HIGH SIERRA
(Warner Bros.)
"HEN, in the CBS session, Any Questions? the other Sunday evening a question suggesting anti Semitism ‘came before the panel, one of the
speakers indignantly exclaimed that it was the kind of thing that should be jumped on with both feet.. High Sierra the same reaction in me. I am well aware that the fiim critic’s concern is with the entertainment value of a picture, but there are times when one is forced, willy-nilly, to take a moral view, and this is one of them. The theme of High Sierra-the glorification of the American gangster-is a rotten one, and why a studio like Warner Bros., which has gained some reputation for crusading, should waste time, and film, and good players on it, is a mystery. True, there is a _ crime-does-not-pay twist in the plot. The killer is finally and irrevocably killed. But he does not die like a rat in a hole, or a thug in a slum basement, or get a similarly appropriate curtain. He dies in good clean sunshine, with his back to the ultimate precipices of the High Sierras, holding a battalion of State police and sheriff’s deputies at bay, and within two hundred yards of a radio truck which is broadcasting, a, shot-by-shot commentary on a_ coast-to-coast hook-up. As for the main theme, that there is honour among thieves and that the tougher and more ruthless a killer is the more chivalry and generosity there will be concealed behind his flinty features, that just will not go down any more.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19421023.2.30.1.3
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 174, 23 October 1942, Page 13
Word count
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258HIGH SIERRA New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 174, 23 October 1942, Page 13
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