High Sierra

A pivotal, star-making performance from Humphrey Bogart anchors Raoul Walsh’s High Sierra, co-written by John Huston and W. R. Burnett. The hard-boiled plot follows pardoned felon Roy Earle who, sprung out of jail by past associate Big Mac, begins planning a jewel heist on a resort town in the shadow of the Sierra Nevada. Co-starring Ida Lupino as the film’s quasi-femme fatale, Walsh’s film bridges the distance between the gangster pictures of the 1930s and the ambiguous film noirs of the 40s, bathing the audience in California’s curative sun until the skies begin to darken and give way to a doomed, fatalistic universe: a harsh wilderness of treacherous peaks and deadlier valleys.