The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
We’re all familiar with the classic axioms about money: “The root of all evil”, “You can’t take it with you”, “No one is poor who has friends”. Still, few of us would turn down a short stack of green if it happened to fall into our lap. There have been many films exploring the effects of greed on the human heart, but none have had the lasting effect and entertainment value as John Huston’s 1948 masterpiece The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
Down in Mexico in 1925, Fred C. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart) and Bob Curtin (Tim Holt) are struggling to survive. Most days are spent merely hoping that some work will come along to grant a reprieve from begging for scraps from the outwardly wealthy. Beaten down and humbled by their predicament, they meet the grizzled yet wise prospector Howard (Walter Huston), who turns them on to the idea of marching into the Mexican frontier to claim mountains of gold that await. With a bit of luck, the trio raise the funds to start the expedition and venture out as equal partners and friends. But when the men discover riches in the desert, Howard’s warnings about the corruptive nature of gold begin to come to fruition, and each man’s integrity is put to the ultimate test.
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is at its heart a morality tale, but Huston somehow manages to cram a fairly exciting adventure movie into it. This is aided by his choice to shoot on location in Mexico (practically unheard of at the time), which lends not only an air of authenticity to the story, but a somewhat exotic allure that could not be replicated within the studio walls. The maternal mountain that the men harvest for riches almost becomes a character in its own right, especially as the trio depart with their earnings having healed her wounds and waving a fond goodbye whilst calling her by name. The wilderness is vast and unforgiving, not only in its barrenness but also because of the moral choices that its isolation seems to grant those who trod upon it. Bandits ride across the plains almost with free reign, attacking trains and robbing men for the shoes on their feet. But the archetypal criminals aren’t the biggest danger in the desert. Alone in the wilderness, our heroes’ senses of conscience are questioned and, at times, thrown to the way side.
Though his turn as Rick Blaine in Casablanca is Bogart’s most famous and possibly best performance, it’s here that he solidifies his reputation as one of Hollywood’s greatest actors. Pigeon-holed playing romantic leads and hard-boiled gangsters and detectives for years, Bogart finally garnished enough popularity to choose his own project. He chose to portray a seedy loser with a subconscious knack for self-sabotage and destined for madness. From the beginning, we see that Dobbs shouldn’t fall into a substantial amount of cash, since he squanders his pittance from begging not on food or shelter, but small luxuries that temporarily make him feel like he belongs in the higher class. Not that he’s a bad man, just a petty one. But we believe him when he rebuffs Howard after the old man explains how he knows what gold does to men’s souls. “It wouldn’t be that way with me. I swear it wouldn’t!” he insists. But of course that’s all a set up for the tragedy that follows as the paranoia sinks in and the mountain keeps on giving.
In the village, Dobbs and Curtin insist that gold carries no curse, and that it can only serve to amplify the traits of the person who finds it. Though broke and desperate, the duo aren’t greedy in the beginning, and still maintain a code of honor. Cheated out of an honest week’s pay, they run into their two-timing employer on the street and beat their pay out of him in a terrific and decidedly anti-Hollywood brawl. They don’t take any more than what they are owed, and throw the rest of their victim’s cash back in his face. Perhaps it’s the isolation of the wilderness that sows seeds of distrust in their hearts, or maybe the gold really does carry a curse with it (Max Steiner’s fantastic score gives the shiny stuff a seductive twinkling). As Howard puts forward, gold only has value because of all the hard work that goes into finding it, and isn’t good for much of anything except jewelry and gold teeth. The fact that the trio finds success is their curse, and the idea that more will keep sprouting out of the mountain begins to turn the partners against one another.
From the beginning we know that the allure of riches will corrupt our heroes, but it’s surprising how well Huston involves us in the fall. Pride and avarice may be their downfall, but we still understand how each begins to distrust the other two. We identify best with Howard, who continues to spout out words of wisdom when the chips are down. But he’s much more than just the white knight opposed to Dobbs’ manic paranoia, he’s still interested in his goods. He did earn them, after all. Were it not apparent that he’s seen this exact scenario play out several times before, he’d likely come close to shooting the other two himself. A lesser film would make Curtin the main character, torn between Dobbs’ insanity and Howard’s nobleness. Though Howard is much more immune to the gold’s wiles (he doesn’t have many more years in which to spend it after all), he’s not just a harmless old man, and Dobbs is not past feeling, even in his most dour moments
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is a tragedy on par with anything that Shakespeare wrote. Dobbs has much in common with Macbeth and King Lear, a man blinded by power and seduced to the point beyond obeying his conscience. “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 you?” Soliloquies like this can be disturbingly true, softened only by the fact that they are delivered by a man who is clearly going mad. What keeps us coming back is how good a man Dobbs could have been, and the places he could have gone had he embraced working as part of a partnership rather than winning the world only for himself. The film’s ending is a cosmic joke that might have been debilitating and utterly depressing were it not for Howard’s insistence that we shrug and laugh it off.
This column has done no justice to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. It’s a film that will continue to take us to school no matter what kind of masterpieces are released in the years to come. It’s a film that’s not just saying that money is bad, nor that the poverty stricken are happy. It’s a perfect examination of masculinity, honor, power, and, above all, fate. What sets it apart is that it is fun and makes us laugh along the way, even when fate delivers the final cynical punch line. John Huston’s screenplay, Walter Huston’s performance, Max Steiner’s score, Ted D. McCord’s cinematography, and so much more deserved a paragraph or so each, but I’ve hit my limit as to what words can relate. Like the mountain, there is almost no limit to what it keeps giving. It almost makes we want to go nuts and dance.
