Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The (DVD)

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"Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinkin' badges!" --Alfonso Bedoya, "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre"

It was daring of Humphrey Bogart to take on the role of a greedy, gritty, down-on-his-luck drifter as he did in the 1948 adventure yarn "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre." After all, he had spent most of the 1930s typecast as a movie gangster, finally breaking the mold with his cynical, hard-boiled private eye Sam Spade in "The Maltese Falcon" (1941) and reaching the zenith of romanticized, world-weary antiheroes with Rick in "Casablanca" (1942). Why go back to bad guys?

But when Bogart learned that John Huston, who had directed him in "Falcon," was doing the picture, it didn't take much to persuade him to climb aboard. The role turned out to be among the actor's finest work, but at the time it didn't win him many new friends. Although the movie got good notices and a ton of awards, it did not go over well with audiences. Bogart's part was considered too much of a contrast for viewers who wanted only to see him as a heroic leading man, and the movie's script was too much of a downer to appreciate. "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" would not acquire its classic status until many years after its initial release, thanks largely to television, which is where I came to it in the late fifties, more than a decade after it was made. I loved it immediately, as did a whole new generation of movie fans.

Based on a best-selling book by the reclusive and mysterious B. Traven, the movie's screenplay was written by its director, John Huston. The writer/director/actor had wanted to do the film for many years, but World War II had interrupted his career, and it wasn't until 1947 that production finally started, most of it shooting on location in Mexico.

The story is not so much an adventure in the action-adventure sense, as it is an adventure of the mind. Not that it doesn't have its fair share of action, to be sure, but it's more of a character study, overall, a treatise on the effects of gold and the expectation of wealth on human nature. It's a profound examination of mistrust and avarice, leading to greed, deception, and murder.

The time setting is 1925, the place Tampico, Mexico, where Bogart plays a scroungy, penniless, out-of-work fellow with the singularly unromantic name of Fred C. Dobbs. He's panhandling money from anyone he can find and cursing his bad luck. It's in Tampico that he meets an equally penniless young man, Bob Curtin, played by Tim Holt, and an old prospector, Howard, played by John Huston's father, the noted stage and screen actor Walter Huston. After several discouraging attempts at making money, including a wasted week working on an oil rig, the three decide to throw in together and look for gold in the rugged Sierra Madre Mountains. But finding the gold is the easy part; getting it back is what's hard. Their good fortune is both a blessing and a curse. Not only must they face bandits, they must face one another and their inner conflicts.

The movie owes most of its achievement to its superior acting and direction. Bogart might best be known for his role as Rick in "Casablanca," but as Dobbs he does his most intense work since "The Petrified Forest." It's a wonder of the screen to watch Dobbs's character deteriorate before our eyes as he slowly loses control and plunges into an abyss of madness. It's likewise a wonder why Bogart was not so much as nominated for an Academy Award for the role, one of the great and many oversights in the Academy's history.

Walter Huston, known to movie audiences for his acting in films like "Dodsworth," "Yankee Doodle Dandy," "And Then There Were None," "Duel in the Sun," and "The Devil and Daniel Webster," is ideal as the patient, optimistic, easygoing old-timer. The book's author, B. Traven, had wanted an even older man, but serendipity prevailed. Tim Holt may have seemed an odd choice for Curtin. Holt had played a series of B-movie Western heroes prior to "Treasure," and he would return to the B-movie fold when the film was over; but in the meantime he, too, is outstanding as the noble young man unwilling to compromise his values for the sake of money. His inherent naïveté provides a faultless counterpoint to the grasping Dobbs.

The supporting cast is no less formidable. Movie tough guy Barton MacLane plays the larcenous con-man Pat McCormick, who indirectly gives Dobbs and Curtin the impetus to go looking for gold. Bruce Bennett, formerly an Olympic shot-putter and a veteran of many Hollywood film roles, including that of Tarzan (as Herman Brix), was well chosen for Cody, the man who insinuates himself into the prospectors' lives, bringing a touch of poignancy to the story in the process. And then there's Alfonso Bedoya as Gold Hat, the Mexican bandito who utters the celebrated words about "stinkin' badges" that have become as famous as the movie itself. He is brutish and charming at the same time, a characteristic that might apply to the film as well.

Huston moves the proceedings along at a healthy clip, and although the picture is perhaps a trifle lengthy at 126 minutes, it doesn't seem that long. There are events toward the end of the film that I've always felt could have been trimmed to make the story line tighter, and there are a few studio-shot scenes that would have worked better if filmed on location along with so much of the rest of the film, but these are trifling matters in the long run of things. Seldom does perfection reach off the screen and grab a viewer so closely.

Now a word about the music. It was unjustly overlooked at the time of the film's release, Max Steiner's score thought to be too theatrical and melodramatic for the seriousness of the subject matter. I quite disagree. Steiner had revolutionized the way we listen to movies over a dozen years before with his score for "King Kong," and he is no less triumphant here. In fact, his music for "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" is among the best ever written, and if you want to hear just how good it is, I recommend the 1999 Marco Polo CD of the complete, restored score (Marco Polo 8.225149), performed by William T. Stromberg and the Moscow Symphony Orchestra. I know that a Russian ensemble seems an unlikely group to be recording Hollywood film music, but they and the Marco Polo label (a subsidiary of Naxos) have been successful doing a whole series of classic film scores recently, and this one is the best of the lot. Listening to Steiner's music, restored by John Morgan, the man responsible for many other Marco Polo releases, one can picture every detail of the movie's plot and hear it in stereo sound of vivid clarity, impact, and depth.