Whether he is endlessly repeating the phrase "I kid you not" (as Commander Queeg in The Caine Mutiny) or referring to himself in the third person (as Fred C. Dobbs in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), Humphrey Bogart does paranoia more compellingly than anyone in the history of Hollywood. His performance in John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is very little short of perfect--and likely to exert something of a stranglehold on the attention of any viewer coming to the film for the first time.

The first few times I watched this film, in fact, it would have been impossible for me to imagine anyone saying a word against it. John Huston's archetypal story about prospecting and greed is an essential cinematic experience for even the most casual of moviegoers, but it is not perfect. If we're lucky, however, we'll be able to make some kind of sense out of the flaws.

Sierra Madre begins as an ultra-formulaic adventure story featuring a down-on-his-luck American in Mexico. Our attention is riveted on Fred C. Dobbs (Dobbsy) from the beginning. He is not a particularly likable fellow. He throws water at a Mexican boy who is trying to sell him a lottery ticket. But he's not despicable either. He tells the boy that he's about to throw water at him first.

When he finally finds a job, he meets another displaced American by the name of Bob Curtin (Tim Holt). Curtin comes across as a bit of a follower (and perhaps slightly dimwitted) in his early interaction with Dobbs. But as the film continues, he proves to be the more clear-headed of the two. He knows how to think through problems logically and employs a vocabulary that is far more precise and useful than Dobbs'. Curtin speaks rather like a lawyer: methodically, unimaginatively, purposefully.

When Dobbs and Curtin are stiffed by their employer for their wages, they follow him into a bar, beat him up, and take the money that he owes them (flicking the rest of his money back at him in disgust). When it's only a matter of a few hundred dollars, they are not greedy men. But they soon find themselves in a flophouse listening to an old prospector named Howard (Walter Huston, John's dad) as he talks about how sacks of gold will change an ordinarily decent fellow into a money-grubbing scoundrel.

Huston's script, incidentally, is brilliant. The picaresque prologue of how Dobbs and Curtin and Howard meet is a story that all of us seem to be born knowing, but one that Huston manages to keep us interested in even though we already know it. The story becomes even more familiar to us after the prospecting plot is introduced. It's a story that we knew before the first time we heard it, a story whose lesson is simple: "You won't know how you would behave under those circumstances until you find yourself in those circumstances."

When you wander into the wilderness, isn't there supposed to be a reminder about the preciousness of water? Check. When you go prospecting for gold, shouldn't there be a point when you become ridiculously excited about pyrite? Check. Once you've found the gold, shouldn't you be threatened by bandits? Check. Doesn't someone at some point need to deliver a lecture on the fundamental worthlessness of gold and remind us that there are more important things in life? Check.

How can a film deliver every single one of these hackneyed plot components and still be brilliant? I suspect it has something to do with Huston's reliance on Dobbs as a foil for the much less interesting Curtin. Curtin is not only better than Dobbs at thinking (within certain non-violent parameters, at least); he is virtuous, generous, kind, and, most importantly, a man who wants to do something with his life. He wants to use his share of the gold to become a farmer. Dobbs, on the other hand, wants only to get the money back to town so that he can buy more clothing than he needs, drink himself sick on champagne, and find the most expensive whores in Mexico.

Whereas Curtin is the character that we want to be (or that we're supposed to want to be), Dobbs is the one that is fun to watch. And even if Dobbs doesn't put his thoughts together as solidly or articulately as Curtin, he is the figure that stands for the writer, the imaginer, in all of us. He may not think things through very clearly, but he is much more comfortable with symbols and metaphor than Curtin will ever be. When the three men have taken as much gold as they think it's worth their time to take, Howard observes that they can break down their sluice and get the mountain back in order in roughly a week. Curtin is puzzled. He doesn't understand why they can't just leave their camp the way it is and head back to town.

"We've wounded this mountain," Howard explains. "She's been very good to us, and it's our duty to heal her. I'll do it myself if you won't help me."

Curtin is befuddled by such a sentiment, but Dobbs (for all his paranoia) responds enthusiastically. "Sure, old timer. I'll help you. She has been pretty good to us after all."

Curtin can't understand how Howard and Dobbs can talk about the mountain as if it's a "real woman"; he is uncomfortable with the idea of metaphorical usage running amok. A mountain isn't a woman; it isn't capable of being wounded; and there's certainly no point in attempting to heal a mountain. But screenwriter John Huston (whose title tells us of a mother mountain) forces him to play along. They spend the extra week putting things back the way they found them.

Here is where the flaws of Huston's screenplay really start to show. It's a bit strange that Curtin fails to argue that their recent encounter with bandits might justify their high-tailing it back to town. But Huston has to establish Howard as a natural healer, a man of the earth who is mystically connected to the organic forces of nature. Such a characterization is essential to our understanding how he will manage to bring an Indian boy back from near death a few scenes later (a process during which he will act strangely as if he knows what he's doing).

After Howard plays the (again) over-familiar role of the divinely-empowered-white-healer-among-the-savages, his Indian hosts insist on keeping him around to show their appreciation. He sends Dobbs and Curtin ahead with his gold, and Dobbs (who has shown signs of mental deterioration throughout the film) finally goes completely insane. His paranoid fantasies about Curtin's designs on the gold ultimately lead him to shoot his companion. He tells himself that his action was performed in self-defense, but Bogart's excellence in his role enables us to see that even Dobbsy himself does not entirely accept that lame justification.

Thinking that the wounded Curtin is dead, Dobbs curls up next to the campfire and tries to sleep. The music swells (painfully) as the camera dips into the campfire and Dobbs appears to be in hell. Some cinematic crimes are unforgivable; this damnation scene is one of those crimes. If Ed Wood had done it, we would all howl with laughter; since it's Huston, we pretend not to notice.

It hurts the film; there's no doubt of that. But why? Why is Huston doing such violence to his own work? The most obvious answer is that he is trying to show us the film through the eyes of its most engaging, most imaginative, and most insane character, Dobbs. According to such a reading, the fire scene is not only about Dobbs, but by him. It is as if Bogey's overwrought character took over the direction for a short while and gave us an overwrought section of film.

That explanation is close, I think. But I'm not sure that Dobbsy took anything from Huston that Huston didn't give him. Huston (the screenwriter, not the director) found creative fuel for his project in choosing between the rational, legalistic, precise vocabulary of Curtin and the irrational, imaginative, self-indulgent vocabulary of Dobbs. We look to writers to give us sympathetic characters, but writers look to one another for imaginative flights of fancy. Usually the compromise results in a sympathetic character who is made interesting by his circumstances, not his personality (think of Harrison Ford movies or Bruce Willis movies), but Huston's genius in Sierra Madre is to flirt with the idea of allowing the imaginative villain to win us over while the sympathetic nice guy actually bores us to tears.

The damnation scene is a metaphor for Curtin's ultimate triumph, even if it is precisely the kind of metaphor that Curtin himself could never appreciate. Curtin is the literal-minded sort of person who is never annoyed by heavy-handed symbolism because he can't decode a symbology no matter how heavy-handed it is. Dobbs, on the other hand, is sensitive enough to metaphor that he would himself be annoyed by the overwrought quality of the campfire shot. It's not really as if Dobbs took over the direction from Huston, but as if Huston forced him to direct simply in order to show him what a mess he would make of things.

"This is why we have to compromise on the nice guy," Huston appears to be telling his audience. "It's because you satanic figures, as attractive as you are when you're trying to get the spotlight, don't know what to do with it once you have it--apart from strutting and puffing out your chests." (Huston knew his satanic figures quite well--if not from Milton, then certainly from Melville's spin on Milton in Moby-Dick; Huston released his own version of Moby Dick in 1956, eight years after making Sierra Madre.)

But even if Huston's point in surrendering his narrative to pure symbolism with the campfire shot is to teach the Dobbsian imagination a lesson, he never quite regains control of the film. Howard's acceptance into the Indian tribe is mechanical and dull. The decision of the bandits who steal Dobbs' gold-laden donkeys to empty the sacks of gold dust out (instead of simply tossing them aside) is contrived. And the scene in which Howard and Curtin burst into a fit of hysterical laughter upon learning that a windstorm has blown their gold dust back toward the mountain from which it came is a good deal more than over-the-top.

If Curtin is the Apollonian side of artistic creation and Dobbs is the Dionysian, then Huston learns that the artist is not allowed to punish his Dionysian side with impunity. It's all very fine to say that those who allow themselves to be carried away by their desires (e.g. greed) will always punish themselves in the end. But the fact of the matter is that they will punish the rest of us too. The actual Dionysus (Dobbs) will punish the actual Apollo (Curtin) by losing the gold. But more importantly, the artist who allows the Dionysian side of his artistic persona to get the upper hand will find that both he (the artist) and the audience will be punished by bad art. It's an important lesson, and one that I'm not sure Huston could have articulated without allowing the final section of his film to deteriorate into pure melodrama.

But the melodrama still hurts.

Recommended: Yes