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.”