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Created Sep 01, 2014 01:38PM PST • Edited Jan 22, 2021 06:45AM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Very Good 3.5

   High Sierra remains a very entertaining movie some sixty years after it made Humphrey Bogart a star. In many ways it set the template for future antihero movies made in realistic settings. But never mind that. With Bogie at his best, working from a script written by John Huston and W.R. Burnett, and a conclusion literally filmed high up in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, High Sierra is more than a museum piece.

4. Acting

   Very Good 3.5

   Humphrey Bogart campaigned for the role of “Mad Dog” Earle, his first time as a headliner, and then turned in an inimitable Bogie performance. Grimacing, taciturn, but with an underlying humanity, he jumps offscreen as a middle-aged man who knows the high stakes of his life choices. Nobody did it better.

   Ida Lupino matches up well with him as a dime-a-dance girl who sees her main chance and wants to take it. That said, her’s is hardly an inimitable performance.

   Alan Curtis & Arthur Kennedy are suitably knuckle-headed as a couple of hired thugs.

   Joan Leslie is affecting as a crippled girl who Bogie falls for, while Henry Travers is delightful as her Pa.

   Cornel Wilde jumps off screen in a bit part as a corrupt hotel clerk.

5. Male Stars Really Great 4.5

   Bogie

6. Female Stars Very Good 3.5

7. Female Costars Good 3.0

8. Male Costars Good 3.0

10. Film

    Great 4.0

    The star of High Sierra may have been unproven, but its behind-the-camera talents were anything but. Raoul Walsh, W.R. Burnett and John Huston were legendary stalwarts of Hollywood’s Golden Age.

    Their film has a satisfyingly realistic feel to it, largely due to its then-unusual location shooting, famously including the concluding manhunt located above Lone Pine, California, on the slopes of Mt. Whitney.

11. Direction Great 4.0

    Raoul Walsh directed 132 movies over five decades, with crime dramas a particular specialty.

12. Play Great 4.0

    W.R. Burnett wrote the eponymous novel, from which he and John Huston adapted the screenplay. Huston and Bogart became fast friends and drinking buddies during filming, leading to a partnership that began with The Maltese Falcon later the same year and went on to include The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The African Queen.

13. Music Very Good 3.5

14. Visuals Great 4.0
15. Content

16. Edge

    Risqué 1.8

17. Sex Innocent 1.4

18. Violence Fierce 2.3

19. Rudeness Salty 1.6

21. Reality

    Glib 1.3

    High Sierra is markedly realistic compared to most contemporary crime dramas, as was standard during Hollywood’s Golden Age.

    A more interesting comparison is how people thought about medical care then and now. The movie has a subplot about a girl with a deformed foot, which she lived with into adulthood. Her family was poor, so she had no prospect of getting it fixed, a situation she and they stoically accepted. This being a movie, a benefactor came along, but my how times have changed.

22. Circumstantial Glib 1.8

23. Biological Natural 1.0

24. Physical Natural 1.0