MUBI

(Wednesday / March 17, 2010 / 11:15pm)

John Huston’s “The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre,” is an adventure film in which the pursuit made is not an end in itself but the excuse for a fatalistic character study in which the moral differences between an older wiser man, and the mistrustful, middle-aged man become downright apparent, and between the younger man must decide.This is one of the best films that examines the greed that gradually gets the better of good people. This is one of Bogart’s incredible performances, uniquely about paranoia that spirals into madness, and the breaking of the bond with other characters created a frenzy atmosphere that only Huston can furnish.

Director John Huston makes a small cameo at the beginning of his 1948 masterpiece. He plays a gentleman repeatedly asked for money by the penniless Fred C. Dobbs. With his commanding presence, he gives Dobbs two pesos the third time around, tells Dobbs to stop pestering him and walks away. This scene subtly hints at the sense of command and control Huston has over this tightly constructed and engaging film. His onscreen appearance is brief, but his presence can be felt throughout the movie.

Humphrey Bogart stars as Fred C. Dobbs, a man whose greed and thirst for gold is at the center of the film. Tired of working dead-end jobs and begging for money, Dobbs bands together with young Bob Curtin (Tim Holt) and the much older Howard (Walter Huston, father of the film’s director) to find gold in the Sierra Madre mountains. The movie starts off as a Western-esque adventure with the three men searching for gold, but it soon becomes a serious look at greed and the darkest depths of human nature.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is one of the most visually impressive American films of its time. While many black and white films depicting the old West or Mexico feel flat, the textures of this film can be sensed through the screen with hellish campfires at night and suffocating dust in the air. Director Huston is largely known for film noirs like The Maltese Falcon, and the same atmosphere is present as the characters move through the night, untrusting of the men who are their partners. The visual compositions of this film reflect the weariness of the characters and the disturbing sense of paranoia always bubbling under the surface.

The characters are played with such authority and complexity by the leading actors. Bogart’s performance is much darker and crueler than anything else he has ever done. With his sand-caked beard, Dobbs mutters under his breath and laughs hysterically as he is driven to madness by his greed for gold. After walking through the mountains alone, he stumbles upon a dirty creek and rushes to drink water and wash his face. The performance teeters brilliantly between tragic hysteria and comical desperation. While Bogart did not receive the Oscar for his performance, Walter Huston grabbed the Academy Award for supporting actor with his turn as a wise but delightfully loony prospector. Few images in American film history are as memorable as old Howard joyously dancing over the gold Dobbs is too stupid to even notice under his feet. The casual tone with which he informs Dobbs and Curtin they have wasted water on fool’s good is characterized by great wisdom, but the madness with which he laughs at the end of the film is both humorous and disturbing.

These two performances are often talked about, and deservedly so, but I feel the brilliance of Tim Holt’s performance is overlooked. He offers a sense of steadiness compared to the dynamic characters of Bogart and Huston. Consider his deadpan look of confusion at Huston’s maniacal laughter or his cold expression when he takes out a deadly lizard with his handgun. His character acts as a crucial foil to the ever-present madness in the film.

This cynical film asks questions about obsession, probing into some of the deepest issues of the American Dream. At the same time, the movie is never unfair to its characters, and we never get the sense that director Huston dislikes people. He simply has a keen understanding of the capacity for man to corrupt. It is a film with dark humor, tragedy and even hints of optimism. Winning the Best Director Oscar for his work on this film, John Huston takes his delicious screenplay, the vivid sets and locations and the talented actors (including his own father), and he presents us with a piece of art that still resonates to this very day.

In a career of adapting difficult novels to the big screen, John Huston hardly found a text more apt to his sensibilities than B. Traven’s “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”, a scorching 1927 anti-capitalist, anti-fascist adventure tome in which the greed and deviousness of human nature is juxtaposed with the psychological underpinnings of poverty and post-revolutionary politics on peasants and indigenous peoples. Obsession, of course, and greed, runs concurrent throughout Huston’s career; the debilitating power of the black bird in “The Maltese Falcon”, Ahab and his quest for the white whale in “Moby Dick”, the crushing defeat of the bank robbers at the end of “The Asphalt Jungle”, Sean Connery and Michael Caine duping religious monks of their treasure in “The Man Who Would Be King”, even his Noah Cross in Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown” is a lecherous creep who has bilked the entire Los Angeles Valley out of precious drinking water for millions in profits; all these unsavory characters pail in comparison to what Humphrey Bogart does as Fred C. Dobbs in ‘Treasure’, turning a character that was already borderline psychotic in the novel into a fully possessed, paranoid, mumbling, twitching, bearded, dirty double-crosser who puts a slug into his best friend because he thinks his precious gold is ripe for the picking. Indeed it is, by bandits, who don’t need to show any stinking badges to harass a group of disheveled prospectors in the Mexican mountains, but the genius of Traven’s great novel, and Huston’s peerless, Oscar-winning adaptation, is that the bandits don’t even know, or care, that the packs hidden in Bogart’s hides contain 50,000 dollars worth in gold, they care only for selling the donkeys, and grabbing maybe a gun or two, and it’s the psychological hold the gold has on Dobbs that causes him to see things that aren’t there, namely, that his partners are after his score, and inadvertently, literally, he loses his head for it. “I know what gold does to men’s souls,” says Walter Huston as the grizzled old prospector Howard, and so does John Huston, and Humphrey Bogart, because their depiction of Dobbs’ rapidly decreasing mental health in favor of a panicky paranoid jerk with trust issues is one of the great, faithful book-to-film character transfers in film history, and it remains the high point in both their revered careers.

If The Maltese Falcon was Huston’s film about greed, then this film is about Greed with a capital G. It may the definitive film on the cancerous and corrupting influence of the American dream, namely, to get rich. Bogart plays his first non-heroic role since becoming a big star, though his Fred C. Dobbs is more of a tragic, weak figure than an out and out bad guy. Huston directed his father, Walter, to an Oscar as the sage but nuts old prospector. Together, they give two mesmerizing performances, Bogart slipping further and further into paranoia and madness as the gold piles up. A remarkable film, one of the best ever made in Hollywood.