The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

Settled into their flea-bitten cots in a Mexican dosshouse, a gang of down-on-their-luck Americans sit rapt while an aged prospector pontificates on the subject of gold. Although Humphrey Bogart's Fred C Dobbs is evidently only half listening, his antenna is up, scanning for a quick route to solvency. The warnings are lost on him. The older man, played by Walter Huston, talks about the metal's intoxicating effects, how it can ruin an honest man, transforming him into a greedy, insatiable savage. Dobbs isn't an honest man though, certainly not with himself. He is, to some degree, a fantasist. Dobbs wears public and private faces; writer-director John Huston canny enough to begin our time with him before he has any need to maintain a consistent fiction.

We meet Dobbs rambling around the streets of Tampico, an oil-town whose wealth he is unable to access. He accosts American tourists, jabbing at them with a clipped sob story, hoping to needle some change. Despite this destitution, Dobbs still considers himself a cut above the Mexican kids who comb the town, shaking down bar patrons for increasingly meagre lottery tickets. Dobbs is aggressive, both in tone and action, when confronted by one such child - he howls at the eager little hawker, even going as far as hurling a glass of water into the youngster's face. This cruelty is diffused by the boy's reaction - it barely upsets his sales pitch - but we've noted something crucial. Dobbs is mean, disproportionately so, when he feels cornered.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre then does not tell an Old Testament tale of immaculate materialism, Huston's film instead concerns magnification. How an excavated fortune can stir up profound paranoia in a man already capable of a slippery, delusional sort of self-justification. Dobbs' partners, the old prospector Howard and Tim Holt's Bob Curtin are comparatively easygoing; gentle souls who just want to put the work in then retire. Dobbs is out to settle a score. His stated dream is to breeze into a well-to-do restaurant, order up everything on the menu then harass the wait staff, even if the food is beautiful. Dobbs is hemmed in, his personal space incessantly intruded upon. He suffers mine collapses and umpteen unwanted visitors, all prodding away at him and his property. Huston and cinematographer Ted D McCord's academy ratio frame squeezes the film's horizontal space, crowding its subjects together until they can't help but collide.