The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)

               Bogart, Huston and Holt

'The Treasure of the Sierra Madre' is an American adventure film made in 1948 by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart, Tim Holt and Walter Huston, the director's father.

Jack Warner initially detested the film, but it brought Warner Brothers not only a 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. The film was also nominated for the Best Picture award, but lost to Laurence Olivier's 'Hamlet'.

The film is generally regarded as a classic and in 1990, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

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' in 1941 to 'The Man Who would Be King' in 1975 he played repeated variations on this theme - but 'The Treasure of the Sierra Madre' presents it in something close to its purest form.

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Three ill-assorted American drifters in Mexico in 1925 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 all the outdoor scenes 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 (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. There is a wonderful final scene with the youngser and the old-timer laughing when they discover that after all their effort the gold they found has blown back to the place where they found it.