The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Bogart's greatest performance, as a guy first outta luck, then outta his mind.
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). Grade: A
One of the cool things about this silly blog/project/hobby/whatever this is has been rethinking my attitude towards “movie classics.”
When I first started watching “movie classics,” in my teens, it was sheer pretension. Newsflash: teens are pretentious! They want to think they’re smarter than anybody else! So I’d seek out movies that were big critical favorites, listed on all the lists, and watch them so I could say “I’ve seen movie X, this makes me a Deep Person.”
Which is profoundly silly.
Having viewed/read/listened to any great art doesn’t make you a Deep Person. Compassion does. If you would rather listen to ABBA than Beethoven, but you use your experience as a human to empathize with and help others (when you can help, you can’t always), you are a decent human. If you would rather listen to Beethoven, consider ABBA trash, and think of ABBA fans as ignorant sludge beneath your notice, you’re a giant flaming s**thead. (And if you’d rather listen to Beethoven, consider ABBA trash, and are a kind human, you’re a kind human and that’s what counts. This isn’t complicated!)
When I first started dating Mrs. twinsbrewer, I would routinely demand that she watch “classic movies” with me, as a way of “educating” her about Film History.
How completely boring! It’s a wonder she didn’t dump me there and then.
Now, when we watch “classic movies,” it’s a mutual decision. “This one’s about this, have any interest?” If not, it’s “watch it on yer own time, hon.” And it makes watching good ones together that much more fun.
You should watch “classic movies” because you’re curious about them. Not because it makes you Deep (it doesn’t). Because you’re interested in watching a thing you’ve heard or read about, and it sounds like something you might enjoy. That’s it.
Along those lines, I would NOT recommend The Treasure of the Sierra Madre to anyone who wasn’t familiar with movies of the period. And I’d strongly suggest seeing other Bogart movies of the period first. I think it’s a tremendous film. But I also think it’s best enjoyed if you already enjoy 1940s movies, and if you already enjoy Bogart.
Watching older movies is a bit like reading older books. The words may all be ones you understand, but the way they’re placed is not the way we’d place them now. You have to get used to that sort of style, so that it isn’t jarring to you anymore. That’s easier when reading an old book, since you read a book at whatever pace you like. You can ease your way in. A movie runs at the speed it runs at, whether you’re used to the style or not.
The easiest old movies for modern audiences to watch are, I think, the ones with funny lines in them. Something like The Big Sleep or Ninotchka. A lot of the jokes still hold up well. And they’re funny enough that you don’t mind how the pacing is very different than a modern movie. (Or mind, with The Big Sleep, how certain parts of the plot are making Absolutely No Sense… although that’s something modern audiences will be familiar with, too.)
Go watch The Big Sleep before this one; maybe watch To Have and Have Not, too. Definitely, watch The Maltese Falcon. That’s the key one. Pauline Kael wrote, about that movie, and its Bogart character, detective Sam Spade:
“‘By shooting the material from Spade’s point of view, [this] makes it possible for the audience to enjoy Spade’s petty, sadistic victories and his sense of triumph as he proves he’s tougher than anybody. Spade was left a romantic figure, although he’s only a few steps away from the psychopathic “Nobody ever put anything over on Fred C. Dobbs” of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which was a box-office failure — perhaps because the audience was forced to see what was inside the hero.’”
When Kael was on, she was ON. That’s exactly what this movie is. It’s the tough guy, the guy who knows better than everyone, shown to be a complete jerk. The whole point of knowing more things is to share that knowledge! If it’s to be one step ahead of everybody else, how lonely is that? By the end of Sierra Madre, pretty lonely indeed.
So that may not sound like an interesting movie to you, right now. Then, don’t make yourself watch this! Watch the other Bogarts instead. And if/when you become interested in the darker sides of some of the characters he portrays, come back to this one. It’ll still be there. And maybe libraries still will, too.
What’s notable about the Bogart character here, to me today (I’ve probably seen this five times or so over the years), is that he’s quite bright, but he’s such a colossal clod. He’s very sharp on his feet; he’s quick to assess what the situation is. But he’s also quick to take that first assessment and absolutely decide it’s 100% true, unless somebody else talks him down from it right away. Once he gets a notion in his noggin and it sticks there, there’s no reasoning with the guy. I have KNOWN people like this. And so have you.
There’s a great little moment when the three mining partners are discussing their future dreams. (The plot involves gold mining. They’re prospectors, hoping to strike it rich.) One talks about investing in fruit trees, because he has always loved harvest season. Another talks about retiring, since he’s getting on in years, and wouldn’t need a ton of money to be reasonably comfortable the rest of his days. Then Bogart describes his dream as buying the fanciest suit, then going to the fanciest restaurant and sending all the food back because it wasn’t good enough. The other two slowly look at each other like, “oh, CRAP. This guy is bonkers, and we’re out here in the middle of nowhere with him…”
So, back to the plot. It’s a decent-sized town in Mexico. Bogart is an American who’s wound up there, for some reason, and he’s really down on his luck. Begging strangers for money; taking an odd job where the employer won’t actually pay anybody. He runs into some other hard-luck Americans in town, and one of them knows an awful lot about gold prospecting. If they could only get the money together for equipment, maybe that might be worth a try… it’d be no worse than begging from strangers.
This opening setup, about 20 minutes long,1 might be something that modern audiences find dull. Again, if you’ve watched older movies, it won’t seem dull to you; it’s just how stories were paced back then. But a modern viewer might wonder why doesn’t the movie get to the plot, already? Because it’s a setup for everything else that follows. It’s a setup for why the Bogart character is so quick to think people are swindling him; people frequently HAVE. And, in a way, you can even see why he’s got such shallow dreams about lording it over others, since he’s humiliated by others lording it over him. (You can see it, but you won’t like it; he’s really a d**k to a poor kid, right away.)2
This is based on a 1927 novel by one “B. Traven,” and there’s a lot of speculation about who “B. Traven” actually was. Probably a German rebel/anarchist/anti-capitalist sort, although nobody knows for sure. Or knows for sure if “B. Traven” was actually his name. In a Making Of feature on the library DVD we got, it says that Traven had a mysterious “representative” on the set of Sierra Madre as a technical advisor. Some time after the movie came out, Traven said the “representative” was actually him. Director John Huston refused to believe it — how could a scrawny nerdy dude be the guy who wrote about such ruff-’n’-tuff prospectors? Maybe John should have listened to the characters in his script! They underestimate the old guy’s toughness, and he’s more of a backwoods badass then they are. Same goes for nerds, sometimes…
Huston wrote the book adaptation. When he’d first started making movies, his dad Walter — a popular and well-respected stage/screen actor — told him that, someday, he should write a role for his dad. And so John did. I haven’t read the book, so I don’t know how much of the “wily old prospector” comes from the novel, or comes from John Huston’s imagination. In any case, it’s an absolutely fabulous role for Walter. It’s his fast-talking “Mr. Scratch” from The Devil and Daniel Webster zapped even further into verbal overdrive. But this guy’s the opposite of a know-it-all. He knows enough to know how foolish he himself can be. When somebody disagrees with him, he shrugs and says “you might be right” (unless they’re dead damn wrong). If Bogart’s the dark soul of the movie, Huston’s the light — he’s what Bogart could be if he wasn’t so pickled by petty insecurities all the time.
(In a way, Bogart would play a version of this character a few years later in John Huston’s The African Queen, where he knows everything there is to know about his boat and that river… but he’s not so hardheaded that he won’t let Katharine Hepburn tell him what to do. I personally think it quite wise to let Katharine Hepburn tell you what to do, I would!)
Tim Holt is really solid as the third mining partner. Holt had a very strange career. He became known, mostly, for cheesy Westerns, and devoted a lot of time to rodeos. So, naturally, he was born in Oklahoma. Oh, wait — he died in Oklahoma. He was born in Beverly Hills. Which granted, wasn’t quite the richy-rich area in Holt’s childhood as it is today, but it wasn’t exactly the dusty cow trail either. Holt had the main role in Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons, and was quite convincing as a spoiled rotten annoying twit. He’s basically asked to be the straight man, here, and does a very good job of it. He’s the counterpoint to Bogart’s growing paranoia and Huston’s high-speed cynical optimism. (If you’re wondering what “cynical optimism” could possibly mean, Walter Huston in this will define it for you.)
Of note, too, are Bruce Bennett as a too-clever-for-his-own good opportunist, and prolific Mexican actor Alfonso Bedoya as a bandit leader. Bennett was a Olympic medal-winning shotputter, of all things, and originally cast to play Tarzan in the 1930s jungle-silliness movies. But he broke his shoulder filming a football movie called, how creatively, Touchdown, and swimming star Johnny Weissmuller became Tarzan instead. Bedoya is both a hoot and a threat as the bandit; this guy likes to play dumb so you’ll trust him, then slit your throat once you do. He’s got a great scene near the end where he’s trying to bargain with/decieve the cops, and it’s all in Spanish with no subtitles. Bedoya makes what’s being said perfectly plain just from his face, vocal tones, body language. Huston was right not to use subtitles; Bedoya doesn’t need any stinkin’ subtitles!
This isn’t perfect (no movie longer than 20 minutes is). There’s a pretty silly sequence where Walter Huston is asked to help revive an injured mountain-village child. Two problems: A) methinks the villagers would be perfectly capable of handling this situation themselves and B) Max fuggin’ Steiner. Steiner lays on the heavenly choir during this scene, and what? Huh? HUH, MAX? (Also, “huh, John?” for Huston allowing this lousy music in his movie.) The main theme isn’t godawfully horrible, but the “dramatic highpoints” stuff is nearing there. Basically, when you see Max Steiner’s name in movie credits, you had just better hope the story’s good enough to make you ignore the music. And this one is.
So’s The Maltese Falcon, which Steiner also does his best to ruin and mercifully fails. And that’s one I’m basically going to demand you watch before you watch this. They’re both great, you’re not getting shortchanged. It’s just that this Bogart performance will have more impact, I think, if you know what he’s doing a variation from. The African Queen is a good one that’s easy to enjoy, too.
Why wasn’t John Huston ever considered one of the “great” directors? This and Falcon and Queen enough are better than almost any three movies anybody’s ever made. Was it because Huston has a lot of duds, too? OK — but then why do critics forgive Hitchcock for his duds? They are just as bad if not worse. And Hitchcock, who did some very fun films, never did anything as good as this or Falcon — or The Dead, for that matter. Eh, who cares. John Huston had a very fun time making movies, and that’s what matters. This took awhile to make its money back, finally turning a profit after being rereleased a few times (what movies would do before home video came along). The budget got a little high, not because there were any production difficulties — because John Huston was enjoying the heck out of himself in Mexico. And that’s one reason movie studios were pretty nervous about shooting on location back in the day!
21:37, if the Internet Archive copy runs at the right speed, which I think it does.
That kid — the one selling lottery tickets — is played by Robert Blake. Yes, THAT Robert Blake. The creepy-a** guy from Lost Highway who in 2001 very probably murdered his girlfriend. That dude. You still won’t like Bogart being mean to him, though. He hadn’t murdered anybody yet!