“Greed is good,” right? John Huston’s THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948)
Details
THIS WEEK’S ONLINE EVENT: Two rough-and-tumble wanderers, Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart) and Curtin (Tim Holt), meet up with a veteran prospector, Howard (Walter Huston) in Mexico and head into the Sierra Madre mountains to find gold. Although they discover treasure, they also find plenty of trouble, not only from ruthless bandits lurking in the dangerous Mexican wilderness but from their own insecurities and greed, which threaten to bring conflict at any moment.
Written and directed by John Huston
Cinematographer: Ted D. McCord
Edited by Owen Marks
Music composed by Max Steiner
Release date: 14 January 1948
Running time: 2h 6m, b&w
HOW THIS WORKS
To learn where to stream Treasure or rent it online, search JustWatch.com. View it on your own during the week, then join us for our Zoom conversation this Saturday evening 9/2 at 7:20p Eastern. The Zoom link will appear on the right when you RSVP. If the link doesn't work for you, copy and paste it into the search bar of your browser.
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Yes, the group I organize for us is the Classic/Indie Movie Group, but I’ve been fudging the definition. True, for me anything at least 50 years old can be considered classic, since I’m all of 67. But the term inevitably conjures up Hollywood’s storied past — Hepburn and Tracy, Cooper and Stanwyck, Grant and Russell — and I haven’t offered you many from that era of star-struck glory.
Thus this week’s indisputable classic, my gesture of repentance. It’s the kind of film you think of when you invoke that status: black-and-white elegance, charisma onscreen, keen-eyed direction. Bogie here is a bogey indeed: great actors (Daniel Day-Lewis of There Will Be Blood) and great producer/creators (Vince Gilligan of Breaking Bad) alike have cited his depiction of a descent into paranoia as a cinematic true north. Huston’s commitment to filming on location and to including much longer stretches of spoken Spanish than convention allowed adds up to a tall movie standing taller, even amidst Hollywood’s monuments. Join us then in crossing Treasure off your bucket list. You may be crossing it off for the third or fifth time: Who’ll blame you? You don’t need no stinkin’ justifications! Just rake in the gold. — CW
TRAILER, RATINGS, EXTRAS
Rotten Tomatoes: 100% of 55 reviews
Metacritic: 98 (“universal acclaim”) based on 10 reviews
Walter Huston won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1949; his son John was honored with Oscars for Best Director and Best Screenplay. The Academy’s failure to nominate Bogart for Best Actor has been roundly condemned; it’s considered his best performance.
Before filming began, Bogart told one critic while leaving a New York nightclub, “Wait till you see me in my next picture. I play the worst shit you ever saw.”
Here’s the dialogue for one immortal scene, Dobbs and the bandito chief:
Gold Hat: "We are federales: you know, the mounted police."
Dobbs: "If you're the police, where are your badges?"
Gold Hat: "Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges! I don't have to show you any stinkin' badges!"
Gold Hat's response was chosen as No. 36 on the American Film Institute list AFI's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes.
BLURBS & ATTITUDES
Shot largely on location, the film posits its characters against the unforgiving immensity of their surroundings, rendering their efforts almost pathetically sublime. Partly realistic, partly poetic, fully moral, this deservingly canonized behemoth is one of the relatively few films that transcends the medium to become a mandatory viewing experience for anyone that identifies themselves as a human being, period. § Rob Humanick, Slant
As the stories of Howard and Curtin evaporate into convention, however, Fred C. Dobbs somehow moves to a higher level of tragedy …. There is a pitiless stark realism in these scenes that brings the movie to honesty and truth. Leading up to them is a down-market Shakespearean soliloquy when Dobbs thinks he is a murderer and says, "Conscience. What a thing! If you believe you got a conscience, it'll pester you to death. But if you don't believe you got one, what could it do to ya?" He finds out. § Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
Mr. Bogart’s Dobbs … goes to pot before our eyes, dissolving from a fairly decent hobo under the corroding chemistry of gold into a hideous wreck of humanity possessed with only one passion—to save his "stuff." And the final appearance of him, before a couple of roving bandits knock him off in a manner of supreme cynicism, is one to which few actors would lend themselves. Mr. Bogart's performance in this film is perhaps the best and most substantial that he has ever done. § Bosley Crowther, New York Times