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.