A Filmmaker's Review: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)

So, I watched this film a while back and I have recently re-watched it because I found it on YouTube Movies and rented it for £3.49. I'm not going to lie when I say this but it was a great movie back then and it's a great movie now. It's one of those very unforgettable movies which has an amazing sense of obsession and self-destruction that is styled like a modern thriller movie. A film way ahead of its time, it makes for an excellent and immersive viewing experience with an intense amount of psychological treatment on behalf of the characters. It is an amazing movie which is resonant of the paranoid sociopathic films we have seen of the 1970s onwards.

First of all, we have an amazing storyline. The story concerns a treasure that is possibly located in the area of Sierra Madre and three men, including one of the greatest actors ever - Humphrey Bogart - go to seek it out after one wins some money to travel there. When they camp out for nine months, they begin to witness things such as delusions, paranoia, insomnia and other psychological torments as they are from the city, they aren't used to living in caves. However, they manage to pull through whilst they are partnered together as another rider becomes acquainted with them. They ultimately want him to leave, but he does not. Through this sensational turmoil and disintegration of humanity, this film shows us the way it could be if you leave three men in the hills and caves and tell them that there's gold buried somewhere. With this sense of false belief, they try to carry their fellow men to the grave. Through theft and bewilderment, we have three characters: the paranoid, the harmlessly good and the delusional.

The next thing we have is the themes. The main theme being self-destruction, we see three types of this through the way in which each main character is presented. The one character who we thought was our main guy and on our side was actually the one who experienced the most self-destruction. There was a certain sense of derangement throughout the film which coloured every character's experience. First of all, we have the conditions in which they were living - the caves, mines, hills and natural landscape were riddled with strange creatures and vagrant folk. The next thing we had was the sense of paranoia as soon as gold was found. They start splitting their share and guarding it as they would guard their lives. Then we have the other people who seemed to be native to the nearby land and bandits as well. These people were there in order to bring the paranoid together as three people on the same side, but it wouldn't last very long.

After this, we encounter these symbols that litter the film and seem to be very cleverly placed. The one I thought was the smartest was the snake near the goods of Dobbs. This foreshadows the fact that it is ultimately Dobbs who is the one who tries to steal everyone else's share even though initially he was the one trying to make sure everyone didn't steal everyone else's money. It seemed to turn the entire storyline on its head and makes you wonder about the symbols regarding other characters as well.

When it comes down to it, a re-watch of this movie is absolutely necessary in order to pick out all the small details such as the snake and the bandit symbols. It is also essential to be on the lookout (or rather, 'hear-out') for any particular or unusual dialogue that you can hear during the film especially when the man shoots the necklace out of the bandit's hand. There is a lot of dialogue which makes you really think in this film because it could have more than one meaning. If you want to start a little easy, check out the scene in which Dobbs is about to put his hand under the rock to get his share whilst the other man states that there is a poisonous animal beneath it. That scene has a lot of double meaning dialogue if you listen carefully and analyse the language.

In conclusion, this film is a roaring success of a thrilling, action-packed intense movie experience. It is 2 hours of greatness and psychological warfare in one of its earliest forms. I would go as far as saying it's on the list of the 100 greatest films of all time for me.