Ascending the High Sierras: Bogart Died Here

Humphrey Bogart got second billing on High Sierra, but you’d never know it. When the Warner Bros. crime thriller was released in 1941, Bogart had already made a name for himself in cold-blooded killer roles, starting with the screen version of his electrifying performance in Broadway’s The Petrified Forest (1935), opposite good-guy Leslie Howard. But his studio already had George Raft, James Cagney, and Edward G. Robinson on its payroll, and for a time it seemed Bogart would never be anything but a sidekick.

 This all changed in 1941, with High Sierra, a novel adapted for the screen by his drinking buddy John Huston.  Fortunately for his career, Paul Muni, Raft, Cagney, and Robinson all turned down the part before it came to him. Bogey may have been billed second to Ida Lupino (playing a tough, loyal gal who’s been around the block a time or two), but the film is his story all the way. He plays yet another criminal, one who has just been released from prison and immediately returns to a life of thievery and worse. But his Roy “Mad Dog” Earle is a complicated man who is not without a soft side. Roy loves nature, and seems to yearn for the simple life he knew on the family farm back in Indiana. He also loves pretty women, whom he treats with a respect that borders on the courtly. And he also has great affection for animals, like the little dog who plays a key role in the plot. In the film, we don’t know quite why he has deviated from the straight and narrow path, but sense that there’s a concealed trauma behind his lawless ways.

 The film is full of action, including a deadly robbery at a swank hotel in a resort area that is clearly modeled after Palm Springs, California. It takes its title from a climactic shoot-out, with Bogart’s character perched high on a Sierra Nevada peak, as crowds of law enforcement and looky-loo types gather below. Because of the strictures spelled out in the infamous Production Code, we know that in movies of this era crime never pays, and so there’s no point in hoping for Roy Earle’s survival. Still, his character is so appealing that we can’t help wishing him well.

 I suspect the audiences of 1941 felt the same way. High Sierra became the pivotal film of Bogart’s career, the one that elevated him to leading-man status. Also in 1941 he graduated into the role of melancholy private detective Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, then followed this up  by playing Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep. His unusual combination of toughness and softness made him a natural for film noir, but he also  revealed a memorable romantic side in Casablanca and, later, in The African Queen. And his real-life love story with actress Lauren Bacall, triggered by their on-screen chemistry in To Have and Have Not (1944) was fodder for fan magazines around the globe..

 High Sierra was not life-changing only for Bogart. John Huston, the son of a legendary actor, started out in Hollywood as a screenwriter. Beginning in 1930, he had ten screenplay credits before High Sierra, some on big-name pictures like Jezebel and Juarez. But after High Sierra, which was directed by action-specialist Raoul Walsh, Huston moved into the director’s chair, starting with The Maltese Falcon and continuing until 1987, when he directed a poignant adaptation of James Joyce’s The Dead. The grand total for Huston as a director: 38 films in all, with The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Moulin Rouge, and Prizzi’s Honor among them.

 

 

Anne Heche: Looking Back in Sorrow . . . And Frustration

 Yes, I feel bad about Anne Heche’s final days. Clearly there is something terribly wrong when a talented woman gets into a senseless accident that destroys her life. The fact that she had experienced other bizarre encounters, both on the day of her final crash and years before, suggests that she was suffering from mental issues that no one could permanently solve. It’s tragic, but it happens. 

 What nags at me, though, is the fact that we’re all lamenting Heche’s lost promise, with little thought for the woman whose life she so permanently upended. On August 5, a Mini Cooper driven by Heche crashed into the garage of a West L.A. apartment building, narrowly missed hitting a pedestrian, and struck a Jaguar. Shortly thereafter, it smashed through a small rental house on Walgrove Avenue, destroying the front wall and lodging in the rear, where it burst into flames. Thankfully, the occupant managed—with the help of neighbors—to save herself and her pets, but after some fifty-nine firefighters converged to put out the blaze, most of her belongings (as well as her home itself) were toast. Remarkably, this newly bereft L.A. woman has had the grace to express on Instagram her condolences to Heche’s family. But will the public outpouring of grief for Heche and her bereaved kin extend to the person whose life she has irretrievably altered?

 Maybe it’s the fact that the destroyed house is perhaps ten minutes from the peaceful street on which I live that makes me so sensitive to the losses suffered by innocent bystanders. But I’ve got to say that living in Movieland is not always easy for us civilians. True, I’ve had the thrill of seeing  (and sometimes interacting with) celebrities in their native habitat Many are gracious to members of the public, and I’ve certainly read about hugely good deeds done out of the spotlight. But it’s also true that successful creative types seem prone to lapsed judgment, often involving alcohol, drugs, and very fast cars. I’ve just been reading back over the details of Charlie Sheen’s checkered career. Sheen mostly seemed to do harm to those he married, but other Tinseltown figures have come closer to injuring complete strangers in their vicinity. There was, for instance, Mel Gibson, who was stopped by a Malibu cop for driving under the influence, then responded with anti-Semitic threats to the arresting officer  A special case, I suppose, is that of Margot Kidder, who—having rejected a medical diagnosis of bipolar disorder—was found in a distressed state of mind wandering in a homeowner’s Glendale backyard.

 Of course it’s not just entertainment figures who wind up creating havoc for those around them. A tragic story covered by the Los Angeles Times occurred just one day before Heche’s Mar Vista misadventure. In a section of L.A. known as Windsor Hills, a Mercedes traveling at 90 miles an hour sped through a red light and crashed. The result: five people died, including a pregnant woman and a very young child. The horror of the situation was compounded when news surfaced that the driver of the Mercedes was a longtime nurse, much respected in the community for her compassion and her medical skills. (Somehow her 13 previous crashes had never affected her license to drive a motor vehicle.)

 What’s my point in all this? People—both famous and not—are complicated. And mental illness can bubble up anywhere. But I can’t help wishing that we spent less time mourning troubled celebrities who cause harm, and more time focusing on the plight of their unfortunate victims.

 

 

 

Roger Corman: The Man with Kaleidoscope Eyes Strikes Again

Early in the 21^st century a writer and editor named Tim Lucas—a fan of my Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers--slipped me a copy of a script he had written, along with his pal, Charlie Largent. It was a clever dramatization of an incident known to all Corman enthusiasts: the 1966 jaunt that Roger took to Big Sur, California, in preparation for shooting the movie that became The Trip. The straight-arrow Corman, getting ready to film Hollywood’s first flick exploring the allure of LSD, had been persuaded by both screenwriter Jack Nicholson (yes, that Jack Nicholson) and star Peter Fonda that he couldn’t film an acid-trip story without having first dropped acid himself. And so he did.

 The Lucas/Largent script found its way into the hands of Corman protégé Joe Dante, who signed on to direct and produce. Eventually two more screenwriters got involved—Michael Almereyda and  James Robinson—and the title evolved from Sunshine Boulevard  into The Man with Kaleidoscope Eyes. At one point Oscar-winner Colin Firth committed to playing Roger. But, like so many Hollywood projects, this one never got funded. Its biggest hurrah was a live script reading at a local L.A. theatre, with Roger himself participating, and Bill Hader in the Corman role.

 Nothing daunted, Tim Lucas has now turned The Man with Kaleidoscope Eyes into a novel that pop culture fans will cherish. Having done his research, Lucas revels in the minutiae of Roger Corman’s lifestyle (the fancy cars and austere Metrecal lunches; the obsessive punctuality and zeal for problem-solving). He also paints vivid portraits of such Corman cronies as Fonda, Nicholson, resident hippie Chuck Griffith, and director-in-the-making Peter Bogdanovich, who liked to present himself as something of a dandy (“His ascot was the color of the velvet curtains in a roadshow cinema”).  Then there’s Roger’s plucky Oxford-schooled assistant, Frances Doel, who seems prescient in her ability to anticipate her boss’s every need. (Frances, a close friend of mine, finds her own portrayal hugely annoying, but I chalk that up to her intrinsic modesty.)

 Lucas has a ball depicting the commercial stretch of Sunset Blvd. in its flashy, trashy heyday. As he wittily puts it, “Contrary to its name, Sunset was actually where the sun rose—on the American dream.”  He revels in the oversized billboards that dotted the street, promoting such cinematic fare as Born Free, The Endless Summer, and Corman’s own unlikely 1966 hit, The Wild Angels. It’s all part of what he calls “the phantasmagorical bazaar that was the Sunset Strip on a Friday night in the summer of 1966—the Summer of Foreplay before the Summer of Love.”

 He also finds ways to work into his narrative tidbits of Corman’s personal and professional life, finding a place for Roger’s first creative breakthrough (The Day the World Ended) and his all-time gutsiest stab at social commentary (The Intruder). There’s playful quoting from The Little Shop of Horrors (“Novocaine . . . it dulls the senses”) and, in an eerier vein, X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (“I can still see!”) As a tribute to Nicholson’s eventual star role in The Shining, he slips in a reference to how “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”  My favorite insider gag: a highly fictitious account of how the scruffy LSD supplier is promised, in return for a serious discount, an associate producer credit.

 Lucas’s determination to add a romantic thread involving the future Mrs. Corman may be a stretch, but it gives the ending of this book a surprising sweetness. Well done, sir!     

Corman (and Lucas) fans might like to know that Tim is offering signed and personalized copy of this book at his site, videowatchdog.com. Tim would also like me to thank his publishing house, Electric Dreamhouse/PS Publishing, and I'm happy to do that here.