Walter Huston
Tim Holt
Bruce Bennett
Barton MacLane
Alfonso Bedoya
Photography:
Black and white
Distributed By:
Warner Bros.
Release Date:
1948
Runtime:
126 minutes
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is a 1948 American Western adventure drama film written and directed by John Huston. It is an adaptation of B. Traven's 1927 novel of the same name, set in the 1920s, in which, driven by their desperate economic plight, two young men, Fred C. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart) and Bob Curtin (Tim Holt), join old-timer Howard (Walter Huston, the director's father) in Mexico to prospect for gold.
Why It Rocks
B. Traven's novel used the travails of down-and-out laborers who become prospectors as a metaphor for the greed that corrupts humanity, and the film adaptation manages to maintain the overall theme of greed corruption. Like Traven’s writing, the film’s grimly downbeat, oppressively condemnatory, offering hope only in the return to a pre-industrial utopia of native rituals.
John Huston, the film’s director, stated the certain incidents in the work paralleled his own experiences in Mexico. The film version strips away much of the novel's background material, exaggerating the story's tragic overtones in the process. Additionally, some of the characters are built up, notably the bandit Gold Hat who only got a single mention in the novel. Here, he haunts much of the film, and even gets to mutter the film's signature line about "stinkin' badges".
Most of the film’s concerned with craft, particularly surviving as a vagrant in a foreign country. Its opening scenes thoroughly explain panhandling, then later it provides concrete details about supplying prospecting expeditions, building sluices, coping with the elements, etc. Most directors wouldn't bother with this level of storytelling, yet Huston's decided to do so. In a way, he was making a statement about his own life, with all of its hard knocks and reversals, and he would follow this technique a few more times in later films.
Humphrey Bogart did some of his best acting as Fred C. Dobbs, in what's easily his most aggressive performance. He's basically doing a retread of Rick Blaine, but without his appeal to sympathy or forgiveness, reducing him to a snarling dog.
Walter Huston has the showiest acting in the film, with a masterclass in hamminess, expanding on a shrewd and deceptively cornpone character he did previously.
Tim Holt –at the time the star of a series of B-Westerns – provided the perfect foil for both Bogart and Huston. He projects decency and stillness, an important contrast to Dobbs and Howard. Though the role tends to be overlooked, compared to the others.
Mexican actor Alfonso Bedoya, as the toothy bandit Gold Hat, is another major show-stealer, as he delivers one of the most quoted —and misquoted—lines of dialogue in Hollywood history: “Badges? We ain’t got no badges. We don’t need no badges! I don’t have to show you any stinkin’ badges!” Bedoya had already enjoyed a long career in Mexican cinema, but this performance brought him to Hollywood’s attention and he acted in American films over the next decade.
Bogart had dipped into unhinged characters before with Black Legion and High Sierra, and he would do so again with In a Lonely Place and The Caine Mutiny. His portrayal of Fred C. Dobbs, however, is something else entirely. It embodies, as admirer Martin Scorsese has said, “one of the great disintegrations of character” in American movies. Dobbs takes to muttering about himself in the third person (“If you know what’s good for you, you won’t monkey around with Fred C. Dobbs!”) and comes to see any conversation between the other two men as evidence of a conspiracy. As his thoughts grow more insane, he increasingly becomes a physical wreck. Dobbs is probably the most despicable character Bogart ever played, which is ironic, since he had finally escaped years of villainous roles with The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca to become a romantic, if still caustic, leading man. At this point Bogart's playing against type with this role.
It's notably one of the first US films to be made almost entirely outside the US (more specifically, it was shot in Tampico, San Jose de Purua and in Durango)
The Only Bad Quality
Due to fact that the film's concerned with craft as mentioned in pointer #3, it can be very slow-paced and difficult to watch at various points, which will definitely drive some viewers away.
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