HUMPHREY BOGART'S CAREER SKYROCKETS FROM 'HIGH SIERRA'

title: HIGH SIERRA year: 1941 cast: Humphrey Bogart, Ida Lupino, Alan Curtis, Joan Leslie, Arthur Kennedy rating: ****

There's a dog that, wherever he goes, gives bad luck to whomever takes him in: this happens to be Humphrey Bogart and Ida Lupino, who both meet each other, then the pooch, in a rural small town hideaway whilst Bogart and three other men plan a caper to rob a plush mountainous hotel. But bad luck usually dogs these kind of characters, doomed from the start while plotting their big easy score which, in this case, got Humhrey's Roy Earle cut from prison early: Although Bogart isn't altogether villainous as he, after meeting a down-home family which includes a beautiful young girl with a club foot, invests in real people, hoping for the girl's hand in marriage: but he's more suited for Lupino, a gun moll whose bittersweet performance adds to Bogart's seasoned usual, and from one scene to the next this is a thoroughly enjoyable melodrama centering on tough human beings, not your typically cliched gangsters. Unfortunately some really bad performances, like the dog's last owner, and the insertion of melodrama into what should have been a leaner, tighter, more edgy crime flick, especially if our man's flawed cohorts Arthur Kennedy and Alan Curtis along with nervous middleman Cornel Wilde had more than peripheral importance: But, either way, HIGH SIERRA, with Bogart's name after Lupino in the credits, is the last movie where that would ever happen again.