#67: THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948)

THRILL SCALE 1-10

8

HAVE I SEEN IT BEFORE?

Never

BEST SEQUENCE

The final meeting between Fred C. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart) and the bandit Gold Hat (Alfonso Bedoya) and his men

BEST LINE

“Hey, you fellas, how about some beans? You want some beans? Going through some mighty rough country tomorrow, you’d better have some beans.” - Howard, the old prospector, chowing down on some beans while his two travelling companions are fast asleep and snoring. Howard then immediately pulls out his harmonica and starts tootling away, happy as a clam. I laughed out loud

ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE

100%

ROTTEN TOMATOES CRITICS CONSENSUS

"Remade but never duplicated, this darkly humorous morality tale represents John Huston at his finest."

IMDB SYNOPSIS

"Two down-on-their-luck Americans searching for work in 1920s Mexico convince an old prospector to help them mine for gold in the Sierra Madre Mountains."

DIRECTOR

John Huston

MAIN CAST

Humphrey Bogart, Tim Holt, Walter Huston, Alfonso Bedoya

THOUGHTS

• The act of prospecting for gold, and the stock character of the grizzled old prospector, they both seem like such deeply ingrained tropes that it surprised me when I couldn't really think of any other "gold prospecting" pieces of culture that I'd seen. Google brought up some results, many of which I hadn't even heard of, but no more movies that I could recall watching
• I wasn't even expecting a gold digging movie going into it. I was taking "treasure" more literally and expected more of an adventure movie along the lines of Indiana Jones. This isn't really that, although supposedly Steven Spielberg and George Lucas took Sierra Madre as inspiration when making Raiders of the Lost Ark. I don't really see the connection, apart from Humphrey Bogart's fedora. They're very different movies and characters
• I'm going to talk spoilers, which is kind of a silly warning for a movie from 1948. However, I feel like it's also a movie that not a whole lot of people have seen these days, but it's great. You should definitely watch it, and if you don't want anything spoiled, stop reading. It's my favourite Western I've reviewed so far, but it doesn't really feel like a Western aside from the setting. It's not about good cowboys and bad cowboys riding horses around and shooting each other; it's about how a few men find some gold and start to turn on each other. In ways, it's really more of a thriller than a Western. More shades of grey than I would consider a Western to usually contain
• Spoilers follow
• Especially going into this movie thinking it would just be a straightforward action/adventure, I really appreciated Humphrey Bogart's lead performance as Dobbs and the total subversion of my expectations. When we start the movie, Dobbs is down on his luck and, while he was never the most admirable character, he was decent enough and I was at least sympathetic towards him. But as the plot progresses he gets more and more greedy, paranoid and self-serving, until, in my opinion, he becomes the outright villain of the film. It's a really great character arc and not at all what I anticipated, and the scene in which Dobbs meets his demise was my favourite of the movie, in part because of how sudden and anti-climactic it was
• And so, the actual protagonists of the movie are Dobbs' companions, Curtin and Howard. Curtin, played by Tim Holt, is honestly pretty forgettable. But Howard, played by Walter Huston, was my favourite part of the movie. Playing an old, experienced gold miner, Howard exemplified the "old prospector" trope, while also going against some of my assumptions. I've always pictured the old prospector as greedy and eccentric, with maybe a couple of screws loose. Howard is certainly eccentric, talking a mile a minute and not really caring if his conversation partner is keeping up, but he's not greedy. He's seen the chaos that greed can sow in a group, and he does what he can to avoid that. He's also quite wise, not only in the art of finding gold but also in the nature of human behaviour. Thankfully, though, he displays the most important character trait of an old prospector - when they find gold, he does an energetic little jig

• And they find the gold within the first 30 minutes of the movie! This isn't really a "gold finding" movie. It's more of a "gold found and shared and trying to keep it safe" movie, with the conflict coming from people having different opinions about how best to share it and keep it safe
• Walter Huston won a well-deserved Best Supporting Actor Oscar for this movie. I'd never seen him in anything else, but I'm definitely going to remember him in this, and it's the kind of performance that you'd watch the whole movie just to enjoy. He was certainly helped by his son, John, though. John Huston won the Oscars for directing and for screenplay. It's a really great script, with tons of memorable lines. The only Oscar Sierra Madre didn't win that it was nominated for was Best Picture, losing to Laurence Olivier's Hamlet
• Speaking of the script, for years if you asked anyone what the most famous line was from this movie, they probably would have said, "Badges? We don't need no stinking badges!" This line was repeated in various other movies and TV shows, most notably Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles, but ironically it's actually a misquote. The line from Sierra Madre, spoken by the antagonist Gold Hat (although I maintain that Dobbs is the real antagonist), goes, "Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges!" And I'm honestly a little perplexed by this being the most famous line from the movie. It's fine, and it's given a memorable delivery by Alfonso Bedoya, but as far as classic movie lines go it's kind of inconsequential to the movie as a whole
• There is some good action - there's a viscerally violent bar fight early on, and some good shootouts, although the gunplay is less important here than in other Westerns I've seen. The real thrills don't come from the action, though. They come from the ways that a bit of gold can change a man
• We'll be seeing another movie with John Huston directing and Humphrey Bogart starring quite a ways down the line - The Maltese Falcon is movie #26
• And finally, to wrap things up, I can hardly believe I made it all the way through this review without mentioning Gus Chiggins. Oh wait, I guess I did just mention him. Oh, cinnamon and gravy!

Up next: It's a big one! The Matrix, from 1999, the second-most recent movie on the AFI list (The Sixth Sense came a few months after). Let's see how deep the rabbit hole goes