High Sierra

High Sierra ushered the gangster genre into the forties, and the gangster himself into the role of existential antihero. Humphrey Bogart’s Mad Dog Earle, hiding out in the Sierras following a robbery, is in a no-exit situation that ends in a mountain shootout. Lupino is the hard-bitten cabaret singer who falls in love with him; the two characters are magnetized by their shared status as outcasts. Manny Farber commented: “Lupino . . . works close and guardedly to the camera, her early existentialist-heroine role held to size . . . retracting into herself, [she] steals scenes from Bogart at his most touching.”