The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)

Fantastic movie with great cast and a thrilling story. Bogart performs great.

I wanted something very special to be my 5,000th film (at least to my horrible memory and to my stats on IMDb), and so after brazen and intense thought, I decided on a later-than-expected watch of a classic from Bogart's association with John Huston. I say later than expected because I bought the immaculate 24-film Humphrey Bogart Collection, which was supposed to have it on its 12 double-sided DVDs, but it accidentally had, in its place, the special features disc, which held excellent feature-length documentaries on both John Huston and the making of the film. Thus I waited until recently, wh…

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is a film whose pleasures lie in the ‘how’ as opposed to the ‘what.’ Not long into the movie, Howard (Walter Huston) spells out the plot in broad strokes: “Never knew a prospector yet that died rich … going with a partner or two is dangerous. Murder's always lurkin' about. Partners accusin' each other of all sorts of crimes … as long as there's no find, the noble brotherhood will last, but when the piles of gold begin to grow, that's when the trouble starts.” The movie then unfolds with all the inevitability of a Greek tragedy (with Howard doing Cassandra on…