Ill-Informed Gadfly

I was excited to see this, but the rave I expected to write won’t quite materialize here. John Huston’s macho 1948 adventure was impressive and entertaining, but not the thrill I had hoped for. It’s very predictable — an early speech by Walter Huston about the perils of prospecting for gold pretty much lays out the entire plot — and it lacks psychological complexity, particularly in a showy lead performance by Humphrey Bogart.

Bogart’s Fred C. Dobbs begins as an essentially decent, down-and-out fellow with a bit of a mean streak — he throws water in the face of an annoying kid who tries to sell him a lottery ticket. But when confronted with instant riches, he immediately loses all self-awareness, behaving as if he’s trying to prove true everything that wise old Howard (Huston) said about gold corrupting men’s souls. We don’t see the insidious influence of potential wealth grow slowly — gold transforms him abruptly and saps the movie of dramatic tension. We have little doubt that in every situation, Dobbs will do the wrong thing. I prefer Bogart working in a more restrained emotional palette, as in “Casablanca” or “The Big Sleep.”

Much about the movie is terrific, starting with the two other leads, Huston and Tim Holt. Huston, who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, brings a chipper fatalism to Howard, who knows everything about how to find and mine gold but has never gotten rich from it. Huston creates a wry, sardonic and fiercely intelligent prospector: Watch his perfectly evenhanded responses when Dobbs starts talking about how they should divide up the gold between themselves as they go along. Howard has been here before, and he knows he’s powerless. And Holt, as the straight man, shows what Bogart cannot: the tension of virtue being tested by wealth and one’s devious fellow man.

But the real star of “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” is John Huston’s direction. He’s an intensely physical filmmaker who conveys through his images how it’s not just the weakness of men that ultimately makes it impossible to cash in on a gold strike. It’s the harsh, unforgiving nature of the landscape. Shooting largely on location, Huston creates a tactile sense of place and of man’s antagonistic relationship to his environment. He wants things to look real, not pretty. He makes his intentions clear early, in a sloppy and ugly fight scene in which Bogart and Holt need every bit of their strength to beat up a corrupt contractor who’s ripped them off. Later, as the effort to bring the gold to market becomes increasingly nightmarish, Huston eloquently communicates through his images the idea of the land reclaiming the gold from the men who extracted it. It’s almost a corny conceit, but Huston makes it bleak and harrowing.