The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is John Huston's 1948 American feature film adaptation of B. Traven's 1927 novel of the same name, in which two impecunious Americans (Humphrey Bogart and Tim Holt) during 1920s in Mexico join with an old-timer (Walter Huston, the director's father) to prospect for gold. The old-timer accurately predicts trouble, but is willing to go anyway. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was one of the first Hollywood films to be filmed almost entirely on location outside the United States (in the state of Durango and street scenes in Tampico, Mexico), although the night scenes were filmed back in the studio. The film is quite faithful to the novel.

Background

By the 1920s the violence of the Mexican Revolution had largely subsided, although scattered gangs of bandits continued to terrorize the countryside. The newly established post-revolution government relied on the effective, but ruthless, Federal Police, commonly known as the Federales, to patrol remote areas and dispose of the bandits. Foreigners, like the three American prospectors who are the protagonists in the story, were at very real risk of being killed by the bandits if their paths crossed. The bandits, likewise, were given little more than a "last cigarette" by the army units after capture, even having to dig their own graves first.

Plot

This is the context in which the three gringos band together in a small Mexican town and set out to strike it rich in the remote Sierra Madre mountains. They ride a train into the hinterlands, surviving a bandit attack en route. Once out in the desert, Howard, the old-timer of the group, quickly proves to be by far the toughest and most knowledgeable; he is the one to discover the gold they are seeking. A mine is dug, and much gold is extracted. Greed soon sets in and Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart) begins to lose both his trust and his sanity, lusting to possess the entire treasure. Dobbs is also paranoid that he will be killed by his partners. At this time a fourth American shows up, which sets up a moral debate about what to do with the new stranger. The bandits then reappear, pretending, very crudely, to be Federales, which leads to the now-iconic line about not needing to show any "stinking badges". After a gunfight, and the fourth American is killed, a real troop of Federales appears and drive the bandits away.