Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

Another example of Burnett’s work adapted for film is High Sierra (1941), directed
by Raoul Walsh and screenwritten by John Huston and William Burnett himself.
Humphrey Bogart, as Roy Earle, and Ida Lupino, playing Marie Garson, are both
criminals. Their moral complexity is revealed in their own human weaknesses, or what
William Burnett considered the unbearable fatality of being trapped when someone enters
a life of crime. We, as viewers, share a certain sympathy for and understanding of both
characters, along the lines of what Burnett sought to achieve in the novel, that is, all of his
characters were human, and therefore pitiable to their inexorable fate. High Sierra is also a
good example of the difficulty in defining film noir as some critics consider the film to be a
decided gangster film, whereas others perceive it to be a prototypical noir production. In
my opinion, the thematic and stylistic relationships between the two types of film are made
evident here, and this lays bare the variety of icons and motifs they share. High Sierra
contains the presence of a gangster, a fictional peer to John Dillinger, whose main
objective is, as he says, “to crash out” to a free life of which he is both a creator and a
master. Moreover, the fact that the film is a powerful expression of the individual’s pursuit
of freedom may in some ways dissociate it from the noir cycle. Conversely to film noir, the
major scenes do not occur at nighttime in contemporary urban settings with wet streets and
neon lights everywhere; rather, High Sierra depicts the protagonists outside, in broad
daylight, with the characters moving about in verdant parks and lush mountains. However,
one thing remains common: Roy seems to be condemned from the very start, as his face
appears carved out for death and Marie has the battered look of a fallen angel, as fig. 11
below shows. Finally, their fight towards freedom emphasises Walsh’s sense of a cruel,
inescapable fate reinforced by his grim view of human existence, which is indeed a noir
conception.
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