A Film Canon

 

 

A gangster film with a noir protagonist, High Sierra culminates the elegaic strand of the genre that developed in the late 1930s. As such, it emphasises the generation gap - both professional and romantic - between a semi-mythological 'big shot' and the contemporary world, with the critical difference that there is now no desire to alter or reclaim that world, but merely to retreat from it. Hence released convict Ray Earle's (Humphrey Bogart) yearning for a transcendental encounter with nature, which takes the form of both a personal and national nostalgia, inducing him to fuse his return to the places of his childhood with the trajectory of westward expansion - a journey that culminates with the Waldenesque, lakeside community whose incongruously gentrified hotel he is commissioned to rob. That said, this transcendentalism is inevitably filtered through a gaze jaded by urban imprisonment, which reduces it to a stark sublimity at best, and a raw, empty brightness at worst. Hence the culminative car chase, whose nuances are transferred from the action itself to the succession of landscapes through which it passes: desert, foothills, sierra and, finally, Mt. Whitney, the highest peak in America, clad in nothing but sharp rocks and pines. The result is something akin to the more recent emergence of film soleil, as Earle struggles to avoid an imminent world of claustrophobia, darkness and distortion, all of which nevertheless inscribe themselves on his face; or, rather, in his voice, which, with the aid of John Huston and Walter Burnett's script, freezes the most intimate, or sympathetic, pronouncements into something alienating and strange, such that his romantic rumination on the stars already contains a reporter's experience of the final scene: "This seems to be the coldest place in the world tonight...cold and unreal."