List Price: $19.98 Our Price: $17.98YOU SAVE $2!
Buy it
DVD High Sierra
This 1941 melodrama is memorable for both its strong central performances and their intimations of how the previous decade's crime dramas would evolve into film noir--no accident, given the solid direction of veteran Raoul Walsh and the hand of screenwriter John Huston, who teamed with the author of its novelistic source, W.R. Burnett (Little Caesar). In the central character of Roy "Mad Dog" Earle, a fictional peer to John Dillinger, Humphrey Bogart finds a defining role that anticipates the underlying fatalism and moral ambiguity visible in the career-making roles soon to follow, including Sam Spade in Huston's directorial debut, The Maltese Falcon.
Earle suggests a prescient variation on the enraged sociopaths that were fixtures of the gangster melodramas that shaped Bogart's early screen image. Pardoned from a long prison stretch, the weary robber is clearly more eager to savor his new freedom than immediately swing back into action. But his early release has been engineered by a mobster who wants Earle to pull off a high-stakes burglary, setting in motion a plot that is a prototype for doomed-heist capers--a small, yet potent subgenre that would later include Huston's The Asphalt Jungle and Stanley Kubrick's The Killing.
What gives High Sierra its power, however, isn't the crime itself but Earle's collision with the younger, brasher confederates picked to help him, and the hard-edged but vulnerable taxi dancer they're competing for, played forcefully by Ida Lupino, who actually received top billing. Her attraction to the reluctant Earle is complicated by a convoluted subplot designed to showcase then starlet Joan Leslie, but the movie finally moves into its most gripping moments when the wounded Earle, pursued by police, flees ever higher toward the mountains. His final, suicidal showdown would become a cliché of sorts in lesser films, but here it provides a wrenching climax sealed by Lupino's vivid final scene. --Sam Sutherland
In HIGH SIERRA Humphrey Bogart plays professional criminal Roy Earle who is pardoned from prison because of the influence of a crime boss named Big Mac. Bogart is paid advance money to report to Big Mac in California. Mac is planning to use him to lead a small gang in pulling off a jewelry robbery at a swank resort hotel.
En route to California Bogart helps a distressed family he meets at the scene of a minor traffic accident. He is attracted to the granddaughter who is played by Joan Leslie. She has a deformed foot which Bogart arranges to have fixed by a surgeon in California. When he arrives at the hideout he finds two cheap crooks and a dance hall girl waiting for him. One of the hotel employees is also involved in the robbery scheme.
The suspense builds rapidly from this point on as we await the outcome of both the holdup and also the romances which are developing simultaneously between Bogart and the two women.
Ida Lupino gives a stellar performance as the former dance hall girl whose love for Bogart isn't really appreciated until it may be too late.
Bogart and Lupino are at their best in this film. A Strong supporting cast includes Arthur Kennedy, Alan Curtis, Henry Hull, Henry Travis, Jerome Cowan and Cornell Wilde. There is also a small dog in the cast who will win your admiration and break your heart. Raoul Walsh is known for his direction of many other fine movies including ROARING TWENTIES and THE STRAWBERRY BLONDE.
Bogart on the Run
In High Sierra, Humphrey Bogart plays one of those characters that we shouldn't admire because he has led a "bad" life of crime, yet somehow we find ourselves rooting for him to get what he wants, because we suspect he's a decent guy at heart that didn't get the right breaks. In other words, he's a complicated character, and in the hands of Bogart, he's well played and very compelling. Ida Lupino gives another one of her intense performances as the girl who loves him and who herself is in need of a break. Joan Leslie plays a teenage girl that Bogart helps out and falls in love with. Leslie seems like an unlikely choice for Bogart to love. She's too young and there isn't any chemistry between them at all. But for me, that's about the only real flaw in this film. Director Raoul Walsh blends a lot of elements together: gangsters, bank caper, chase scenes, love story, and drama at a very human level. And he blends those elements into an excellent movie.
Bogart Breakout
This was the first of the George Raft reject parts that transformed Humphrey Bogart from James Cagney's second banana into...Bogart. The next two were "The Maltese Falcon" and "Casablanca". In "High Sierra" Bogart plays a sociopath bank heister who still has a shred of humanity left, something like Frankenstein's monster but not as bulky. The character originally was stitched together from a number of Public Enemies by novelist W. R. Burnett. Bogart's performance is completely un-maudlin and genuine and like all his best work continues to last as the modern touchstone of American film acting. Another great directing job by Raoul Walsh as well, a man who could handle about anything the studio threw his way.
Yes, it's true: you can virtually see Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall falling for each other in this Howard Hawks variation on Casablanca but adapted from--as legend has it--Ernest Hemingway's self-declared "worst novel." (The story goes that Hawks told Hemingway he could make a movie of the author's least work, and Hemingway gave him the rights to this story.) The script by William Faulkner and Jules Furthman actually makes this one of Hawks's and Bogart's most interesting and often exciting films. Bogart plays a boat captain who reluctantly agrees to help the French Resistance while wooing chanteuse Bacall. Hoagy Carmichael, wry at the piano, adds a delicious accent to an already wonderful mood. --Tom KeoghMore Info about this DVD Actor(s): Humphrey Bogart - Lauren Bacall Director(s): Howard Hawks DVD Release Date: Released the 04 November 2003 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $19.97 Your Price: $15.98YOU SAVE $3.99!
Buy it
This gimmicky film noir stars Humphrey Bogart as an escaped criminal who undergoes plastic surgery and holes up at the home of Lauren Bacall's character while healing and preparing to prove his innocence. If you can last through the first half-hour of this thing--which is shot entirely from the subjective view of Bogart's bandaged face, which we don't see until later--you might find ample reason in the stars' performances to stick around for the conclusion. But director Delmer Daves (A Summer Place) tests a viewer's endurance with such an obvious, attention-getting ploy. The least of the Bogart-Bacall vehicles (The Big Sleep,To Have and Have Not, Key Largo). --Tom KeoghMore Info about this DVD Actor(s): Humphrey Bogart - Lauren Bacall Director(s): Delmer Daves DVD Release Date: Released the 04 November 2003 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $19.98 Your Price: $17.98YOU SAVE $2!
Buy it
By turns hard-nosed and ribald, They Drive by Night smashes through a vintage Warner Bros. yarn about truck drivers, the Depression, and one duplicitous dame. The opening reels are a forceful look at the dangerous lives of independent truckers (George Raft and Humphrey Bogart as brothers--Bogie in the supporting role, though he would soon eclipse Raft in Hollywood), battling the system and the economy. The final section veers into a less exciting murder frame-up, but Ida Lupino is so delicious as the Black Widow, it works. The robust humor of director Raoul Walsh dominates the film, with some truly hilarious double entendres aimed at outfoxing the censors. At the center of many such one-liners is Ann Sheridan, as a waitress who slings more than hash. It's close to being a classic,... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): George Raft - Humphrey Bogart Director(s): Raoul Walsh DVD Release Date: Released the 04 November 2003 Usually ships within 24 hours
List Price: $19.98 Your Price: $17.98YOU SAVE $2!
Buy it
Ranked at No. 30 on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 all-time greatest American films, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is a genuine masterpiece that was, ironically, a box-office failure when released in 1948. At that time audiences didn't accept Humphrey Bogart in a role that was intentionally unappealing, but time has proven this to be one of Bogart's very best performances. It's a grand adventure and a superior character study built around the timeless themes of greed and moral corruption. As adapted by writer-director John Huston (from a novel by enigmatic author B. Traven) it became a definitive treatment of fate and futility in the obsessive pursuit of wealth. Bogart plays Fred C. Dobbs, a down-and-out wage-worker in Mexico who stakes his meager earnings on a... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Humphrey Bogart - Walter Huston - Tim Holt Director(s): John Huston DVD Release Date: Released the 30 September 2003 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $26.99 Your Price: $21.59YOU SAVE $5.4!
Buy it
The most famous and sublime treatment of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, John Ford's My Darling Clementine is by any measure one of the most classically perfect Westerns ever made. Henry Fonda plays a hard, serious Wyatt Earp leading a cattle drive west with his brothers when a stopover in the wild town of Tombstone ends in the murder of his youngest brother. Wyatt takes up the badge he had turned down earlier and tames the wide-open town with his brothers (Ward Bond and Tim Holt), all the while waiting for the wild Clantons (led by Walter Brennan's ruthless Old Man Clanton) to make a mistake. Victor Mature delivers perhaps his finest performance as the tubercular gambler Doc Holliday, an alcoholic Eastern doctor escaping civilization in the Wild West. Ford takes great liberties... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Henry Fonda - Linda Darnell Director(s): John Ford DVD Release Date: Released the 06 January 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $14.98 Your Price: $11.98YOU SAVE $3!
Buy it
