Book Into Film: “High Sierra”

(Editor’s note: This is the third installment in a series comparing noteworthy crime, mystery, and thriller novels against their Hollywood feature adaptations—for better or worse.)

By Randal S. Brandt

Book: High Sierra, by W.R. Burnett, 1940
Movie: High Sierra—John Huston, W.R. Burnett (screenplay),
Raoul Walsh (director), 1941
Movie: Colorado Territory—John Twist, Edmund H. North (screenplay), Raoul Walsh (director), 1949

“I’ve been trying to crash out ever since I can remember.”
—Marie Garson (High Sierra)
“This time, Wes, we can really bust out.”
—Colorado Carson (Colorado Territory)

William Riley “W.R.” Burnett had an incredible track record of getting his books adapted for the silver screen. His first novel, Little Caesar (1929), was an overnight success and led to a wildly popular 1931 gangster film of the same name starring then little-known actor Edward G. Robinson. In 1949, he published The Asphalt Jungle, which was filmed the next year under the direction of John Huston and is widely considered to be a quintessential heist film. These are just two examples of Burnett’s output, but he clearly had a knack for turning out filmable fiction. It probably didn’t hurt that he was a skilled screenwriter, as well as a novelist, and often adapted his own work.

Much of Burnett’s storytelling in the crime genre revolved around gangsters and robbery capers. In 1940, he penned a tale that incorporated both and added a twist by moving the action out of the asphalt jungle of the city and into the wilds of the American West. High Sierra, published by Alfred A. Knopf, is the story of Roy Earle, a small-time gangster who ran with John Dillinger and wound up being sentenced to a lifetime’s confinement in prison. As the novel opens, however, Roy is driving across the country, headed for California, after just six years behind bars in Illinois. At 37, he’s been granted a full pardon, secured for him by “Big Mac” M’Gann, who bribed the governor in order to get Roy out of stir. Mac, suffering from ill health, has engineered the heist of a popular mountain resort in Southern California, where all the big shots from Hollywood go to gamble and flaunt their wealth and jewelry, and he wants Roy to pull off one last score for him. Two inexperienced thugs, Red Hattery and Babe Kozak, have been enlisted to do the dirty work, and an inside man, Louis, is providing key information about the layout of the resort. Roy is needed to organize the crew and lead this seemingly easy job.

(Right) High Sierra, Alfred A. Knopf, 1940.

During the drive west, Roy meets “Pa” and “Ma” Goodhue. They have lost their farm in Ohio and are taking their granddaughter, Velma (who is afflicted with a club foot), to Los Angeles to live with Velma’s mother. Roy, who was also reared on a Midwestern farm and longs to return to that idyllic life, hits it off immediately with the Goodhues and is attracted to Velma.

When he arrives at the motor camp near the resort, where the gang is meeting to plan and wait for their go-ahead, Roy finds out there is another person there, Marie Garson, a girl who Babe picked up at a “dime-a-dance joint” in L.A. Roy is not pleased with this turn of events, but he ends up letting Marie stay. He is also introduced to a mangy stray dog called Pard by the camp’s Black handyman, Algernon, who explains to Roy that Pard brings bad luck to anyone who adopts him. Not being the superstitious type, Roy takes in the dog, too.

Can anyone guess where this is going? Right. Pear-shaped.

Marie falls in love with Roy. Roy falls in love with Velma, pays to have her foot operated on, and has his marriage proposal rejected (Velma’s already got a fiancé back home). Predictably, the heist goes sideways—a security guard is shot and Red and Babe are killed in a car crash during the getaway—and Roy, Marie, and Pard end up on the run. Things get even worse when Roy reaches L.A. and finds that Big Mac has died and he has no way to collect his cut of the money for their stolen jewels. In the meantime, Roy is wounded, Louis squeals to the cops, and a manhunt for Roy (now dubbed “Mad Dog” Earle in the press) ensues. Roy convinces Marie to take Pard and head east to San Bernardino to wait for him. Short on gas and cash, Roy holds up a drugstore and is recognized, leading to a chase over a mountain pass in the shadow of mammoth Mount Whitney. When Roy is stopped by a boulder blocking the road, he takes off up the mountain on foot. The police draw near and a marksman shoots him. Fade to black.

High Sierra in paperback (left to right): From Bantam, 1950, with art by Harry Schaare; Corgi, 1958; and Carroll & Graf, 1986.

The novel has two major flaws. The first is the abruptness of its ending. For a book called High Sierra, the chase up that 14,505-foot mountain and subsequent standoff occupy fewer than four pages at the end. Both film versions discussed below vastly improve on the drama and tension of Burnett’s original climax. The second flaw is much more serious. The racism the author heaps on Algernon is unforgivable. Not only is the character treated as a stereotype and a caricature, but he is repeatedly referred to with vile racial epithets, both in the white characters’ dialogue and in Burnett’s exposition. Even for 1940, this seems extreme, cruel, and wholly unnecessary.

The initial big-screen version of High Sierra, which premiered on January 25, 1941, is an important bridge between the popular gangster films of the 1930s and film noir (a term that had not been coined yet). It is not really a gangster film, or a heist film, or a film noir, and yet it contains elements of all three. The screenplay was written collaboratively by John Huston and Burnett, and the plot is extremely faithful to the novel. For the role of Roy Earle, director Raoul Walsh reluctantly cast Humphrey Bogart, who up until that time had only served in supporting roles in B-pictures.

(Left) Humphrey Bogart with his younger screen “moll,” Ida Lupino.

According to Marilyn Ann Moss, in her 2011 biography of Raoul Walsh, Bogart lobbied Warner Bros. hard for this role. He won it after top Warner star Paul Muni, who’d played the lead in Scarface—a 1932 Howard Hawks-directed feature that Burnett had also had a hand in scripting—and George Raft, who was adamant that his fans did not want to see him die onscreen, turned it down. Bogart didn’t get top billing, though; that honor went to Ida Lupino for her role as Marie. Lupino’s star had risen significantly after her appearance the previous year in They Drive By Night, also directed by Walsh and starring both Raft and Bogart. A big part of the reason Warner wanted Raft for High Sierra was due to the success of Drive; studio execs saw the Walsh-Raft-Lupino combo as a winner.

Shot on location outside Lone Pine, California, High Sierra was a box office hit and made Humphrey Bogart a star. It also boosted John Huston’s career and, based on the success of this film, Warner Bros. decided to let him try his hand as a director. His debut in said capacity came with The Maltese Falcon, which was released later that same year, starred Bogart as San Francisco private eye Sam Spade—another role that Raft refused to play—and, well, you know the rest of the story. Bogart never again received second billing to anyone.

But Ida Lupino, then only 23 years old, deserved her headliner status in this film. Her performance is terrific as Marie, the taxi dancer who wants to crash out of her dead-end life and sees Roy as the means to that end. It also helped pave the way for Lupino to begin writing, directing, and producing her own motion pictures by the end of the decade. (And in 1953, she became the first woman to direct a film noir when she helmed RKO’s The Hitch-Hiker.)

The official, 1941 trailer for High Sierra.

As mentioned previously, the ending of this flick vastly improves on what the novel offers. Maybe Burnett realized his original was jarringly abrupt and was happy to get a do-over, or perhaps the credit belongs to Huston. In any event, this time the standoff with Roy on Mount Whitney lasts long enough for a large crowd to gather below, including newspaper and radio reporters. (In a bit of coincidental casting, Jerome Cowan appears as a journo with just about as many lines as he would be given later that year playing Sam Spade’s doomed partner, Miles Archer.) The standoff also provides time enough for Marie and Pard to arrive on the scene. When Marie refuses to call up the mountain to Roy and lure him out into the open, Pard’s barking does the job, giving a police sharpshooter the opportunity to take him out. After Roy’s lifeless body tumbles down the slope, one of the closing shots is of Pard, licking his hand. That dog was bad luck, after all.

The movie also treats handyman Algernon (played by Willie Best) marginally better than the book. There are no racial slurs in the dialogue, but a cringe-worthy portrayal of Algernon as a lazy, superstitious “Stepin Fetchit” stereotype is hard to watch.

In many respects, High Sierra reminds the viewer of a western, especially with it climactic shootout amid dramatic mountain scenery. Director Raoul Walsh certainly saw those qualities in the first film adaptation and, in 1948, when Warner Bros. found itself short on good scripts, he pitched the idea of actually turning High Sierra into a western. Studio mogul Jack Warner approved the project, shooting took place in New Mexico from September to November, 1948, and the finished Colorado Territory premiered in June 1949.

This time around, the protagonist is mid-19th-century bank robber Wes McQueen (played by Joel McCrea), who is busted out of jail by his old friend Dave Rickard (Basil Ruysdael) and told to head off to Colorado Territory. In the stagecoach along the way, McQueen meets Fred Winslow (Henry Hull, who played the doctor in High Sierra) and his daughter, Julie Ann (Dorothy Malone—not disabled like Velma Goodhue, just in a very bad mood); they are bound west to take up ranching. Julie Ann is the spitting image of Wes’ old girlfriend, Martha, who died while he was in prison. McQueen travels to the ghost town of Todos Santos, where he meets the rest of his gang: Reno (John Archer), Duke (James Mitchell), and Colorado Carson (Virginia Mayo), who Reno picked up in an El Paso dance hall. In this version of the story, the gang has been assembled to execute a train robbery. Wes is tired of the outlaw life and hopes to use his share of the loot from this one last job to buy his own ranch and settle down, preferably with Julie Ann as his wife.

Following the general outline of High Sierra, McQueen is betrayed at every turn, first by the “inside man” railroad station agent, then by his partners, and finally—and most cruelly of all—by Julie Ann, who is barely stopped by Colorado Carson from turning him in for the reward money, a selfish impulse that earns her a slap from her father. Only Colorado can be trusted, and Wes eventually recognizes her as his true love. They go on the lam together and try to get married at the derelict Todos Santos mission, but the padre there explains he is “not a priest, only a brother,” and cannot perform wedding ceremonies. When Wes realizes the posse is closing in on them, he unsaddles Colorado’s horse to prevent her from following him. He rides into the “Canyon of Death,” hoping to elude his pursuers and escape south into Mexico, where he and Colorado can be reunited. Not so easily deterred, Colorado follows on foot and eventually catches up to the posse, which has McQueen holed up in the abandoned “City of the Moon,” an ancient Pueblo settlement carved out of the canyon wall. When Colorado arrives, the sheriff tricks her into luring Wes out into the open, where a sniper can shoot him. This time, though, Wes is only wounded. Colorado races up to meet him, carrying two pistols. As Colorado starts blasting lead at posse members, the doomed couple is cut down in a hail of gunfire, dying hand in hand.

Again, a much more dramatic climax than Burnett’s novel offered.

Not surprisingly, given its source material and director, Colorado Territory is a very good production, one which American film historian David Meuel thinks, “in several ways, improves on the original.” Although not quite an “A” picture, it definitely rises above “B” status. It is also a prime example of the “noir western” subgenre that combined elements of film noir (including cinematography techniques) with the traditional western—Walsh was a pioneer of the noir western, with his 1947 film, Pursued, featuring noir stalwart Robert Mitchum, often considered to be one of the earliest examples.

The original, 1949 theatrical trailer for Colorado Territory.

The acting in Colorado Territory is strong, even if the Wes McQueen role is somewhat miscast. A veteran of countless westerns, Joel McCrea was resistant to playing “bad guy” parts during his career. So, he is not quite believable as an outlaw, even one who wants to leave behind his life of crime and settle down with the woman he adores. But he has strong chemistry with Virginia Mayo and he is not someone to be messed with in a gunfight. There are no dogs or racial stereotypes in this version, although we are told that Colorado is a “half-breed” (“Unusual for a blonde, wasn’t it?” Virginia Mayo is reported as saying years later). Otherwise, the Native Americans in the film, although in small roles, appear to be treated in non-stereotypical ways and with basic respect and dignity—on both sides of the law.

High Sierra was remade again in 1955 as I Died a Thousand Times. It is described as a scene-by-scene remake of the 1941 version, albeit in color, and this time Burnett is the sole credited screenwriter. In an interview (quoted in Marilyn Ann Moss’ Walsh biography), Burnett stated that the script for the original was weakened by the interference of associate producer Mark Hellinger and indicated his clear preference for this version. “The main point wasn’t as strong as it should have been. I corrected that in the remake … The remake is a better picture. Except we had two repulsive people in it—Jack Palance and Shelley Winters … I think the script is much better. I cleaned up the script …” This writer has not yet seen it.

SOURCES
Meuel, David. The Noir Western: Darkness on the Range, 1943-1962. McFarland & Company, 2015.
Moss, Marilyn Ann. Raoul Walsh: The True Adventures of Hollywood’s Legendary Director. The University of Kentucky Press, 2011.
Nott, Robert. Last of the Cowboy Heroes: The Westerns of Randolph Scott, Joel McCrea, and Audie Murphy. McFarland & Company, 2000.

READ MORE: W.R. Burnett’s 1982 Obituary.