Here's my confession: I have never really warmed to John Huston's 1948 Treasure of the Sierra Madre. In fact, I'm not really a big fan of John Huston's films in general: The Maltese Falcon always bores me to tears. I've seen The Treasure of the Sierra Madre at least six or seven times -- my father proclaimed it one of the best movies ever made and, I think, I first watched the film with him on TV when I was ten or eleven years old. (I read B. Traven's 1925 novel in junior high.) The story impressed me although I thought the film had a little too much dialogue: Walter Huston as Howard, the old prospector and Humphrey Bogart during a bravura star-turn as Fred C. Dobbs always seem to be chattering away. In fact, Bogart is so talkative that when there is no one else with him on-screen, he babbles to himself. My perspective hasn't really changed with fifty years and half-dozen additional screenings. John Huston is not really a visual or pictorial director -- he is more literary in emphasis as witness his adaptations of Joyce's The Dead and Kipling's The Man who would be King (his best picture in my view). Although Huston's movies contain lots of violence, he's not really interesting in staging scenes of that kind and his gun battles and killings always seem perfunctory -- this is morally praiseworthy, but, sometimes, a questionable strategy in a film that is designed as an adventure movie. The gun fights with the bandits in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, crucial to the plot, are shot like an old Hop-Along Cassidy Western -- they aren't exciting, nor are they convincingly realistic: Huston stages the scenes with a minimum of flourish, treating the action sequences as plot points entirely subordinate to the showy speeches by the characters that drive the picture. The old prospector, Howard, speaks in arias, fast-talking patter like the news men in a Hawks' film His Girl Friday. Bogart has baroque paranoid soliloquies -- he's like a conscience-stricken Macbeth in one scene. Even Tim Holt as Curtin, the third-wheel in the prospecting expedition, gets a monologue about a fruit harvest in the San Joaquin valley. All of these speeches are marvelously written, but the effect that the film makes, notwithstanding its vivid locations in Tampico and Durango, Mexico is a bit theatrical -- the movie could be staged on Broadway. Unlike Raoul Walsh (in Colorado Territory or High Sierra) or John Ford, Huston isn't interested in landscapes -- although The Treasure of the Sierra Madre has features of the classic Western, it doesn't look like a Western. Rather, it's darker and more claustrophobic and, even, the exteriors look grimy, hot, and desolate -- Ford films his great Westerns in Monument Valley, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre could be shot in any suburban gravel pit. In fact, it's a kind of film noir Western -- confined, a study of men under stress, and inclined to dramatizing the worst aspects of human nature.
No doubt exists that the film is brilliantly written. The denouement involving the gold-bearing sand blowing away in the wind is carefully set up. The final (unconvincing) wind storm is foreshadowed by an earlier gale in which Howard says that during a "Northwester the country stands up on its hind legs." The fact that the bandits can not recognize the gold ore in its raw form is painstakingly established by the famous scene in which the weary prospectors are said to "not recognize the riches under (their) feet" -- this is the scene in which Howard does a little jig on the pay dirt. The film's point, so ancient that it probably preceded Homer, that you can't eat gold and that it won't make you happy is made powerfully. However, Huston's predilection for the literary causes him to be over-emphatic: when the Texan interloper, Cody is killed by the bandits, Curtin reads the letter from his wife in which she decries
Cody's gold fever and says that in the happy family "we've already found life's real treasure." Elements of the film are irritating: there's a heavenly choir when Howard resuscitates a Indian child that has fallen into a well and some of the caricatures of the Mexicans on display in the film are marginally offensive although, in general, Huston treats the indigenous people with respect. There are some visually effective moments in the film. The lighting puts little beads of malicious glitter in the protagonists' eyes when they are discussing gold; a scene with thirsty men in a showdown has the visual drama and brutal force of some of the final scenes in von Stroheim's Greed. Huston romanticizes smoke -- he uses coils of smoke from campfires to suture together different parts of the screen and there is a spectacular column of smoke in an early scene in which the men are rigging an oil derrick; the plume of smoke is shown from different angles and becomes the central element in the sequence, again serving as a moving diagonal that links foreground to background. When Dobbs and Curtin bicker beside the campfire, the camera suddenly pulls away from them -- it's not a showy gesture, but sufficient to emphasize their terrible isolation. On the other hand, I could do without the foreground of fire (ostensibly a campfire) that dramatizes Dobbs' guilty conscience after he shoots Curtin. A ballroom brawl early in the film, figures pounding one another with their fists and backlit by the open door of the tavern, looks like some of George Bellows' more savage canvases and has a ferocious power -- Huston isn't interested in gun battles but when the fighting is with fists, up close and personal, he perks up. Furthermore, Huston's nondescript settings and his documentary style mise-en-scene pay off in the scenes involving Fred Dobbs' death -- there's a pathetic little arroyo with some muddy water stagnant in tank-like ditch; sad-looking ruins, battered adobe walls and a forlorn-looking colonnade, stand in the dusty desert in the background. It doesn't matter where Dobbs dies -- it could be anywhere. And this is powerfully conveyed by Huston's refusal to romanticize the scene by giving it a picturesque landscape in which to occur.
The theme of the film -- the corrupting power of gold fever -- is complicated in an interesting way: Bogart's character is hyper-sensitive, nonchalantly cruel, and arrogant long before gold becomes an issue. It's not the gold so much as the isolation in the wilds of the Sierra Madre that affects Dobbs -- Dobbs was always half-mad; it just took the wilderness and the threat of violent death to reveal this aspect of his personality. There's a curious note of proto-environmental animism in the film. Howard refuses to depart from the Sierra Madre without "binding up the wounds" of the mountain that they have mined and that has made them (putatively) wealthy.
The picture is effective on many levels and brilliantly written: but it just doesn't speak to me.
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