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.