Production
Actor George Raft was originally intended to play the Bogart part. However, Bogart, who at the time took a great interest in playing the role of Roy Earle, managed to talk Raft out of accepting the role, who subsequently turned it down.
Bogart had to persuade director Walsh to hire him for the role since Walsh envisioned Bogart as a supporting player rather than a leading man.
Bogart's character's dog, "Pard," was erroneously believed by some to be canine actor "Terry" ("Toto" from The Wizard of Oz). In fact, it is Bogart's own dog, Zero. In the final scene, Buster Wiles, a stunt performer, plays Roy's corpse. His hand is filled with biscuits to encourage Pard to lick Roy's hand.
Many key shots of the movie were made on location in the Sierra Nevada. In a climactic scene, Bogart's character slid 90 feet (27 m) down a mountainside to his just reward. His stunt double, Wiles, bounced a few times going down the mountain and wanted another take to do better. "Forget it," said Raoul Walsh. "It's good enough for the 25-cent customers."
Read more about this topic: High Sierra (film)
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
“The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.”
—Erich Fromm (1900–1980)