“He said you were rushing towards death”
This blog has been missing some Bogart.
So I went back, back to the role which made Bogart a name, and set him on a course for superstardom: 1941's High Sierra.
Bogart had been working for years, and had some notice for 1936’s The Petrified Forest, but he toiled in b-pictures and supporting roles for the next couple of years.
Weathered, world-weary, a tough exterior hiding an empathetic soul, High Sierra’s Earle feels like a vintage Bogart part - since it is the start of his rise, it also carries an energy and a sense of newness.
Introduced as a pardoned convict, Earle is a man who is used to being in control, but is now in a position where he controls nothing. The character’s conundrum almost plays like a meta-textual narrative for the fledgling star - older than his compatriots, yet still hungering for a shot at the big time.
Earle’s increasing anxiety over his reduced status feels like an extension of the performer, as the actor finds his way into the persona that would define his stardom.
The film also plays as an eulogy for the gangster film. Earle is a man out of time, and the old world he represents - like his old boss Mac (Donald MacBride) - is dying.
Earle has gone from being the violent young man, to an angry old one.
At the end of the movie, Earle goes back to his old ways and tries to go on the run.
But once again, Earle is not with the times: We get a montage showing the police using radios and maps to track him.
Certain elements are out of time in other ways: Algernon (Willie Best) is a cliched black servant - constantly sleeping on the job, he also has a comical reaction where he goes cross-eyed. It is a trope Jordan Peele recalled in a Key & Peele sketch about black roles in old studio movies.
An important movie, but not one I can see myself going back to.
It is a tad slow, and the focus on Earle’s relationship with a disabled girl is so saccharine it feels like the studio is trying to overcompensate for the character’s brutality.
The subplot feels more extraneous when the film already has Earle matched with Ida Lupino’s Marie, a tough gunmole who is introduced playing gangsters off against each other, and the one person who brings out the old gangster’s humanity.
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