High Sierra

I still have 40 minutes left in Raoul Walsh's High Sierra but so far so good. Interestingly, Ida Lupino got top billing and Bogart was second. Nowadays, who remembers Ida Lupino? It's a good heist film and Bogart has an awesome haircut. It features some nice on-location shooting and, of course, shows the wages of sin. The more I read the more I realize how the narrative structures we take for granted were shaped by industrial mandate. In other words, most films we see feature the bad guy getting it in the end because early on in Hollywood's history, filmmakers were told that's what had to happen. It distressed people in charge of the Production Code to see gangsters and other bad guys romanticized and valorized so they dictated that if criminals were depicted, it had to be shown that crime doesn't pay, that their lifestyle didn't end well. Isn't that funny? We're so used to the bad guy getting his just deserts, we just assume that's the way stories are to be told. But largely those are the films that were made - not because people didn't want to see films like that - but because censors complained and industry bigwigs wanted their movies to be seen by the largest number of people possible. Interesting.

I'll finish High Sierra after we're done watching the diva-fest that is Project Runway.

P.S. In addition to being an actress, Ida Lupino is one of the only (if not the only) women to direct a film noir. She co-wrote and directed the 1953 feature The Hitchhiker. It didn't keep me awake all the way through but I still admire the accomplishment.