The USPS has issued a set of four stamps honoring great film
directors and the films for which they are most remembered. The four selected
are: John Ford (The Searchers), John Huston (The Maltese Falcon), Frank Capra
(It’s a Wonderful Life), and Billy Wilder (Some Like It Hot). We will be
exploring the lives and work of these directors over the next several weeks. In
this post LR Simon reviews The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948).
John Huston’s first film after World War II was The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), re-teaming him with producer Henry Blanke and star
Humphrey Bogart from The Maltese Falcon. Huston won Oscars for his screenplay
and directing, and he directed his father, Walter, in an Oscar-winning
performance. The film in on the AFI’s list of the top 100 films.
Huston returned to the theme of a failed quest, with three
drifters prospecting for gold. The titular treasure lends the film its other
key themes: gold can corrupt the best of men; the difference between honesty
and trustworthiness; and money isn’t everything.
Bogart plays Fred C. Dobbs, a role that posed some risks for
the actor, who had spent the last several years playing heroic characters to
break his early bad-guy typecasting. Dobbs, however, was no mere
two-dimensional villain. We meet him as a broke American expatriate in Tampico,
Mexico, begging for change from an American tourist, played by John Huston.
Dobbs and another American expatriate (Curtin, played by Tim Holt) are offered
work, for which they are not paid. They meet up with aging prospector Howard
(Walter Huston), who tells them about a deposit of gold in the Sierra Madre.
Dobbs, Curtin, and Howard agree to mine the gold together, making promises
about the treasure and each other. The wizened Howard warns of the pitfalls of
such arrangements: “As long as there’s no find, the noble brotherhood will
last. But when the piles of gold begin to grow, that’s when the trouble
starts.”
The longer the three treasure hunters spend in the
wilderness, the more Dobbs begins to lose his connection to reality. He starts
talking to himself, and becomes convinced that Curtin and Howard are trying to
cheat him out of his share of the gold. This descent into madness provides
Bogart with one of his best opportunities to show what he can do as an actor.
Along the way, the characters must make decisions regarding
the trustworthiness of one another and the other characters they meet. Dobbs,
Curtin, and Howard are perfectly honest when they make their plans at the
outset, but Howard, ever the voice of reason, says “I know what kind of ideas
even supposedly decent people get when gold’s at stake.” Later, when the three
of them cross paths with Cody, a prospector from Texas, they try to disguise
their purpose in the jungle; Cody sees through their attempted subterfuge, and
tries to ingratiate himself with the trio. He never fully gains Dobbs’ trust,
and ends up paying dearly for it.
Dobbs’ and Curtin’s lack of money at the beginning of the
story provides a powerful and understandable motivation for the pursuit of the
gold in Sierra Madre. Howard tries to inform them of the dangers along the way,
including priorities: “Water’s precious; sometimes it can be more precious than
gold.” Dobbs’ obsession with the treasure blinds him to what he stands to lose,
but Curtin learns from his losses, and the audience can see him following
Howard like a surrogate son and learning everything the old man has to teach.
The use of music in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
deserves a special mention. As the three main characters make their way through
the Mexican jungle, the music is bright and up-tempo to reflect Howard’s
expertise and enthusiasm; the same theme is brought down-tempo to underscore
how difficult the same journey is for the much younger Dobbs and Curtin. Later,
as Dobbs goes more obviously mad, the string-heavy music starts to sound like
bees (a musical idea that’s been used in similar ways in more recent films,
including The Dark Knight).
Earlier in the film, during a fight in a bar, however, no music
backs up the action. The fight looks less choreographed than much action in
more recent films, and the film does not manipulate the audience’s reaction to
the violence in the scene.
John Huston’s vision as a director was mature from the
start, but The Treasure of the Sierra Madre established him as a
major force in film.
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