High Sierra · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man comes out of prison and goes straight to a park. He walks on the grass. He looks at the trees, and Bogart plays the beat without a trace of sentiment, the way a man checks a tire before a long drive. Roy Earle is finding out whether the world is still where he left it.

Hold that scene. Nothing in it advances the plot, and it tells you the whole picture. Five years earlier the same actor had played Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest, an outlaw at bay in a desert way station, held in stiff frontal medium shots as a fixed object. Walsh keeps the diner-and-highway geography and puts an inside into the same body.

The Warners gangster film that High Sierra comes out of ran on one circuit: a man sees a situation, acts on it, the situation changes. Rico climbs, then Rico falls. Gilles Deleuze called that circuit the action-image, and he thought American cinema had built its highest industrial form of it, the large form, where a big encompassing situation presses on a man until he acts, and the act transforms the situation. He had a name for the encompassing part, the milieu that calls the action out of you: the encompasser. It is not a difficult idea. It is the shape of most movies you have ever seen, and by 1941 Warner Bros. could stamp one out fast.

High Sierra keeps the machinery and quietly removes the milieu.

Look at what Roy is released into. The boss who pardoned him is dying. The crew he is handed are amateurs. The job is a hotel robbery, not an empire. Every plot movement is a subtraction. And Roy still acts, with total competence: the resort robbery is staged with complete clarity about who is in which corridor and how the alarm travels. There is simply no longer a situation dense enough to be changed by it. That is why the classical arc is missing. Little Caesar was a rise and a fall. High Sierra opens at the parole gate and runs only the fall. Fatalism here is not a mood laid over the story. It is how the story is built.

Which is the argument for bringing Deleuze to this film at all. Call it a transitional noir and you have described its temperature. The action-image gives you its mechanism: a working engine turning in a world that no longer resists it.

Deleuze has a word for the bond in which a milieu and a man stamp each other, the imprint. Tony Gaudio, who had shot Little Caesar ten years earlier for the same studio from a novel by the same writer, lights these interiors low and directional. Faces are carved out of the dark. Shadow squeezes the rooms down. Roy is legible in those rooms because those rooms made him. Then Walsh drives him into the Sierra Nevada, shot on real terrain around Lone Pine, bright and deep-focused and enormous, and the man becomes a mark on rock. Nothing up there carved him. The mountain does not light anybody.

The roadhouse, the motor court and the resort are what Deleuze would call derived milieux, surfaces: bribable, negotiable, worked. Underneath them, in the films he grouped under naturalism, lies the originary world, a savage ground that is not a setting at all, where everything follows a line of slope downward toward exhaustion and death. The mountain is the one location in High Sierra that was never designed. It cannot be negotiated, bribed or escaped. When the last movement drops social explanation and hands the verdict to geology, that is the slope showing through the floor.

Jack Killifer cuts the picture in two movements. Two-thirds novelistic and dispersed: the drive west, the Goodhue family, the camp, the casing of the resort. Then violent compression, cross-cutting Roy's climb with the massing police, the arriving press, Marie's approach. Deleuze calls the alternation of vast milieu-space with the taut line of an action respiration-space. The film breathes in on the mountain and out along a single thread of switchbacks.

At the end of that thread there should be a duel. The action-image runs on the binomial, force against force, man against man. Walsh hollows it out. Roy is shot from below by a sharpshooter he never sees. The craft debts sharpen the point. Underworld (1927) established the gangster's last stand as a geographic set-piece, Bull Weed barricaded and the cordon tightening in exterior long shots. Scarface (1932), which Burnett worked on, pinned Camonte in a vertical stairwell shaft under steep overhead angles. Walsh moves the siege and the vertical grammar outdoors, where high and low mean something because the height is real. Lang's You Only Live Once (1937) had already put its fugitive down in high wooded country under raking low-key light. Walsh reproduces the terminal image and gives it a mountain.

Deleuze dates the collapse of the action-image to postwar Europe, to neorealism and its characters who see clearly and can do nothing. High Sierra is 1941, American, made under the Production Code, and it is not a time-image film. But the symptom shows up here early. The park is a pure optical situation in embryo, a man with nothing available to him but looking. And the film's final position belongs not to the man of action but to Marie, who watches, endures, and speaks over his body. Deleuze's name for that figure is the seer. Twenty years later she would be the protagonist of a European art film. In 1941 she is the last shot of a Warners crime picture, standing among newspapermen and gawkers who came to watch a death. The gangster's end used to be executed on him. Here it is spectated.

Roy's other future is a fantasy and the film knows it. The Goodhue farmhouse and the Indiana idyll are dressed and lit as a dream he has no access to, a dream-image hooked to no memory he actually owns, since he never lived that life. He buys Velma's operation and it purchases nothing. Joan Leslie plays her as ordinary on purpose, which is what lets you see the projection as projection.

Then there is the dog. Pard arrives with a reputation for bad luck, which installs a chain in your head: see the dog, expect the worst. Deleuze calls an object that condenses a film's organizing relation a symbol. Pard's barking on the mountainside is what gives Roy's position away. The idea is sentimental. The execution is not. Every soft attachment in this film costs the man who forms it.

The innovations are modest and the consequence is not. The Code required that Roy die, and High Sierra took the requirement and made the dying the subject rather than the punchline, a move I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang had licensed nine years earlier by dissolving its man into darkness instead of resolving him morally. Make a criminal mournable and a great deal follows: Bogart's wounded-hard persona, Huston's directing career, the Burnett heist structure that hardens into The Asphalt Jungle, the fatalism the French would later name noir. Walsh remade the story outright as a Western in 1949, Colorado Territory, admitting what the mountain had already said, and closed his own gangster arc with White Heat, the same death rewritten in fire.

Watch it again and try to find the exact moment Roy loses the power to change anything. It is not the robbery going wrong. It may be the park.