Trailer
Plot summary
Convicted bank robber Roy Earle leaves an Indiana prison after Big Mac M'Gann bribes the governor to free him. Mac wants him to lead the robbery of a fashionable hotel in Tropico Springs, a resort town in the Sierra Nevada. Roy drives to an abandoned logging camp to meet the three men who will help: Louis Mendoza, a clerk at the hotel, and Red Hattery and Babe Kozak, who live at the camp. Babe's girlfriend, Marie Garson, a former taxi dancer from Los Angeles, has come with him. Roy tells her to return to Los Angeles, then lets her stay. The handyman Algernon introduces Roy to Pard, a small dog he adopts. In town, Roy meets the Goodhue family and takes an interest in their granddaughter Velma, who has a clubfoot.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about High Sierra (1941)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
SPOILER
George Raft was intended to play Roy Earle in High Sierra, but Humphrey Bogart talked him out of accepting the part, and Raoul Walsh could not change Raft's mind: Raft did not want his character to die at the end of the film.- Bogart also had to persuade director Raoul Walsh to hire him for High Sierra, because Walsh saw Bogart as a supporting player rather than a leading man, even though writer John Huston saw potential in him that others at the studio did not.
- High Sierra made Humphrey Bogart a star and turned him from supporting player into leading man, while its success gave John Huston the leverage to move from screenwriter to director with The Maltese Falcon later that same year.
SPOILER
In the final scene of High Sierra, stunt performer Buster Wiles played Roy Earle's corpse, with his hand filled with biscuits so that Pard, the dog, would lick his hand on camera.SPOILER
Bogart's stunt double, Buster Wiles, slid 90 ft down a mountainside, bounced a few times and asked for another take, but Raoul Walsh refused, saying it was "good enough for the 25-cent customers."
