-
4 Who’s the Boss?: W. R. Burnett's High Sierra
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
f o u r Who’s the Boss? W. R. Burnett’s High Sierra I If Hammett’s and Chandler’s best detective fiction has as its underlying theme the main character’s becoming or staying his own boss and Cain’s best has as its the main character’s trying to beat or outwit his employer, then W. R. Burnett’s High Sierra (1940) situates itself in relation to these works by addressing the question of who’s actually the boss and whether bosses are necessary. During his long working life, William Riley Burnett (1899–1982) enjoyed equally successful careers as novelist and screenwriter. A native of Ohio and descendant of a family long active in state politics, Burnett, after being turned down for army service in World War I and briefly studying journalism at Ohio State, worked in vaudeville, insurance sales, and in factories before he got, through his family’s political connections, a job with the Ohio Bureau of Labor Statistics in the early 1920s. Finding the work boring, he set out to learn the craft of fiction in his spare time. Realizing his son’s unhappiness as a state employee, Burnett’s father gave him a job in 1927 as desk clerk at the Northmere Hotel in Chicago, one of the repossessed hotels the elder Burnett managed, and young Burnett found in the city a subject to match his grow- 98 Unless the Threat of Death Is Behind Them ing ability as a storyteller. Burnett’s work at the hotel brought him in contact with small-time underworld figures, and through an acquaintance he began learning as much as he could about the Chicago mobs, research that resulted in his first novel, Little Caesar (1929), the story of the rise and fall of Rico Bandello . The novel received glowing reviews, was a main selection of the Literary Guild, and in 1930 Warner Bros. turned it into a movie that made Edward G. Robinson a star in the role of Rico. That same year Warners offered Burnett a screenwriting contract, and his dual career began. Over his working life Burnett would publish more than thirty-five books and have as many more screenplays (on which he did both credited and uncredited work) produced as films, among these Howard Hawks’s Scarface (1932); John Ford’s The Whole Town’s Talking (1935); Raoul Walsh’s High Sierra (1941), on which he collaborated with John Huston; Frank Tuttle’s This Gun for Hire (1942); John Farrow’s Wake Island (1942), for which he received an Academy Award nomination; John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950); and John Sturges’s The Great Escape (1963), for which he received another Academy Award nomination. Of Burnett’s novels, the three best are High Sierra, The Asphalt Jungle (1949), and Little Caesar, in that order. In this chapter I focus on the first, invoking the other two for comparison. II High Sierra is the story of Roy Earle, “the Indiana bank robber and last of the old Dillinger mob,”1 pardoned from a life sentence in prison through the corrupt intervention of Big Mac M’Gann. M’Gann wants Earle to lead a gang of inexperienced young crooks in robbing a luxury hotel in Tropico Springs, California (a setting modeled on Palm Springs). As the novel opens, Roy is driving cross-country from the Midwest and remembering during the long trip through the Nevada-California desert his boyhood on an Indiana farm. Earle’s memories of his bucolic younger years (comprising the book’s entire first chapter) “were of that far-off time, a generation ago” and “seemed to a worried man heading downhill like the morning of the world, a true Golden Age.” In these memories “it was always summer” (1), memories of the swimming -hole, the Saturday afternoon baseball game, his Aunt Minnie and her “home-made ice cream in the summer-house,” and “those long hot evenings” when “Roma Stover, the yellow-haired girl from across the road, came sidling over shyly”and the two would swing on“the big farm gate”and laugh at noth- [54.234.6.167] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 14:40 GMT) ing (3–4). Suggesting the nostalgic iconography of a Norman Rockwell painting (indeed, at one point Roy even cites a poem by the nineteenth-century Indiana bard James Whitcomb Riley to describe Aunt Minnie), these memories are meant not only to evoke the complexity of Earle’s interior life, distinguishing...