierra, released in 1941, set in motion some staples of today's action genre, including car chases and fugitives on the run. However, the actual action in the film is minimal. There are some obviously ridiculous scenes by today's standards--including Bogart delivering a monologue in his sleep--and the whole film is fairly predictable, but that doesn't really make it any less enjoyable. In general, my rule is, if Humphrey Bogart's in it, it's probably worth seeing. With Bogart, you know exactly what you're going to get, and you know that he will deliver every time. High Sierra is no different.
Movie Review: "High Sierra" was the film that changed the course of Bogart's career and lifted him up to stardom...
Summary: 3 Stars
"High Sierra" was the film that changed the course of Bogart's career and lifted him up to stardom...
As Earle, Bogart was expanding on the criminal characterization he had already mastered in a dozen earlier films, giving it greater depth by adding contrasting elements of warmth and compassion to compensate the dominant violence...
Bogart helps a clubfooted girl, Velma (Joan Leslie), who repays him only with disregard and indifference...
Bogart's interpretation already showed signs of the special qualities that were to become an important part of his mystique in a few more films...
Here, for the first time, was the human being outside society's laws who had his own private sense of loyalty, integrity, and honor... Bogart's performance turns "High Sierra" into an elegiac film...
As a film, "High Sierra" has other notable qualities, particularly Ida Lupino's strong and moving performance as Marie, the girl who brings out Roy Earle's more human emotions...
The movie was remade as a Western, "Colorado Territory," with Joel McCrea and Virginia Mayo, and as a crime film in "I Died a Thousand Times," with Jack Palance and Shelley Winters in the Bogart and Lupino roles... Neither came up to the stylish treatment given "High Sierra" by director Raoul Walsh from an exceptionally good script by John Huston and W. R. Burnett...