The Treasure of the Sierra Madre movie review (1948)
Howard has been here before ("I know what gold can do to men's souls'). He plays a tactful peacemaker, agreeing with Dobbs' paranoid suggestions because he knows they will make little difference at the end of the day: Either they'll get out with their gold, or they won't. The performance is a masterpiece by Walter Huston, John's father, and won an Academy Award (John Huston won two more, for direction and screenplay). Listen to the way the senior Huston talks, rapid-fire, without pause, as if he's briefing them on an old tale and doesn't have time to waste on nuance. He does a famous dance when he finally finds gold, playing the stereotype of a grizzled prospector, but see how his eyes are sometimes quiet even when he's playing the fool; he reads every situation, knows his options, tries to slow Dobbs' meltdown.
Bogart shows not a shred of star ego in the role, but then he didn't become a star by being a pretty face. His wife Lauren Bacall writes in her memoirs that Bogart began to experience rapid hair loss on "Dark Passage" (1947), and was completely bald when he arrived at the "Treasure" locations. Doctors blamed his drinking and a B-vitamin deficiency; B-12 shots helped his hair return, but in "Treasure," all three men wear wigs that were carefully muddied and matted every morning to reflect that day's difficulties.
Bogart's break in pictures came in John Huston's own first film, "The Maltese Falcon" (1941), after the much bigger Warner Bros. star, George Raft, turned it down. Not tall, balding, with a scar on his lip, Bogart could play a hero but loved to be the scrappy little guy; remember his Charlie Allnut in Huston's "The African Queen" (1951). In "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," he plays a character who diminishes steadily as the story moves along, finally disappearing into himself and his delusions. Although Howard saves Dobbs' life just by being a seasoned mountain man, and Curtin pulls him unconscious from a collapsed mine, he doesn't trust either one and finds he is capable of killing either one just to get a bigger share of the gold.
