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Mountain Greenery, 20 July 2001
Author:
telegonus from brighton, ma
W.R. Burnett's novel High Sierra is maybe his best book; it's certainly a
classic of its type, and very readable and moving even today. The movie
version of the book isn't quite as good, but it does something few
adaptations do: it captures the spirit of the original.
The story is about a John Dillinger-like criminal, Roy Earle, just released
from prison, and his planning of his last 'heist', as he moves from the
Midwest to California. It's as much a character study as anything else, and
here the book is better, as Burnett seems to get inside the heart and soul
of Roy Earle in ways that screenwriter John Huston and director Raoul Walsh
can't. This isn't their fault. Burnett gives us Earle's inner life in
interior monologues, and movies simply can't do this. Nevertheless, we get a
feeling for Earle, a lonely, extremely sentimental and romantic man,
essentially a frontier type, or with more brains an artist, who cannot fit
into modern life. The reason is simple: he doesn't understand it. He is
driven by two things, strong emotions and extreme professionalism. The
problem is that his profession is crime. Between these two extremes he is
unsocialized, or rather doesn't understand the subtlety of contemporary
life. To put it in current parlance, he's not hip, which is to say he has no
detachment, no capacity for pulling back and reflecting, unless, that is, he
is in love, and even then he gets it wrong by misunderstanding an
attractive, crippled girl's reliance on him for love, and taking her country
girl disposition for naivite (i.e. like him), which isn't true. This tragic
aspect of Roy Earle is beautifully and perceptively described by Burnett,
and while it's present in the film, it makes Roy seem obtuse, while the
truth is his emotions run deep, and are sincere. He wants to give up crime
and marry a small-town girl so that he can go back and get it right again.
In the lead role Humphrey Bogart gives a major performance. Superficially
he's wrong for Roy Earle: too urban, flip, smart and clever. But he trades
in his natural big city persona for a moony, brooding romanticism, and it
works. He doesn't seem the least bit sophisticated, and in his quieter
moments he comes off like a man who can kill the way other men write checks
He has a true girl-friend in Ida Lupino, but he doesn't realize that she's
more his type: life-weary, straightforward, deep and caring. He prefers the
one he can't get, and this gets him in trouble, as his commitment to her
puts him in a dreamy, dissociative state that is dangerous for a man in his
line of work. The story builds on little things, and the bucolic mountain
and small-town setting of the film is terra incognita for Roy, and we sense
this even if he doesn't. He is, for all his professionalism, way out of his
league, and is looking back to his idealized, romanticized early life, and
longing for an ideal girl that he can 'fix', rather than doing the right
thing and going off with Lupino and stating anew, which is his only chance
for happiness.
Roy is a man who lives in two parallel worlds, the real, vicious one he must
cope with, and the fantasy one he longs for and sees in the crippled girl he
so tenderly loves. There is no in-between for him, as his head is in the
clouds much of the time. It is therefore fitting that the movie ends up
literally in the clouds, or so it seems, atop a mountain, as Roy shoots it
out with reality one last time.
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