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As the film starts, we see Fred C. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart) homeless in Tampico, Mexico, begging money off American tourists. After hitting the same American up for money three or four times, he's directed to Pat McCormick (Barton MacLane), who's offering work. There he meets Bob Curtin (Tim Holt), and after they convince McCormick to actually pay them rather than running off, they meet an old-timer named Howard (Walter Huston), who convinces them to re-invest their earnings in a gold-mining venture. It's hard, at first, but that difficulty is nothing compared to what happens when the mine pans out, and each is worrying about the others coming after his hoard.

Few of Humphrey Bogart's most memorable roles are steadfast heroes, and his characters don't get much scuzzier than Fred Dobbs. We get hints of what's to come when we first meet him, as we see him push his luck panhandling, but we can chalk that up to desperation to simply survive. Later on we we see his a hard worker when he gets the chance, but we don't see Bogart's best work until Dobbs has his gold and will be rich no matter what. Then we see him crazed with gold fever, twitching, looking at his friend like he expects to be killed at any moment. It's the type of manic performance that can make a lesser actor look like, well, a lesser actor, but Bogart's tense body language and facial expressions that can jump from calm to crazed to conniving sell it.

And Bogart isn't even necessarily the performance people remember from this movie; that honor likely goes to director John Huston's father Walter. He makes Howard a lovable old coot whose acquisition of wisdom with age just means he can see his future screw-ups coming. He knows that he'll blow his gold on women and booze and probably end up right where he started, and he sees his partners' paranoia as an inevitability. He talks like a rube and dances funny jigs, but there's never any doubt that he knows the score. Indeed, the audience will spend a lot of time wondering if he's playing his younger partners against each other. Mostly, he makes relating hard-won knowledge sound like a reminder of something any fool should know, and gains the audience's respect without ever distancing himself from them.

The rest of the cast is pretty good, too, although it's tough to outshine Bogart and Huston Sr. on-screen. Tim Holt doesn't get to go enthusiastically insane like Bogart as the other partner; he's got the unenviable task of being the most apparently level-headed one in the group, a couple steps behind Dobbs in terms of the gold fever. Bruce Bennet appears midway through the film as James Cody, a young guy who stumbles upon the camp, and thus increases the tension between the secretive miners. And, of course, there's Alfonso Bedoya, whose character leads a crew of banditos who menace Dobbs and company in the last act. He essays his part broadly but with genuine menace. His most famous line ("Badges? We ain't got no badges...") has become a target of many bad puns over the years, but Bedoya sells it with venom.

John Huston writes and directs, working from a novel by reclusive expatriate B. Traven (rumored to have been on-set as a technical advisor under a pseudonym). The movie divides into clear chapters - Dobbs begging, the building job, mining, bandits, etc. - connected by the characters' growing distrust. Huston is able to choose shots that emphasize the world closing in around the party even while shooting outdoors, on location in Mexico; it's either night, or there's a mountain rising sharply to cut off part of the sky, or the like. He's got no trouble making things progressively more grim, or pushing Dobbs further and further from being redeemable.

Which is as it should be. Stories of human greed seldom have happy endings, and the bitter, violent conclusion of "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" is just what it should be.

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originally posted: 02/23/06 12:31:38
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