I just wish...

...that this film had some wildly quotable section.  I'd really like it if that quote was misquoted all the time, also.  What?  COOL.

A film that I loved...LOVED...on my first viewing on this stop on the list of the AFI Top 100 (10th Anniversary Edition).

Film 87

87. "The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre" (AFI Rank #38)

The last blogpost I did I confessed to certain prejudices.  Welp.  Guilty.  Again.  I will say that in this case, it's about the poster.  It shows Bogart in his typical Sam Spade style hat, and I always assumed it was a film along the lines of "The Maltese Falcon."   Until I actually WATCHED "The Maltese Falcon," of course, that movie had always bored me.  Why would I sign up for the same thing with this one?  I'm an idiot.

It is inconceivable to me, now that I've seen this film, that I haven't seen it before.  It is everything that I love in a movie/story.  It has grandeur, it has small moments, it has strong moral leanings, it has weak moral leanings, it has good guys choosing to be bad guys, it has good guys choosing to be better guys.  I'm decidedly, and unabashedly, a lover of "male-oriented" stories.  That doesn't mean I like "Men's Movies" - which are usually associated with gunshots and explosions, etc.  No, what I love, deeply, are stories in which men are pitted against each other by wits, or by rivalry, or whatever.  I don't need them to blow shit up, but I do need them to explode each other's intellects.  I could probably write a whole essay on why so many of the films in the Top 100 are dude films (the last 13 I have left are almost exclusively dude films), but I'm not going to.  Whatever.  I ain't alone in my thinking, methinks.

This film was directed by John Huston, marking his third appearance on the list.  His efforts in the list include the aforementioned "The Maltese Falcon," and "The African Queen."  Here.  I'm going to make another confession.  I like "The African Queen" better now that I've seen THIS movie.  That's irrelevant, but it speaks to the genius of this film.  Adapted from a book by a recluse named B. Traven (who, according to several sources, hung out on the set pretending to be a representative of the author's - but no one knew what Traven looked like), John Huston wrote the screenplay for this one, as well as directing it.  This piece of art, I submit, was Huston's great masterpiece.  Yes, "The Maltese Falcon" is the more populist choice, but that film doesn't pack the emotional punch that this one does.  Why this one?  Well...let's get into that...

This film's premise is simple enough:  3 American strangers brought together by a series of circumstances in Tampico, Mexico, head off to the hills to find their fortune in gold.  They do, actually, find it.  They find a LOT of it.  They pull $105,000 worth of gold from the hills..when gold was worth $20 an ounce.  For those of you keeping score, that's 328 pounds.  Today the market for gold is $1260/oz.  That means their take, in modern terms, is $6,615,000.  That's a LOT of gold, and a LOT of money.  What they also find is a whole lot of trouble that comes along with that, including gluttony, envy, greed, sloth, pride, wrath, and a tinge of lust.  Well.  That doesn't sound so simple any more.  And it's not.  This film is a remarkable morality tale, set in a rather mundane adventure tale.  Yes, there are bandits.  Yes, there are guns fired.  Yes, guns result in deaths.  What we are presented with, however, is how man treats his fellow man, especially as man feels threatened.  It's stirring stuff.

I don't often get into the writing on these reviews, but this time I'm going to touch on it, if briefly.  Written by John Huston, this script takes its time to make some specific character choices which have to matter.  Early in the film, Fred Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart) is panhandling.  He is able to convince an American in a white suit (played by Huston) to give him a total of 4 pesos.  The first he uses to get a meal...and a lottery ticket.  The second he uses to get a haircut and a shave...and the third and fourth...well.  We don't really see the results of those (unless I'm not remembering correctly), but the first two are key.  It must be a different kind of man who cashes in everything and moves to Mexico to seek his fortune.  That kind of man must be a gambler, through and through.  That we see Dobbs use the little bit of money he has to pamper himself...well.  I think there's a statement there, and it's made in the writing.  Later, that lottery ticket pays off, and Dobbs comes into probably enough money to get home...and get out of a very unwelcoming Mexico.  Instead of doing that, he takes his winnings and invests it into the tools needed to set up a gold prospecting adventure with fellow Americans Howard (Walter Huston), a grizzled prospector who's made and lost fortunes, and Bob Curtin (Tim Holt), a man he met while working for a sleazy American named McCormick.  What we get through these moments, so well written, is a real sense of the kind of men we're dealing with.  Howard just wants another adventure, and maybe enough gold to never worry about money again.  Curtin wants a way home.  Dobbs wants to be rich.  Really rich.  He wants to spend every dime on the finest things life has to offer.  All of this is carefully written using a real economy of language/storytelling.  It's great.

Direction in this film, if it is defined by techincal prowess combined with an attention to small details that build relationships between actors, could not be better.  It is little wonder that John Huston took home the Oscar for Best Director, even if the film did not win for Best Picture.  We get stunning vistas.  We get a shadowy fight scene.  We get moments of pure genius from the actors, who show us things that a director must have seen.  Late in the film we find Dobbs, dying of thirst, and within sight of his goal with $105,000 worth of gold that he's keeping for himself (you'll have to watch it to see why), stopping to plunge his head into a muddy puddle, gulping water like a fiend.  Tell me a chill doesn't go up your spine when you see the oft-quoted bandit, and man they call "Gold Hat," standing there in the reflection of the water.  Bogart's acting in that moment is so good you can almost touch it.  All that we've built with this character is now gone.  He's helpless, and he knows.  We know it.  The bandits know it.  It's a tremendous scene.  It's the kind of thing that a director builds.

Beyond that, it could get really old that Dobbs is always paranoid, or that Curtin is always "good," or that Howard is just loony enough not to give a shit about anything.  Except Huston takes the time to make sure that each man in this film is all of those things.  We see the dominant characteristics of each one of them meld into the other two as well.  Howard gets paranoid.  Curtin gets loony, and Dobbs gets "good."  It's great stuff.  As the film progresses, we see the ravages of time and wealth, and the toll they take on the men.  We see them ready to kill a fellow American who happens upon their mine.  I want to relate a personal story.  I was in college, and I was blown out of my mind one night on whatever the hell mind-altering substance I took, mushrooms maybe?  Anyway, I was not on mood-altering drugs, I was on mind-altering drugs.  We went to a reservoir to party, and it was raining a little.  It was kind of a miserable night, weather-wise, and mood-wise.  I'd been struggling with a lot, and I was in a bad, bad place.  Should NOT have taken hallucinogens that night.  After we'd been out there a while in this barely rain, some other friends showed up.  I looked at them.  They were dry.  I looked at us.  We were soaked to the bone, and hadn't realized it.  I freaked out about how out of touch with reality I was in that moment and how I just wanted to be dry.  Something about this scene with the nice American showing up feels a lot like that moment.  We see these guys' sins exposed because they realize what they've become.  Eventually, they make a horrific decision, perhaps to deal with that feeling.  Whatever.  Later, we see their reaction to him being killed by the bandits, and it's quite different to what they felt before.  We see the seven deadly sins overtake each man, in one way or another.  We also see the passage of time.  Even if the wealth wasn't there, there is no doubt that 11 months living in the hills with two other men takes a toll on a person.  That aspect is perhaps glossed over, but Huston doesn't spare it, if he just dabs it into the painting he's making.

Also of note should be the use of the bandits throughout the film.  When we first meet them, there are a couple dozen of them.  The next time, maybe 9, maybe 12.  The next time...there's three.  As time goes on, something happens to these men as well.  Some of them are killed by our protagonists, some likely are killed by Federales, some likely moved on.  In any case, their lessening stature throughout the film is a mirror to the lessening of the three men we spend the film with.  Yes, they seem inconsequential.  I don't think it's an accident that we see their ravishment.  Oh, yeah, and the "stinkin' badges" thing is cinematic gold.

I've not seen Bogart do better work.  Dobbs is a great role for him.  He gets to be a tough guy, sure, but Bogart also gets to play defeated.  He gets to play paranoid.  He gets to play exhausted.  He gets to play...well.  He gets to play.  It's a man's man role, and Bogart was a man's man.  Tim Holt is the glue that holds the picture together.  Playing with iconic Bogart and with the performance that Walter Huston turns in (more in a moment), it would be easy for Holt to be run over in this.  It is his Curtin, however, that grounds the piece, that makes the risks taken by the icon and the old man make sense.  If Holt had been a lesser actor, the other two would have been diminished in return.  That Holt consistently stands up in the scenes he is in is a tribute to his skill with this role.  He never became a major star, but this film is an example of how a "never became a major star" actor can absolutely lend greatness to a piece of art.  I'm gushing.  I loved Holt.

As much as I loved Bogart and Holt, the acting shown by Walter Huston in this...is otherworldly.  Goofy as fuck on occasion, this role shows a wide range of emotions, and Huston is more than up to the task.  The quiet moments of regret, of sentiment, of heroic vision, of...wisdom...are amazing.  You can almost feel the emotion run up your back that he expresses at times.  Huston won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for this film.  It was...well...it was deserved, to say the least.  Like other films I've watched in this quest, the old man with a heart of gold is an iconic archetype, and Huston absolutely relishes it.

I can't say too much more without giving away more of the film than I'd like.  I did that for "Double Indemnity," I'm not going to do it here.  Here's the skinny.  This is a great film, likely worth being ranked higher on the list than it is.  I'd likely place it in the top 20, if I was making the list with these 100 films.  It's that good.  Maybe I'll do that when I'm done.  In fact, I will.  I'll go through and list my Top 100, in order, using just these 100 films.   Sounds like a fun project that would likely only take a few minutes.  Yeah.  I'm gonna do it.  No matter if I get to that or not, I got to this film, and I consider it one of the greatest of the greats.  It's tremendous filmmaking, top to bottom, and I'm glad I got to see it.  I look forward to the next time I get to watch it.

One other thing:  There were two moments lifted from this film in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid."  They are the shooting of a gila monster and the use of a brand to identify bandits.  In fact, the scene in "...Sundance..." is almost a frame for frame lift of this one.  It shows a little kid, and the camera angles, everything are identical to this one when the kid reports finding the brand on some burros.  It's quite the homage, if subtle.  It's there, though.  I caught it.

Ebert's take on this film is here.  He gushes about Bogart, rightly so.  He also gives away a LOT of the ending.  So, if you read that, I'm telling you that you are going to know how this film ends.  He does, however, talk about John Huston's love of male camaraderie.  I got that, too.