Strong and Moving!

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Good start, but then it gets ruined

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

W.R. Burnett's book "High Sierra", filmed in 1941 with Humphrey Bogart as a jewel thief, gets a rousing (and uncredited) western reworking here, with the main character's vocation changed to train robber. In 1871 Missouri, a criminal set for execution breaks out of prison and holes up in the valley with two of his cronies, where they plot another railroad heist. Director Raoul Walsh (who also helmed "High Sierra" for Warner Bros.) gets superlative usage out of the dusty, craggy locations, with cinematographer Sid Hickox capturing the mountain terrain and cloudy skies in gorgeously expressive black-and-white. Joel McCrea is surprisingly comfortable playing the semi-bad guy (though definitely one with a heart of mush...and a yen for marriage!), however some of the supporting characters are a bit of a stretch. Virgina Mayo (she of the glassy-eyed stare) does what she can in the insane role of an ex-dance hall girl, Dorothy Malone is completely lost in the underwritten part of a well digger's daughter who wants a better life, and John Archer and James Mitchell are two cardboard villains. The picture gets by on the strength of its considerable technical merits and by McCrea's performance; with his easy gait and benign personality, McCrea is likable even when he's shooting down the law (he's shrewd and sturdy, a good man to have around). However, the writing is overheated, and the nutty finale provokes unintended laughs. Story filmed yet again by recycle-happy Warner Bros. in 1955, entitled "I Died a Thousand Times". **1/2 from ****

This remake of Bogarts High Sierra is a good film vehicle. Raoul Walsh is getting more and more respect as a fine film maker years after his efforts. This is a very good film for its era.There are scenes where things get a little choppy but overall the acting by the cast including Henry Hull is very good. Spoiler The ending is much better than most films of the period as the film is willing to kill it's main start at the end of the movie.Rather than ruin it for a new viewer, I'd recommend viewing this film & I think viewers will be pleasantly surprised. The story works well & the film is overall much better than you'd expect. It centers around a train robber (Joel McRae) who breaks out of jail, finds out the love of his life has died, & then is enlisted in trying to make one more big score robbing a train.During this stretch he meets 2 women (Virginia Mayo & Dorothy Malone)who make him forget his dead lover, and who both make different plays for him. I think I will leave it at that & recommend highly this Warner Brothers film.

Walsh's reworking of his own High Sierra into western format works in every conceivable way. In the reweaving, he has created a western noir more lyrical and more resonant than his original gangster noir. The background is used magnificently, both in terms of the landscape and in terms of the native cultures. Morris Ankrum, best known as a judge in myriad Perry Mason episodes and a General in several science fiction cult classics, is a revelation as the Marshal hunting antihero McCrea down relentlessly. At first he seems easy to outwit, but turns out to be much more formidable. Henry Hull, Ian Wolfe, Jim Mitchell, John Archer, also give excellent supporting performances. But it is half-breed Virginia Mayo, tough as nails but as loyal a woman warrior as ever walked the Earth, who steals the film's acting honor's from her excellent co-star.

The commenters who called this "Western noir" are on the money. Just about everyone in this movie is a ratlike scheming double- or triple-crosser. Bad guys suffer fates not noticeably worse than the handful of schmo's who are honest (mostly in the relative, honor-among-thieves sense). It's all bleak for the ones who don't get out alive and also for the ones who do. The one aspect of this movie that may have lost its punch for 21st century viewers is the script's banal dialogue for the two key women characters. Virginia Mayo in particular is better than her lines and her costume, which is fashioned entirely from clichés about wanton women who aren't 100 percent Anglo. But the story arc treats the women just differently enough from the "classic" Western that it held my interest. The cast, top to bottom, is excellent. Joel McCrea does that thing he does so well *especially* well here. I'd like to see Peter Sarsgaard reprise a McCrea role some day, in either a Western or a Sturges classic.