Review of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) by Nick R — 17 Jun 2009

The failed quest, fueled by ambition and frustrated by greed and internal dissension, was John Huston's favorite plot, appealing to the mixture of romantic and cynic that made up his character. From the Maltese Falcon (1941) to The Man Who Would Be King (1975) he played repeated variations on this theme - but The Treasure of the Sierra Madre presents it in something close to its archetypal form. Three ill-assorted American drifters in Mexico join forces to prospect for gold, find it, and -inevitably- in the end, snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and lose it again. Huston, always a great adaptor of literature for the screen, drew his story from a novel by the mysterious and reclusive writer B. Traven and, as ever, treated his source material with respect and affection, preserving much of Traven's laconic dialogue and sardonic outlook.

Despite the studio's opposition - because location filming, at least for A-list Hollywood productions, was rare in those days - Huston insisted on shooting almost entirely on location in Mexico, near an isolated village some 140 miles north of the capital. His intransigence paid off. The film's texture exudes the dusty aridity of the Mexican landscape, so that watching it you can almost taste the grit between your teeth; and the actors, exiled from the comfortable environment of the studio and having to contend with the elements, were pushed into giving taut, edgy performances. This fitted Treasure's theme: how people react under pressure. Whereas the old prospector (played by the director's father Walter Huston) and the naive youngster (cowboy-movie actor Tim Holt) hang on to their principles in the face of adversity and the temptation of gold, the paranoid Fred C. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart in one of his most memorably unsettling roles) cracks up and succumbs.

Huston's determination to shoot Treasure the way he wanted paid off for the studio too. Jack Warner initially detested the film, but it brought Warner Brothers not only a box-office smash hit but triumphs at the Academy Awards. Huston won Oscars for Best Director and Best Screenplay, while his father picked up the Best Supporting Actor Oscar. It was the first and - so far- only time a father-and-son team had won at the Awards.