"I was getting nervous, waiting over an hour."
"I've been waiting too, over eight years."
"I've been waiting too, over eight years."
That's the answer which represent the genre and the '40s' Hollywood for me. Especially if we receive this kind of quick riposte from Bogart's emotionless character, just released from the prison. Really, he is just perfect! It is a real luck that he was chosen for the part of Roy Earle, pardon, 'Mad Dog Earle'. I mean literally, because originally it was given for two other actors. After their refusal Raoul Walsh picked Bogart, which became his first major role (still Ida Lupino's name on the top...), and started the avalanche of his career. The same year he made Huston's The Maltese Falcon and a year later, yes, you found it out already, in 1942 he gave his biggest in the Casablanca.
But don't run away from this true masterpiece! I need to admit that despite of this title (masterpiece), not this movie is the best from the half-eyed Raoul Walsh. For me the White Heat (1949) with James Cagney is still the top, but It must be true, that without this Walsh couldn't arrive to his peak.
Actually Bogart is much more complex than Cagney's Arthur 'Cody' Jarret: he gave a perfect mixture of a soft-hearted guy and a tough crime-fella. His role – and especially his talent to balance these personalities of his – fuels complexity into the story as well. There is no doubt about how this story ends: the criminal with the heart, who is searching a 'Home' doesn't live long in Hollywood (if you wouldn't be familiar with the attributes of the genre then there is a strong clue in the story: just "read" the dog's behave – it will tells everything about the coming happenings...).
Before I would say "Go and watch it!" only one small remark connected to the style of the cinematography. We are in 1941, in the year of the 'big' Citizen Kane, which adored because of its camera technique. No doubt, Gregg Toland is one of the biggest reference points in the history of the film style. But if we look closer the camerawork of the High Sierra, we may recognize the similarities between Toland's and Tony Gaudino's way of using the deep focus (the earlier Oscar-winner Italian shot the cultic Hell's Angels (1930) for Howard Hughes too...). Let me show some examples from the film:
This last one reminds me considerably to the famous and cited angle from the Citizen Kane... I don't want to judge in the question who used the first time the deep focus motivated by dramaturgical reasons, but I'd like to point out one of my intuitions in this case: I think Toland became the reference-figure of the film analysts, because he used the technique extremely way, where the word 'extremely' refers to its recognizability.
Now, as I promised one thing remained:
"Go and watch it!"
8/10
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