High Sierra

High Sierra (1941) is a crime noir directed by Raoul Walsh — watch online on iFILM. Humphrey Bogart plays Roy "Mad Dog" Earle, a seasoned bank robber who walks out of prison with a pardon and one assignment left: rob a luxury resort in the California mountains, then disappear. It was the role that turned Bogart into a star.

Earle drives west and inherits a crew of young, unreliable heisters he didn't pick and can't control. Two women enter the picture. Marie — sharp, unsentimental, played by Ida Lupino — figures Earle out fast and attaches herself anyway. Then there's a lame farm girl Earle pays to have her foot fixed, half-convinced he can slip into ordinary life after one last job. The police have had his name since he left the prison gates. The Sierra Nevada closes around him.

The screenplay was written by John Huston from a W.R. Burnett novel — Burnett also wrote Little Caesar. Walsh filmed the final chase across the actual Sierra Nevada peaks, and those mountain sequences defined the look of noir endings for decades. Stream High Sierra (1941) online on iFILM.