The Treasure of Sierra Madre (1948)

In 1926, sixteen years after the start of the Mexican Revolution but still a few years before it is officially over, somewhere near Durango, Mexico, American ex-patriates Fred C. Dobbs (Bogart), and Bob Curtin (Tim Holt) are down and out on their luck for some reason or other.

They can’t get work with anyone other than American companies, and these are just as likely to take advantage of them as not.

Misery loves company, so as a trio congregates a stroke of luck allows them to buy the necessary equipment to go and prospect for gold with old veteran prospector Howard (Walter Huston) they meet at a flophouse.

Though set on the East coast of Mexico, this is still a sort of Western.

It uses the visual language of Westerns, at least; but with an authentic, dangerous (when menacing Indians appear at their camp bearing machetes you fear for the characters' safety,) raggedy, muddy, dusty, sweaty feel which would be considered groundbreaking even decades later, (when we saw Marty McFly’s ancestors drink muddy water we thought ‘this is what it really must have been’ I guess we forgot the image of Dobbs drinking mud along his burro!) but was probably begun here.

It’s a sort of moral fable where greed leads to no good; and where sinners are punished and the nicer, more civilized folk who can resist their (admitted) greedy, murderous impulses they were repeatedly are warned about (“Do you believe what that old man who was doin' all the talkin' at the Oso Negro said the other night about gold changin' a man's soul so that he ain't the same kind of a guy that he was...” a character who initially steals only what he is owed later betrays his fellows for their full shares,) are simply taught an expensive lesson.

By the conclusion the still poor, but wiser surviving characters good-humoredly feel as if they are the butt of a divine joke, even though the supernatural force seems to be a nondescript providence (which never pushes them harder than they can handle and always provides for a bit of relief after a period of suffering,) blended with Mother Nature (to whom, represented by the mountain, and under the advice of the old geezer they pay their respects to.)

The film is filled with little nice touches which equally humanizes all of them and grounds their universe: Repeatedly begging money from the same guy without realizing it (Dobbs is so self-absorbed he does not notice,) a hat, which after a much-delayed haircut no longer fits; the lousy looking, self-rolled cigarettes they smoke; the proper order for drinking tequila, salt, lemon; bandits eyeing their victim’s boots, and stealing pants hardly worth stealing; etc.

Bogart is the epitome of paranoia and greed.

This is one of those Classic, perfect films no one would dare change a single thing, (nitpicking about how gold and wind interact in reality would be simply ungrateful,) …and it didn’t win the Best Picture for that year? Hamlet? Which would you rather watch?

Funny, dramatic, tragic, nearly a Horror movie (The Tell-Tale Heart, anyone?) at a point; with one of the greatest film villains ever (Alfonso Bedoya as Gold Hat); and arguably one of the greatest American pictures of all time.

Essential watching.