I got this off the classic actors shelf, under Bogart, but it’d cross-file under noirs easily, were they to file multiple copies. DVDs are expensive, but not metadata, meaning it’s easy to find the same film following multiple routings. I’m speaking in general terms. I’m forgetting which filters MMU uses. I’m thinking in SQL terms (structure query language).
A noir because it starts the way many of them do, with a guy (Bogart) getting out of prison, pardoned from on high, and returning immediately into service as skilled in petty crime (stickups, common heists). As is typical with a Bogart film, is relations with women are of special interest. Although given the vote by this time, women are still groomed as dependents and must think of ways to manipulate men using their desirability.
Bogart is especially attracted to a young woman too innocent to be at all wily yet. She has more power over him for this reason. Her farmer family takes him back to the good old days, before he became a criminal and prisoner.
His willingness to help her with an operation to address a congenital defect, and then take no for an answer when he proposes marriage — he’s expecting a ridiculously paltry payment for his role in a petty heist and plans to retire to a life of travel — shows us he’s a hopeless romantic under it all. That explains why the more worldly woman likes him and wants to be his sidekick (she sees his good side as well as his ruthless toughness, “the right stuff” in her book)).
At first he holds out for Velma (she has attached herself to someone else) but eventually he comes round to caring for sidekick Maria and the dog. The dog (a major character) is treated as a bad omen meaning a lot of thickly applied foreshadowing, starting with Algernon’s story of how the dog’s owners seem to always meet an untimely end. We know Bogart is headed toward a dead end. The high Sierras aren’t featured for no reason.
The film is made for a national audience meaning many states and geographic regions get a plot mention, not unlike in Apple movies today, such as Pluribus, which go for a global audience. The whole globe is now the common backdrop with one weather report for all, on tap at the global weather web sites.
Going forward from this time, women would win some and lose some in the gender wars. Women are still over represented among the exploited classes of course. Movies such as this provide stereotypes and caricatures to some level, one of the chief functions of fiction. That only makes them more interesting from a psychological anthropological point of view.
