Plot
An aged gangster, Big Mac (Donald MacBride), is planning a robbery at a California resort in Palm Springs. He wants the experienced Roy Earle (Humphrey Bogart), just released from an eastern prison by a governor's pardon, to lead the heist and to take charge of the operation.
Roy drives across the country to a camp in the mountains to meet up with the three men who will assist him in the heist: Louis Mendoza (Cornel Wilde), who works in the resort, plus Red (Arthur Kennedy) and Babe (Alan Curtis), who are already living at the camp. Babe has brought along a young woman, Marie (Ida Lupino). Roy wants to send Marie back to Los Angeles; but, after some argument, she convinces Roy to let her stay. Roy also is adopted by a small dog called Pard, played by Bogart's own dog, Zero.
Marie falls in love with Roy as he plans and executes the robbery, but he does not reciprocate. On the drive up to the mountains, Roy met the family of Velma (Joan Leslie), a young woman with a deformed foot who walks with a limp. Roy pays for corrective surgery to allow Velma to walk normally. While she is recovering, Roy asks Velma to marry him; but she refuses, explaining that she is engaged to a man from back home. When Velma's fiancé arrives, Roy turns to Marie, and they become lovers.
The heist goes wrong when they are interrupted by a security guard. Mendoza, Red, and Babe are involved in a car accident; Red and Babe die, and Mendoza talks to the police.
While Roy and Marie leave town, a dragnet is put out for him, identifying him to the public as "Mad Dog Roy Earle". The two fugitives separate in order to allow Marie time to escape. Roy is pursued until he climbs one of the Sierra mountains, where he holes up overnight.
Shortly after sunrise, Roy trades shots with the police. He hears Pard barking, runs out calling Marie's name and is shot dead from behind by a sharpshooter.
Read more about this topic: High Sierra (film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Trade and the streets ensnare us,
Our bodies are weak and worn;
We plot and corrupt each other,
And we despoil the unborn.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)