The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

As I wend my way through all things Mexican, surely the most famous film ever set in Mexico (and shot there, a most unusual thing for the time period) was John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, an American classic from 1948. I must have seen this film as a kid, but in looking at it yesterday I was amazed at how it hasn't dated, and how its duality of being both simple and complex make it timeless.

The film is basically about human greed, and the screenplay, by Huston based on the novel by B. Traven, is elegant at showing how the pursuit of riches warps men. It opens in Tampico, Mexico, where two Americans down on their luck (Humphrey Bogart and Tim Holt) both get hired for construction work. They are screwed out of their pay, though, and end up in a flophouse. There they meet a grizzled old prospector (Walter Huston), and after Bogart wins the lottery, team up to follow the old man into the hills to search for gold.

What is fascinating about this first third of the film is that the men don't really have a backstory. Huston tells us that he has prospected all over the world, but other than that we have no idea where these men come from, whether they have families, and why they are in Mexico in the first place. It is 1925, a time of political peril in Mexico, as ruthlessly efficient police, called "federales," deal with bandits who will kill a man to take his boots. This makes the search for the gold elemental, and their eventual downfall inevitable.

Eventually they make a strike (in a famous scene, Huston laughs uproariously and dances a jig as he shows the pikers the gold lying on the ground). But each doesn't fully trust the other, and Bogart in particular becomes increasingly paranoid. When another prospector (Bruce Bennett) stumbles upon them, his fate hangs in the balance, as one of the three options is killing him.

After encounters with bandits (the most famous line in the picture is by Alfonso Bedoya, the bandit known as Gold Hat, who replies, after claiming he is a federale, " Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges") and the native Indians, the three men turn on each other, with Bogart the catalyst. Holt and Huston are resolutely honest and fair, while Bogart's Fred C. Dobbs (who frequently refers to himself in the third person) becomes as twisted as rope strands.

Of course this will lead to tragedy, and the ending becomes a cosmic joke, as the remaining men will realize the comedy and laugh. This ending, in which riches are literally blown away, recalls von Stroheim's Greed and will be repeated in films as varied as Stanley Kubrick's The Killing, the original Ocean's 11, and even It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

The behind-the-scenes stuff is pretty interesting. This was John Huston's follow-up to the great The Maltese Falcon, and he had wanted to make it ever since reading the book in the '30s. The war delayed that, and the producer, Henry Blanke, basically spun his wheels on the project to keep other directors from shooting it. Jack Warner gave Huston full freedom, despite that the film had no female love interest and was consistently downbeat.

The film has some notable cameos, including Huston himself, who plays a rich American in a white suit who gives money to Bogart three times. Robert Blake, then a child, plays the Mexican boy who sells Bogart the lottery ticket, and there's some controversy about whether Ann Sheridan is the woman who plays a walk-on role of a prostitute.

Walter Huston was John Huston's father, and both nabbed Oscars; the younger for both writing and directing, the father for Best Supporting Actor (this would be repeated only once, with Francis and Carmine Coppola both winning for The Godfather, Part II). The film lost Best Picture to Laurence Olivier's Hamlet, and was not a box office success, as it was perhaps too European and ahead of its time for the audiences of the late '40s.

B. Traven is the most enduring literary mystery of the 20th century, as no one can definitively say who he was. He was alive during the filming, and a so-called assistant was present on the set (and received $100 a week) as a consultant. Many thought he was Traven, but John Huston doubted it. It's hard to believe in this day and age someone's identity can remain hidden like that, but there it is.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is an almost perfect film. My only quibble is with the score, by Max Steiner, which is at times intrusive and overbearing. Also, Holt, who never really became a star, is a bit stiff in his part. But Bogart and Huston give performances for the ages.