The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Warner Bros., First National, 1948)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, July 11) my husband Charles and I watched one of Turner Classic Movies’ double features, co-hosted by Ben Mankiewicz (their regular man since the retirement and then passing of their founding host, Robert Osborne) and African-American novelist Colson Whitehead. Whitehead picked two movies that made an oddball pair, John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) and Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956). They both have at least one thing in common: they end with a fortune in either gold or money literally blowing away in the wind. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre began life in 1927 as a novel by the still mysterious “B. Traven,” who was probably German, though his real identity is still open to doubt. Traven’s identity has been traced to Ret Marut (itself a pseudonym), a German stage actor and anarchist editor who fled Germany in 1923 and arrived in Mexico a year later. Beyond that the question of who “B. Traven” was is still very much a matter of debate. John Huston had long wanted to direct and write a film based on The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and had originally planned it as his next film after his directorial debut in The Maltese Falcon (1941), but World War II and his stint making battlefield documentaries for the U.S. Army Signal Corps delayed it until 1948. It’s a typical Huston story in that it’s about a group of males on a mad quest for something or other that will supposedly make them rich. Humphrey Bogart, who’d played the lead role of Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, took on the role of Fred C. Dobbs, one of two American drifters in Tampico, Mexico in 1925. He meets Curtin (Tim Holt, son of 1920’s action star Jack Holt, who had a truly weird career trajectory: he was in two of the finest films ever made, Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons and this, but other than that he spent most of his time making cheap “B” Westerns for RKO), a fellow U.S.-born down-and-outer. The two take a job as oil drillers for another American, Pat McCormick (frequent Bogart nemesis Barton MacLane), and work for him for two weeks, only then they learn that McCormick has a reputation of hiring people and then not paying them. (I joked, “It sounds like Donald Trump’s business model.”) They encounter McCormick out with a woman (there are only two brief scenes featuring women in this entire film!), corner him in a bar, and beat him up for their money.

Between that and the money Dobbs has won in the Mexican lottery (on a ticket sold to him by the very young Robert Blake, playing a Mexican street urchin), the two have enough money to set off on a gold-prospecting expedition in the Sierra Madre Mountains along with an older partner, Howard (Walter Huston, who won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor), whom they met while staying the night in a Mexican flophouse called El Oso Negro (“The Black Bear”). Howard warns the two younger men (it’s somewhat ironic that Bogart is playing a character much younger than himself: he was 48, and looked it) that discovering gold has a tendency to turn people against each other. They survive an attempted holdup against their train led by a local bandit named “Gold Hat” (Alfonso Bedoya), whom we’ll meet again. There’s the predictable red herring along the way when Dobbs and Curtin discover what they think is gold but is actually iron pyrite, better known as “fool’s gold.” They finally discover the real stuff, set up a mining operation, and extract gold in powdered placer form, though already suspicions are starting to divide them. At Dobbs’s insistence, instead of storing their gold collectively and dividing the proceeds only once they return to civilization and sell it, they each divide their “goods” as they go along. Then they’re encountered by another expatriate American, Tim Cody (a marvelously understated performance by Bruce Bennett, born Herman Brix, who’d made a serial called The New Adventures of Tarzan on the basis of his acclaim as a championship swimmer, then had to work his ass off to overcome that image and convince people that Bruce Bennett could really act), only Cody’s advent on the scene throws their already growing paranoia into overdrive. At one point they coldly and calculatedly decide to kill him, only Cody’s life is saved at least briefly by Gold Hat and his gang of bandidos, who come upon them looking not for gold, but for their guns. There’s a skirmish in which Cody is killed after all, though Curtin finds a letter to him from his wife back home in Texas and decides that as soon as their business with the gold is done he’s going to go to Houston and look her up.

Dobbs’s growing fear that the others are out to get him and kill him for his share of the gold leads him to confront Curtin and threaten to kill him. Ultimately Dobbs meets his end in what I hadn’t realized before is a sequence surprisingly close to the end of Eugene O’Neill’s play The Emperor Jones: a lost man, increasingly paranoid that his riches are going to be taken away from him and he killed, talking to himself in a primitive jungle environment. Ultimately the bandits kill Dobbs and steal the pelt hides he’d collected and intended to sell, but they pour out the gold because they thought it was just sand stuffed in the hides to make them weigh more so Dobbs would get more money from them. In Traven’s book we only learn about this later, but in Huston’s film we actually see the empty gold sacks littering the ground as a major wind blows the last of the treasure away. (Huston was a good enough child of classic Hollywood to have “planted” this in an earlier scene in which Dobbs and Curtin marvel at how unassuming the gold looks in powder form: just like sand.) Eventually Howard settles into a career as a medicine man for the local Natives, courtesy of a young girl he’d cured earlier, while Curtin goes off to Houston to seek out Cody’s widow. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was not only set in Mexico but, at Huston’s insistence, largely shot there. While there Huston sought out B. Traven and was accosted by a ratty-looking man whose business card identified him as “Hal Croves, Translator.” Croves told Huston that he knew more about Traven’s works than Traven himself did, and he became a technical advisor to the film. It didn’t take Huston long to figure out that “Croves” was almost certainly Traven himself, though after the film was made Traven strongly turned against Huston and wrote nasty letters that have been quoted in biographies.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre won Academy Awards for John Huston as both director and writer as well as Walter Huston for his performance as Howard – the only time a father and son have won Oscars for the same movie. (Later Huston would direct his daughter Anjelica to an Academy Award for Best Actress for Prizzi’s Honor, making the Hustons the first three-generation family winners: the Coppolas are the only others.) The Treasure of the Sierra Madre remains one of the most remarkable movies ever made, and I’m flabbergasted that Huston was able to get it green-lighted given that it’s a tough, no-nonsense melodrama about riches and what greed does to people. Jack Warner turned strongly in the other direction for his production slate after 1948; after making The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Jean Negulesco’s Johnny Belinda (which starred Jane Wyman as a deaf-mute), he decided on the basis of the success of Doris Day’s first feature movie, Romance on the High Seas, that he’d shift the Warners production schedule away from edgy melodramas and more towards splashy musicals, all in Technicolor and mostly starring Day.