Sat 26 Aug 2017
A 1001 Midnights Review: W. R. BURNETT – High Sierra.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Reviews[7] Comments
by Ed Gorman
W. R. BURNETT – High Sierra. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1940. Reprint editions include: Avon Murder Mystery Monthly 40, digest-sized paperback, 1946. Bantam #826, paperback, 1950. Carroll & Graf, paperback, 1986. Film: Warner Brothers, 1941 (Ida Lupino, Humphrey Bogart).
“Early in the twentieth century, when Roy Earle was a happy boy on an Indiana farm, he had no idea that at thirty-seven he’d be a pardoned ex-convict driving alone through the Nevada-California desert towards an ambiguous destiny in the Far West.”
Thus begins what is, in effect, the biography of Roy Earle, a fictional creation who reflects the lives of several eminent American outlaws of the 1920s and 1930s. The structure and texture of the opening sentence signals the reader that this will be much more than simply a genre piece of tommy guns and molls. Burnett will attempt nothing less than a definitive appraisal of a bandit’s life as Earle leaves prison, falls in love, and works toward the robbery that will doom him.
For many, Sierra is probably more familiar as the finest of Bogart’s films (with the arguable exception of The Treasure of Sierra Madre). In the film version, John Huston sought to create a romance, a complex variation on the Robin Hood myth, but Burnett creates a novelistic portrait of Roy Earle that is full of fire and contradiction.
Chapter 37 is the key scene in the book. In the space of 3000 words, Roy Earle expounds on himself (“I steal and I admit it”); on his inability to trust (“The biggest rat we had in prison was a preacher who’d gypped his congregation out of the dough he was supposed to build a church with.”); and on the failure of the common man to fight for himself (“Why don’t all them people who haven’t got any dough get together and take the dough? It’s a cinch.”).
He is, throughout the novel, idealistic, naïve, ruthless, and doomed in a way that is almost lyrical. Not unlike Studs Lonigan, Roy Earle becomes sympathetic because his faults, for all their outsize proportion, are human and understandable, and his humility almost Christ-like: “Barmy used to talk to me about earthquakes,” Roy says; “he said the old earth just twitched its skin like a dog. We’re the fleas, I guess.”
Far from the myths created by J. Edgar Hoover’s biased attitude toward the criminals of the 1930s, Burnett gives us a sad, sometimes surreal look at a true outlaw. High Sierra is filled with every possible kind of feeling, from bleak humor to a pity that becomes Roy Earle’s doom. The book’s theme of time and fate is worthy of Proust. If you want to know what made the work of “proletariat” America so powerful in the 1930s, all you have to do is pick up this novel.
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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
August 26th, 2017 at 7:32 pm
I’ve never read the novel.
But the film version is a favorite.
Director Raoul Walsh has a poetic feel that helps the film soar.
August 26th, 2017 at 8:00 pm
I suspect that you’re not the only one, Mike. I fall into the same category myself. I have a feeling that the number of people who’ve ever read the book vs. those who’ve only seen the movie is less than five percent, if that many.
And from Ed Gorman’s review, that’s a mistake on my part that really needs fixing.
August 26th, 2017 at 8:59 pm
There was also a 1955 remake, I DIED A THOUSAND TIMES, starring Jack Palance and Shelley Winters. I haven’t seen it, but reports indicate it doesn’t hold a candle to the Bogart version. Its interesting supporting cast, though, includes Lee Marvin, Dennis Hopper and Lon Chaney, Jr.
August 26th, 2017 at 10:49 pm
In 1948 the director remade HIGH SIERRA as a western, titled COLORADO TERRITORY, starring Joel McCrea and Virginia Mayo. It has a better ending as Virginia Mayo faces the posse with six guns blazing. This movie has to be seen to be believed.
August 27th, 2017 at 12:52 am
A personal thought. Colorado Territory is a better, stronger entertainment than High Sierra, and McCrea is far more likeable than Bogart. As for Treasure of Sierra Madre, and I have seen it several times, including on its initial release in 1948, and while there are unassailable striking elements, one would really have to a member of the counter culture in order to identify with Fred C. Dobbs. I think Curtin could have been, and should have been the story’s center, but failing that, Howard. And both guys, Holt and Huston, were fine. As for Bogart and me, hard to like him after that.
August 27th, 2017 at 3:09 am
I’m yet another fan of the COLORADO TERRITORY , though one of the strengths of SIERRA is that Bogie’s Earle is a shabby little man, hardly the stuff of legend or heroics, defeated in life and finally by his own machinations, redeemed, if at all by one hard young woman who finally sees something in him no one else ever saw.
TERRITORY is more elegiac, the stuff of Western myth, but not really a commentary on an era as the original was.
Barry, Bogie must have felt about Dobbs as you do. He was seldom as heroic or romantic after in film. There are exceptions, but not too many.
August 27th, 2017 at 5:05 pm
Never cared for the film HIGH SIERRA, which seemed to try too hard to achieve Poetry for my taste, but I have to agree with Barry that COLORADO TERRITORY is a classic, with some gripping action. The book is typical Burnett, by which I mean Pretty Damn Good.