‘The Treasure of the Sierra Madre’ A TALE OF ADVENTURE AND GREED

Both an action/adventure epic and a morality tale, John Houston’s “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” garnered the Best Picture Oscar and Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for the director back in 1948. The original source was an anti-capitalist novel, written in 1927 by a reclusive author named B. Tavern, whose identity remains a mystery to this day. Ostensibly an adventure epic, the plot is actually a Conradesque tale where it’s more about character than end result. We have three characters: Fred C. Dobbs (played brilliantly by Humphrey Bogart), a bum wandering the streets of Mexico begging for money; Fred bumps into another wanderer, Curtin, a good-hearted fellow who also wants out from the streets. They hook up with a grizzled old man named Howard, and take off to the Mexican mountains in search of gold.

The person of interest is Fred C. Dobbs, whose character-arch takes him from a fairly decent guy to a raving, paranoid lunatic overcome by greed. He represents the theme of the story—the deteriorating effect of greed on a man’s soul, while the wise old man Howard represents the antithesis, becoming the moral crutch of the story. Curtin is equally honest, more like a younger version of Howard, but even he falls under Dobbs increasing suspicion. With the discovery of gold, Dobbs disintegrates both morally and physically; even though Curtin saved his life in an earlier debacle he still distrusts him, to the point where he attempts to murder him. But Curtin escapes, and together with the old man they start to track down Dobbs, who has taken off with their gold. Yet Dobbs’s karma runs out, he’s thwarted by a group of bandits who ruthlessly kill him. The bandits unknowingly whisk off the gold-dust into the air. In the end no one gets the gold, not even Howard and Curtin. It’s a bleak ending, and even though the film has its occasional bouts of commercial sequences (shoot-outs etc) director Houston did not bailout with a syrupy, neat ending. Hence there is a kind of reality both thematically and pictorially—Houston brings the realism he captured in his war documentary days to the picture, with an edgy black and white look to the film. Furthermore, the movie was shot entirely on location in Mexico. The sun-soaked, cactus-ridden landscape melds in perfectly with the ragged trio—tested by rough terrain, lured by gold. Even though Howard and Curtin were never morally bankrupt as Dobbs, their collective greed for gold resulted in their

downfall.

The film does have its flaws, some scenes are obviously played out for mass commercial appeal while some are plain hokey (like the scene where Howard relaxes in the jungle, surrounded by Mexican maidens like a primitive king). But the ultimate theme/morale of greed and its power to degrade decent people—excellently shown in the character of Fred C. Dobbs—makes “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” more than an adventure film.