The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)

Directed by John Huston

Of course, you knew I’d choose for our Film of the Week something with mountains in it, right? I’m ambivalent about the first film that came to my mind, the late western Ride the High Country, Randolph Scott’s farewell to the screen, even though it features Scott and one of our favorite actors here at Word and Song, the straight-arrow, understated Joel McCrea. If you want to see McCrea in one tense situation after another, requiring honesty and courage, better to go to Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent than to Sam Peckinpah’s saga of violence and gross stupidity. But for mountains, and for the separation from ordinary life and law and order that the mountains offer, if “offer” is the right word, then The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is the place to go.

“There’s gold in them thar hills!” was the cry of the forty-niners that followed John Sutter into California, and later on, it was the same call of quick wealth and wild adventure that brought men into the Klondike, swelling the outpost of Dawson into a bustling little city of more than 9,000 people, though the average high temperature up there in December and January is below 0, Fahrenheit. Hollywood made films about Dawson and the Yukon, and there was plenty of rowdy living in those days of the gold rush, but in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the threats from bad weather and bad men figure in a different way. You do have the desert, and the exhaustion of going without water for a long way; and you have outlaws, robbers in the hills, one of the worst of them going by the name of Gold Hat, a Mexican who pretends to be one of the “Federales,” the federal police, the better to rob a man of his gold. But what you mainly have is the human heart: the mountains of the mind — “cliffs of fall,” as the poet Hopkins puts it, “frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.” What will gold do, or the desire for gold, to the three American men who make their way into Mexico, to a secret place in the Sierra Madre, to find it? One of those men, Fred Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart, in one of his greatest performances), is already bad before the gold bug gets him, but his friend Bob Curtin (Tim Holt) often wavers between the pull of good and evil. As for the third man, Howard (Walter Huston), he’s an older man, the only one of the three who knows a deal about prospecting, and the only one who speaks Spanish. He’s no saint. But he’s the moral center of the tale, a man who wants the gold but who can also live without it.

The complication in the plot arrives when a fourth man, Cody (Bruce Bennett), notices Curtin buying supplies at a Mexican trading post, and guesses that he must be looking for gold. He follows Curtin secretly up to the mine, and when he reveals himself, he offers to the three men to keep quiet about everything, and to lend his back and his shoulders to the hard work, if they would share the profits with him. They resent his intrusion, and they vote to — well, do otherwise than share. But Gold Hat shows up, and some genuine Mexican soldiers too, before the prospectors actually do what they had voted on. Cody is killed in the gunfight, and it turns out that he was a good man, with a wife and a family. And that plants a seed of human conversion in the souls of two of the prospectors. Not Dobbs, though.

I’ve often said that the old Star Trek series was Gunsmoke in outer space, but then, the best of the old westerns were morality plays, which used that west, that mythic area beyond the verge of civilization, to examine the darker corners of the human heart, and the possibility that a man might just become human indeed, by virtue of denying himself, and perhaps by offering to lay down his life even for those who will not thank him for it. That’s what you’re encouraged to think about in this film. The “treasure” is not the pearl of great price, but people treat it as if it were, and that’s always the case when we make some created thing into an idol. Still, even a mistaken treasure can be the occasion for finding the true one.

What John Huston believed about God and religious faith, I don’t know; but I can say with confidence that he did not simply dismiss them. He was, shall we say, certainly haunted by them, and that was all the better for his films. We are made to think that what these men choose is of eternal consequence. Walter Huston, the director’s father, has a perfectly grand time as Howard, and though it’s hard to steal a scene from Bogart, Huston’s performance often puts him in the shade. Walter Huston won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, and his son John won the Oscar for Best Director. I don’t know that we’ll ever see such a combination again.

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