70 years since the release of John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

by JOANNE LAURIER

Tim Holt, Walter Huston and Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was recently screened at movie theaters in the US to mark 70 years since the film’s release in early January 1948. The showings were sponsored by Turner Classic Movies, Fathom Events and Warner Bros. Entertainment.

The classic film, based on the 1927 novel by German author B. Traven (published in English in 1935 to considerable success), is the tale of two down-and-out Americans in Mexico who join with an older prospector to dig for gold.

It is a drama about the transformation and degeneration of human beings as they become possessors, or believe they have become possessors, of considerable wealth. The movie comes out of Hollywood’s most radical and realistic period, between the end of World War II and the full onset of the “Red Scare.” Indeed, by the time of the release of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the liberal opposition to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the anticommunist blacklist, led by Huston, Humphrey Bogart and others, had already collapsed in large measure.

From the film’s first images, Huston is attentive to the acute social and economic realities that are also today’s dominant facts of life. In 1925, Fred C. Dobbs (Bogart), destitute in hot, dusty Tampico, Mexico on the Gulf of Mexico, has been reduced to bumming change from strangers, especially fellow Americans. In fact, Dobbs is so focused on the hands that either fumble for coins—or don’t—that he doesn’t notice he’s solicited cash three times from the same man (played by director Huston). Dobbs subsequently hooks up with another vagabond expatriate Bob Curtin (Tim Holt).

Dobbs and Curtin are recruited by a big-talking contractor, Pat McCormick (Barton MacLane), to work on setting up an oil rig for the princely sum of eight dollars a day. Under the blazing sun, they slave away for McCormick, only to be cheated out of their wages. Drinking in a cantina, the duo are informed about the contractor, who regularly fleeces “foreigners and half-baked Americans.” After a no-holds-barred confrontation with McCormick, they claim their hard-earned pay.

Soon afterward, the pair encounter an experienced, but penniless and more or less toothless, grizzled old gold prospector, Howard (Walter Huston, the director’s father). In their wretched flophouse, the subject of gold comes up. In a remarkable speech, brilliantly delivered in rapid-fire fashion, Howard gives them the lowdown, loosely basing himself on Marx’s theory of value: “A thousand men, say, go searchin’ for gold. After six months, one of ’em’s lucky—one out of the thousand. His find represents not only his own labor but that of 999 others to boot. That’s uh, 6,000 months, uh, 500 years scrambling over mountains, goin’ hungry and thirsty. An ounce of gold, mister, is worth what it is because of the human labor that went into the findin’ and the gettin’ of it.”

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