The Treasure of the Sierra Madre- John Huston (1948)

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre begins with an image of Humphrey Bogart’s Fred Dobbs desperately surveying Mexican lotto numbers. On one hand, it’s a hero shot: a close-up that frames Bogey’s elastic, unimpeachable face and presents him as the hero he’s always been (and few directors knew how to introduce an actor like Huston did). On the other hand, rather than filming the opening shot from below to make Bogart seem larger-than-life, Huston positions the camera slightly above him, as if we and the lottery results are watching over Dobbs, judging him for his future sins. We are the force he’s reaching for, but also the force that will damn him. For the rest of the picture, Huston will continue to present honest, hard-working men and watch them objectively as they fall prey to the most despicable parts of their human nature.

In the first act we get a few establishing scenes that contextualize—but never really explain—why Dobbs and his associate Curtin are in Mexico. If they had to leave America without speaking the language or having any prospect of a job, we can assume the worst. Obviously in dire straits, Dobbs travels around with his hat in his hand, propositioning compatriots with “Stake a fellow American for a meal?” There’s also an episode in which he and Curtin work a construction job for two weeks only to be bilked out of the money they’ve earned. When they beat the money out of their crooked boss, they take only what he owes them from his overflowing wallet and throw the rest back into his face. They operate honestly in a dishonest world.

At a seedy dormitory, they run into Howard, a wizened prospector played by Huston’s father Walter, who won an Academy Award for his knowing performance. Howard spins stories of gold and its corrupting power, but Dobbs and Curtin only hear what they want to hear. They persuade him to go on one more dig. He agrees, they go on the trail, and they find gold. By this point we’re only a half-hour into the film. In the remaining three-quarters of the movie, the characters mistrust each other, double-cross each other, fend off bandits, and defend their own perverted logic with terrifying consequences. In the process, they paint the most vivid, convincing portrait of greed in the history of cinema.

In the scene at the dormitory, Dobbs insists that he would be satisfied with any sum of money he got from gold-mining. He would know when to stop. When he lusts after wealth later in the film and becomes its most vicious, paranoid character—lying, cheating, and even murdering to protect his fortune—this statement goes beyond irony because it doesn’t have the unexpected quality we’re usually looking for from that device. It proves how inevitable all of this corruption actually was.

The fact that Bogart was presented to us as the hero of the story makes his fall more tragic but, again, not more surprising. In the universe Huston has created, this is simply what happens. (It’s not surprising to learn that Paul Thomas Anderson claims to have fallen asleep to the film every night while writing There Will Be Blood, a film with a similarly pernicious moral landscape.) Fate hands Dobbs death, but only because his own flawed devices brought him down. He’s a classic tragic hero, right down to his final speech about the inevitable nagging of conscience.

If there’s a complaint to be made about the picture—it might be perfect—it’s that Huston’s directorial presence is too controlling over it. It seems remote and moralistic at times, the characters drifting into ethical quicksand because the film requires it of them, not because of true motivation.

But I think that’s sort of the point. This gold dehumanizes them. As each man becomes more protective and suspicious, he becomes less loyal and empathetic. They always thought they could distance themselves from the pitfalls of the gold, but it ends up distancing them from their own virtue. (This disconnect is nailed in every aspect of the film. For example, for minutes at a time, none of the Spanish spoken in the film is subtitled. We’re placed in the same frustrating, helpless communication breakdown the Dobbs and company are.) Bogart in particular plays the second half of the film in a doomed trance, unhinged and reckless. The men are under the spell of greed, and Huston suggests that we would be too.

The corrupting power of greed is not just a seductive danger in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre; it is a foregone conclusion. It is necessary and unavoidable, and perhaps that’s what forges the film as such a pessimistic view of human nature. Dobbs gets his comeuppance, and Curtin and Howard lose everything but their lives and souls. But by comparison, they’re the “heroes” of the story. Doesn’t that say it all? The hero is not the person who does something noble or selfless. It’s the person least affected and destroyed by evil, the guy who breaks even in this exhausting test of character. The possibility that that’s the best we have to hope for is what marks the film as the chilling and enduring masterpiece it is.