High Sierra (1941)

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

Hollywood has made quite a few films in which the dog is the focus of everything. My favorite is one we’ve featured here at Word and Song: William Wellman’s Goodbye, My Lady, with Walter Brennan and the boy actor Brandon de Wilde and a Basenji girl-dog the boy finds in the woods and trains to be the best birder anybody’s ever seen. And surely The Hills of Home, starring Pal as Lassie, with the fine character actors Edmund Gwenn and Donald Crisp managing to stay in the same scenes with Man’s Best Friend, deserves an honorable mention. And of course there’s Disney and Old Yeller, and on and on. But here we’re after something more subtle than just dogs for show, and that’s why we’ve chosen for our Film of the Week a movie about a bad man who might have been something else, and we get a sense of this ambiguous possibility from his grudging but real affection for a scruffy and homely mutt named Pard.
The deal is this. A robber named Roy Earle (Humphrey Bogart) gets out of prison by what’s clearly a bought pardon from the governor, and the lifetime gangster who buys his freedom has him tabbed to lead a jewel robbery at a mountain resort in southern California. On his way out there, Earle meets a down-home family traveling west from Ohio, because they’ve lost their farm. The patriarch of the family is a gentle and wise old fellow (Henry Travers; remember him as the wingless angel in It’s a Wonderful Life) whose granddaughter Velma, a very pretty girl, has a club foot. Earle is moved by the girl’s plight, and when he learns that she could walk normally if she had an expensive operation, he decides to help her — and he does fall in love with her. Meanwhile, at the mountain lodge where he is to meet two of his three conspirators, he meets also a woman who is herself on the run, so to speak, not from crime but from life in Los Angeles as a “taxi dancer,” that is, a girl paid to dance with male customers at a music hall. Marie (Ida Lupino) falls in love with Earle, because for a change he’s a man who actually treats her with some kindness. And then there’s Pard (Bogart’s own dog, Zero), an endearingly ugly terrier or spaniel mix, thought to be a jinx, and though Earle knows it’s best to go on a heist without any extra weight, he does let the girl come with him. And as for Pard, he opens the window of the cabin by himself and races after the car, and that’s it: you’ve just got to stop and take him along.

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The heist goes bad, and Earle’s on the run for the last half of the movie. I won’t reveal any spoilers. I will say that it was a breakout movie for one of the writers, John Huston, who used it as his ticket to the director’s chair; and I am a tremendous admirer of Huston’s work. He excelled at telling stories about people who escape easy categorization, and you can’t really be good at that unless you show, usually by suggestions, that in another world things might have been quite different for them. It isn’t that Bogey’s character is a robber with a heart of gold. But there are moments when he does put himself in some danger, or when a warmth passes over the ice-bound criminal, just because he pities someone — a girl with a limp, a dancer who doesn’t know where she’s going, or just a dog. The old farmer appeals to him because he too came from that part of the world; he was once a boy who fished in ponds; he wants, after this last heist, to “go back east,” and leave the life of wickedness forever.
Ida Lupino was perfect for her role, a woman who has not been hardened yet. The hope in this story is for what Earle calls “crashing out,” that is, breaking from your prison bonds and being free at last. She and Earle and, in a lesser way, the girl with the club foot are all trying to crash out. You should ask whether any of them achieves it. The final scene shows us that Marie has her opinion on that score. It is a scene impossible to imagine without that lucky dog, Pard.

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We were not able to find a free to watch version of this week’s film, which we watched ourselves via Tubi (with commercials, alas). It’s a film worth watching.

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Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast for paid subscribers, Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. Paid subscribers also receive audio-enhanced posts and access to our full archive and to comments and discussions. To support this project, please join us as a free or paid subscriber. We value all of our subscribers, and we thank you for reading Word and Song!

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true

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