Fathers and Sons: An Exploration of the Treasure of the Sierra Madre

Since the first screening more than fifty years ago, critics have praised John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) and debated the meaning of the compelling story of three prospectors and their search for gold in the mountains of eastern Mexico. Filmed mostly on location from a Huston script adapted from the 1935 novel by B. Traven, the action opens in steamy Tampico, on Mexico's eastern shore, where the three central characters come together in a prospecting venture: Howard (Walter Huston), the experienced old-timer; Curtin (Tim Holt), the earnest, agreeable tenderfoot; and Fred C. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart), neurotic and needy, his prosaic name a sign of his status as everyman. The story briefly traverses the lush valleys of the Sierra Madre Oriental, where machetes are required in the dense, jungle-like underbrush; moves on to the dusty upper reaches of the Oriental range, where gold is abundant and water scarce, and where the film's most important events take place or are initiated; and concludes to the west in a mythic Durango, where drought and wind-blown dust seem a way of life.1 Running parallel to the film's changing geographies and the group's journey through them is the tragic, interior story of Dobbs's descent from need to greed, from neurotic to paranoid, bringing on his own murder at the hands of bandits and dooming the quest for gold that he and his partners had begun nine months before. For the viewer, Dobbs's trajectory of disintegration seems tragic for being unnecessary and avoidable; if only Dobbs could appreciate that his partners are decent men; if only lie could overcome or suspend his suspicions, and read the signs of Curtin's humanity and Howard's common sense and trustworthiness. Because Dobbs's failure to act reasonably seems to be at the heart of the film's moral perspective, most film critics and scholars have focused on Dobbs's behavior and perceptions. The standard argument for Dobbs's paranoia is that he has succumbed to the lust for gold, that proverbial temptation;2 a somewhat more sophisticated version of that argument, and one made in the film's trailer, is that the three prospectors manage to overcome the "forces of nature, only to find their greatest enemy is: human nature."3 Howard, the film's voice of authority, confirms that perspective at several points, warning the boys in El Oso Negro dormitory, for example, that "when the piles of gold begin to grow, that's when the trouble starts."4 Later, on the mountain, when Dobbs first expresses interest in dividing the gold dust, Howard says, "I know what kind of ideas even supposedly decent people get when gold's at stake," The letter from Helen, found among Cody's (Bruce Bennett) possessions after his death, with its comment that "we've already found life's real treasures," also suggests that the search for gold is somehow inappropriate.5 But why Dobbs? Why does he give in to temptation when Curtin and Howard do not? For Huston biographer Scott Hannmen, Dobbs is a bad person, "rotten, in fact, to the core." Stuart Kaminsky, another Huston biographer, presents the lust for gold as a "disease" to which Dobbs somehow "succumbs," yet he emphasizes that Dobbs, whatever his misdeeds, is not understood to be evil by Howard, Traven, or Huston. James Naremore foregrounds Dobbs's psychological problems, describing him as an "unstable," "Nixonesque" character resembling Bogart's Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny. But he also suggests that the film's opening scenes in Tampico were designed to present Dobbs "as much a victim as a villain," and to show "the brutal determinants of his psychology and the humiliations of his typical day."6 In contrast to Naremore's determinism, Lesley Brill emphasizes the role of individual choice. Curtin and Howard make choices that cumulatively result in an understanding of themselves and of their limitations as human beings. Conversely, by choosing to deny his own vulnerability to temptation, Dobbs brings madness and death upon himself. …