The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) Noir to Adventure Western and Back Again

"I think I'll go to sleep and dream about piles of gold getting bigger and bigger and bigger."            (Fred C. Dobbs)

In Noir circles, if you go by the unfortunately misapplied "genre" definition you always hear about how Hitchcock's Psycho was the first Noir to change "genres' in mid film. 

If you, like me, subscribe to the Noir is a Visual Style definition, all a film has to have to "tip" or "tune" Noir is have a Visual Style that phototropic-ly stimulates a Dark Story from any genre, for You, the individual Viewer. 

So it takes three elements and one will always be subjective. Basically You know them when You see them. If Film Noir changes genre mid film that's a creative decision. Decoy goes from a Crime film to a Sci fi film, Repeat Performance goes from a Crime film to a Fantasy film, they are still NOIRS. 

Seeing Noir as a Style clears up all the confusion and changes everything. 12 Years before Psycho another Noir changed genres in mid film. 

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was Directed and Written by John Huston (The Maltese Falcon, The Asphalt Jungle, Key Largo, The Misfits, Night of the Iguana, Reflections in a Golden Eye, Fat City). Based on B. Traven's novel. Cinematography was by Ted D. McCord (Flamingo Road, The Damned Don't Cry, The Breaking Point, I Died a Thousand Times, Private Property) and Music was by Max Steiner. 

The film stars Noir vet Humphrey Bogart (Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, and many others) as Fred C. Dobbs, Walter Huston (The Shanghai Gesture) as Howard, Tim Holt as Curtin, and Bruce Bennett (Sahara, Mildred Pierce, Nora Prentiss, Dark Passage, Mystery Street and many others) as Cody, Barton MacLane (The Maltese Falcon, Red Light)  as Pat McCormick, Alfonso Bedoya as Gold Hat and Robert Blake (Electra Glide in Blue, Lost Highway) as the Mexican Boy Selling Lottery tickets.

Humphrey Bogart as Fred C. Dobbs

The film opens in a Noirsville boomtown, Tampico, Mexico, 1925. Fred C. Dobbs is a bum. Flat busted. He spends his days panhandling the drift for fellow Americans to hit up. 

"Will you stake a fellow American to a meal?"

He walks the cement strolls of Tampico. He never looks at the faces of the people he tries to bum money off of. He ends up hitting on the same guy (John Huston the director BTW) in a white suit three times. 

John Huston as an American in Tampico

Dobbs: Say, mister. Will you stake a fellow American to a meal?

American in Tampico in white suit: Such impudence never came my way. Early this afternoon I gave you money... while I was having my shoes polished I gave you MORE money... now you put the bite on me again. Do me a favor, will ya? Go occasionally to somebody else - it's beginning to get tiresome.

Dobbs:  Ah, excuse me, mister, I never knowed it was you. I never looked at your face - I just looked at your hands and the money you gave me. Beg pardon, mister, I promise I'll never put the bite on you again.

American in Tampico in white suit:  [gives him a peso] This is the very last you get from me. Just to make sure you don't forget your promise, here's another peso.

[puts another peso in Dobbs' hand]

Dobbs: Thanks, mister. Thanks.

American in Tampico in white suit:  But from now on, you'll have to make your way through life without my assistance.

With the money he has Dobbs eats a meal and splurges 20 centavos on a lottery ticket after he gets pestered by a kid played by a very young Robert Blake. 

only 20 centavos and it's lucky number 13

A very young Robert Blake

Dobbs then stops to rest in under the shade trees in a Tampico municipal park where he assesses his current state of affairs, and there in the park he meets a fellow vagrant American named Curtain.

Tim Holt as Curtain

Then Dobbs goes and gets a shave and a haircut. When the barber is through he looks a bit like Buster Keaton with his slicked back hair.  Back out on the street Dobbs is also tempted to follow a streetwalker into her crib. 

Streetwalker

Later Dobbs runs into Pat McCormick, who is an American contractor who runs an oil rigging crew. McCormick is rounding up what stray Americans he can roust to work as roughnecks.  

Barton MacLane as Pat McCormick

At the dock where the crew is to be picked up by the ferry to the oil patch, Dobbs runs into Curtain again. They team up in the following days building oil derricks. 

Dobbs meets Curtain again on the dock surrounded by 55 gallon oil drums

(In the novel the pay was $8 dollars a day, less $1.80 a day for meals and the crew works 18 hour shifts seven days a week). Two weeks later when the rigging job is done the crew is ferried back to Tampico. 

At the dock, McCormick looks at his watch, shakes his head, and tells the men he just doesn't know what happened to the paymaster. When Dobbs complains McCormick pulls out his wallet and personally advances the men 5% of what they got coming. 

So with some money to burn, Dobbs and Curtain head to a cantina to wind down. 

Bellied up to the bar and talking about Pat McCormick another patron over hears them and warns them that McCormick always pulls that con at the ferry dock. He disappears and never pays out. 

Dobbs and Curtain find a flop called the "Domitorio El Oso Negro" and there the two men run into Howard a old prospector who is telling tales of hitting it rich prospecting for gold. 

Tales of striking it rich

Water Huston as Howard

Dobbs and Curtain are all ears. The next day Dobbs and Curtain are back to loitering in the Tampico municipal park.  They are almost busted again, but lady luck is looking down on the boys. They spot McCormick walking down the street with a senorita on his arm in front of a cantina. 

When Dobbs and Curtain confront McCormick and he sends the senorita away, tells the guys he was looking for them so he could square things up, and invites them into the cantina for a drink. When McCormick gets the bottle he ordered from the bartender he slams the bottle up against Dobbs head and punches Curtain. 

We get a very good fight sequence well choreographed and filmed and with a lot of great Noir visuals. The boys get their money owed them out of McCormick's wallet, drop the rest on his face and go back to the Oso Negro. 

Dobbs hit upside the head

Back at the Oso Negro they meet up with Howard again, they tell him they are interested in going prospecting, and they try to come up with enough money to outfit themselves.

Howard figures they need about 600 pesos to cover the burros, and all the provisions and equipment that they'll need. They only have 400 but Dobbs' lottery ticket hits and its worth the extra 200 pesos that they require. 

These first 20 or so minutes in Tampico it's all Noirsville. As soon as they boys leave Tampico on a train for the interior we switch genre to a sort of Adventure / Western. All the darkness that was in Tampico is now, as we find out later, under Dobb's fedora. It coincides with a film like Leave Her to Heaven, all the darkness is in Ellen Berent Harland's (Gene Tierney) head behind her sunglasses.

So we cut to a the train winding through the dry looking Sierra Madre Orientale heading up onto the Mexican plateau on the way to Durango. Dobb's, Curtain and Howard are sitting in coach. Dobbs is snoozing. The train suddenly lurches to a stop, we hear gunshots we see bandits on horseback. A battle between the bandits and the passengers along with soldiers who were stationed on the train ensues.

Alfonso Bedoya - Gold Hat

From this sequence, from the vantage point of looking back at it through the lens of the 50s and 60s it actually more resembles a sub genre of the Spaghetti Western called the Zapata Western rather than your standard American Western. Federales against bandidos,  The leader of the bandits is "Gold Hat." The rock blocking the track is removed by the soldiers and the bandits foiled. 

We cut to the white walled city of Durango. Howard, Dobbs, and Curtain outfit themselves with burros, picks, shovels, prybars, provisions, waterbags, machetes, a tent, kerosene lanterns, guns and ammo, etc., etc., for prospecting up in the Sierra Madre Occidental. 

Arturo Soto Rangel as El Presidente

Now the film becomes more of an Adventure Film, with shots of the boys climbing over parched, rocky, cactus studded ridges and  hacking their way through the jungle choked valleys. They encounter poisonous reptiles, wild cats, and Dobb's has as an encounter with fools gold, on the way to their eventual strike. 

Fools Gold

Color

GOLD!

Howard finally hits paydirt and they follow the color to its source on a mountain side. They set up a camp near water and away from the workings to make it looks like just another hunting camp. At the workings they build a tank to hold water and a sluice box to wash the gravel with to capture the gold dust. They use the burros in a train to haul water up to the tank.

The film starts to slowly return to Noirsville after one night in the kerosene lantern lit tent, as Howard is weighing out the days gold dust, Dobbs suddenly decides and declares that he wants to split the gold in camp with each man responsible for his own "goods." 

Dobbs about to break bad

Dobbs: When are we gonna start dividing it up?

 When are we gonna start dividing it up?

Gold fever. 

Dobb's Breaks Bad

Add into the mix another prospector named Cody and the return of the bandit Gold Hat.  As Dobbs becomes more and more alienated and obsessed, the film reverts to a classic desert set Film Soleil Noir.

Noirsville

]

Badges?... We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges!

John Huston crafted a masterpiece. The film hits on all cylinders. It's even darker than you might remember if you consider that after the mine cave in there's a sequence where Curtain hesitates going in to rescue Dobbs, and our trio actually were going to gun down Cody in cold blood, but were prevented from doing so by the timely arrival of Gold Hat. 

The film is a Classic however you classify it. 10/10

"At the 21st Academy Awards, The Treasure of The Sierra Madre received four nominations, and won three awards: Best Supporting Actor for Walter Huston, and Best Director and Best Writing, Screenplay for John Huston, his only Oscars. There has been controversy since the 1949 ceremony because of the academy's choice not to nominate Bogart for the Academy Award for Best Actor, a choice that modern critics and Academy members have since condemned. Bogart's performance has been named the best of his career." (Wiki)

B. (Bruno?) Traven was the pen name of a novelist, presumed to be German, whose real name, nationality, date and place of birth and details of biography are all subject to dispute. One certainty about Traven's life is that he lived for years in Mexico, where the majority of his fiction is also set. (from Wiki)