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Essential viewing: 'The Treasure of the Sierra Madre' mines the darks hearts of men

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre conjures a manly slow-motion mania, a three-man triangle only as strong as its least stable leg.

Essential is a series from Dallas Morning News writers spotlighting timeless works of art and culture.

Essential viewing: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948, directed John Huston)

Some people like their Humphrey Bogart cynical but suave, hardboiled but softhearted. Think Casablanca, or The Maltese Falcon, or any other classic that cemented this image for all time. But I prefer a different Bogie. This one is a little unhinged, desperate, animalistic. This is the Bogart of The Petrified Forest, and High Sierra, and In a Lonely Place. This is the Bogart of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, perhaps the best American movie about the soul-corroding power of greed.

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You can see it on the big screen Jan. 14 and 16 in Dallas, part of the TCM Big Screen Classics Series. Bring your mining gear, because there's gold in them thar hills. With it come paranoia, rage and perhaps the impulse to kill your buddy in cold blood.

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"Gold is a devilish sort of thing." So says Howard, the crusty old prospector played by Walter Huston. Howard knows enough is never enough, and he tries to warn the two hardheaded, down-and-out fellow Americans (Bogart and Tim Holt) he meets in Tampico, Mexico. They're taking up space, living job to job, flop house to flop house, dreaming of a big score. Why not head for the hills? The old man seems to know the terrain. What do they have to lose?

Their minds, for starters. The expedition starts out fine, and it gets downright giddy when Howard makes the first discovery and dances a jig punctuated with maniacal guffaws. We're in business! Set up the mine. Plan the glorious future. Try not to get killed by bandits. Oh, and Bogie? Please proceed to descend into madness.

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It's not like Bogart's Fred C. Dobbs was a saint to begin with. He's brusque, and he's cynical. He is, after all, Bogart. But as the three adventurers get deeper into the mountains and start dividing up their goods, Dobbs slowly transforms into something like a wild animal. His eyes hollow out, his tufts of beard frame his chapped mouth and his face is caked in dirt. He starts muttering to himself ("If you know what's good for you, you won't try to pull one over on Fred C. Dobbs"). He becomes Bogie's id, the snarling beast lurking under the surface of so many of his starring roles.

Walter Huston's son, John, is the writer/director (working from a novel by B. Traven), so you know Treasure is a rugged affair. This is the guy who made it his mission to hunt down an elephant while he was making The African Queen (as immortalized in the Clint Eastwood movie White Hunter, Black Heart). Later in his career, on the other side of the camera, Huston would embody greed in its ugliest possible form, as Noah Cross in Chinatown.

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In Treasure Huston conjures a manly slow-motion mania, a three-man triangle only as strong as its least stable leg. The wide-open spaces become claustrophobic as the film progresses. The guns are drawn more frequently. The hands holding those guns shake more readily.

Clockwise from left: Bruce Bennett, Tim Holt, Humphrey Bogart and Walter Huston in "The...
Clockwise from left: Bruce Bennett, Tim Holt, Humphrey Bogart and Walter Huston in "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre."(Fathom events)

Treasure is the movie that brought us the oft-misquoted line, "I don't have to show you any stinking badges." The film won't win any awards from Hispanic anti-defamation groups. Then again, the bandits here are a lot smarter than Dobbs, as they ultimately show. Meanwhile, the Native Americans who adopt Howard as a gringo medicine man are the most enlightened characters in the movie. You could find far worse ethnic stereotypes in 1948.

In the end, however, this is Bogart's show. He had a talent for plumbing the darker recesses of human nature, and every now and then a movie would give him the opportunity to dive all the way down. This is one of those movies. Here's looking at you, Dobbsy.

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The Treasure of the Sierra Madre shows at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Jan. 14 and 16 at various Dallas-area theaters. Visit fathomevents.com for more information.