- Our first glimpse of Fred C. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart) shows him losing the lottery. One can imagine that his standard routine consists of begging for money, blowing it on lottery tickets, and starting the cycle over again. He meets Bob Curtain (Tim Holt) at a construction job that only pays off if you're lucky enough to find the contractor and forceful enough to beat your money out of him. Yes, times are tough in the town of Tampico. While Curtain and Dobbs are holed up at a cheap flophouse pondering their future, they hear an old buzzard named Howard (Walter Huston) lecturing on the lure of gold. Understandably tired of the Tampico lifestyle, the three of them decide to team up and try their luck prospecting out in the wild.
- Howard's strategy for finding gold is to seek out the least inviting terrain imaginable, figuring that nobody else would be crazy enough to go there. Although Dobbs and Curtain are nearly ready to turn back, Howard happily elaborates on how dumb they are for not noticing the gold underneath his dancing feet, and they settle in on a nearby hillside. Their prospecting meets with great success at first, but it isn't long before trouble arrives. Bandits and interlopers alike try to prey upon them, but the insurmountable problem becomes, as Howard puts it, "what gold does to men's souls".
- Despite the final, memorable illustration of the pointlessness of their endeavor, I think this film is ultimately more optimistic than one might initially suspect. Of the three prospectors, Dobbs is the only one who goes sour, and he very well may have been sour from the start. When the three of them are discussing what they intend to do with their eventual riches, Curtain wants to grow fruit, Howard wants to retire, and Dobbs wants to blow it all as extravagantly as possible. Dobbs is just playing a scaled-up version of the lottery, except that he's willing to go to greater lengths not to lose. In other words, the gold doesn't ruin Dobbs' soul so much as it amplifies the problems already present within it. I think Howard recognizes this early on, and his reactions to Dobbs often betray a careful watchfulness for worse things to come.
- While the second half of the film seems a bit less well-paced than the first, this is still an amazing bit of work. I sometimes forget just how many truly wonderful scenes are contained within The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Any one of the train shootout, the bandit encounter, or the charge of the federales scenes would have been the centerpiece of a standard Western, but Huston tries for much more and succeeds. Although the last shot of an empty gold sack impaled on a cactus bleakly recalls Dobbs' fate, we also remember Curtain and Howard's laughter just moments earlier. They'd prefer to be rich of course, but I think they're happy just to have lived through the experience.
- This is famously the first film where a son and father both won an Oscar. I would have given Walter Huston an Oscar just for the jig.
