New Picture

Treasure of Sierra Madre (Warner) is one of the best things Hollywood has done since it learned to talk; and the movie can take a place, without blushing, among the best ever made. But unlike many films of high quality, it does not wear its art on its sleeve. This admirable reticence may earn Treasure some peculiar awards. Movie trade papers are treating it as a western; Daily Variety called it "action stuff with heavy masculine appeal." Reviewer Virginia Wright wrote in the Los Angeles Daily News: "[The] audience . . . seemed to find [Treasure] hilariously funny and, once having decided the spectacle was comic, they laughed indiscriminately at murder, fear and irony."

Treasure is not essentially either a western or a comedy. The squeamish and the lovelorn may be wise to stay away, for it has no heroine and a few scenes are shatteringly brutal. But it is a magnificent and unconventional piece of screen entertainment.

John Huston (San Pietro, Let There Be Light), who wrote the screen play and directed the film, adapted it from a novel by Mexico's Mysterious Stranger, B. Traven. The story, ideal for movie purposes, is a sardonic, intensely realistic fable, masterfully disguised as an adventure story. It is a tale about three Americans of the mid-1920s, on the bum in Tampico. Running into modest luck in a lottery, they strike off into the depths of Mexico's mountains in search of gold.

Old Howard (Walter Huston, the director's father) has nosed around after gold a good deal of his life; he cheerfully warns the greenhorns of what gold can do to a man's character. They don't believe him, but they find out for themselves. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart), a morally chaotic child of perhaps 40, starts coming apart early with bluster, fear and suspicion of his partners. Curtin (Tim Holt), a relatively stable youth, nearly cracks, too, under pressure, but gradually comes of age. The men run into jungle Indians, have to deal with a Texan (Bruce Bennett) who wants to muscle in on their little mine, and are hounded by bandits.

But the meat of the story is its simple revelation of three types of human character, altering in the presence of the sinister catalyst, gold. The story is told with intelligence, humor and suspense. It is by turns exceedingly funny and completely terrifying. It is as rich in symbolic overtones as it is in character and drama. For the treasure of the mountain is a fair image of most human goals; and the men who seek it are fair representatives of man.

Movies have always been expert at picturing cities, but Treasure excels most of them in the streets, park benches, eateries, bars and flophouses that are the backgrounds for its opening reels. The main characters make most so-called simple men in the movies look two-dimensional and sentimentalized. In the superb camera work (by Ted McCord), there is not one fancy or superfluous shot.

Walter Huston's performance is his best job in a lifetime of good acting. Humphrey Bogart cannot completely eliminate the existence of Humphrey Bogart--but he makes a noble effort to lose himself and does far & away the best work of his career. Tim Holt is less an actor than a presence, but it is a powerful and right presence. Bruce Bennett is a fine Texan. Alfonso Bedoya, as the bandit leader, gives the toothy smile a new lease on life as a sinister property (he is known in Mexico as "The Face That Kills").

The Heroes. It has never been easy, in Hollywood, to make a first rate, out-of-the-routine movie. Treasure would never have been made, or would have been hopelessly compromised and watered-down, but for several stalwart heroes. Director John Huston, the chief hero, sold the idea of doing the picture to Producer Henry Blanke. Blanke persuaded the leary moguls to buy the screen rights (Traven got a niggardly $5,000). At one point, Bogart saved the picture by refusing, against front-office pressure, to play his role except as Huston had written it.

With Treasure, John Huston, 41, establishes himself in the top rank of contemporary moviemakers. John is a leathery, ski-nosed man with hard, arresting eyes, who suggests a hammered-out version of his father, Walter. He is as tough in mind and performance as in looks.

John was born in 1906 in Nevada, Mo., a town which (he claims) his grandfather, a professional gambler, won in a poker game. When John was about seven, his parents were divorced. Living with his father, John picked up a profound knowledge of the theater. With his mother he traveled extensively ("Mother hated France, but she was nuts about Turkey"). At twelve he went to military school in California; as a boxer he became amateur lightweight champion of the state.

At 20 he joined the Mexican cavalry. He began to write stories. His father gave one to Ring Lardner, who gave it to H. L. Mencken, who printed it in the old American Mercury. John also wrote "a kind of a book" (it was a play) called Frankie & Johnny, illustrated by Covarrubias. To his surprise, Boni & Liveright gave him a $500 advance for it. John immediately entrained for Saratoga, where he picked up $11,000 in a dice game.

The "kind of a book" also got him a kind of a job in movies. He worked briefly for Sam Goldwyn and for Universal. He went on the bum for a while in London (he and Director William Wyler still ride the freights now & then). Later he wrote Hollywood scripts until he made a name for himself with his first job of directing (The Maltese Falcon, 1941). As an Army officer he made the sullenly beautiful documentary Report from the Aleutians and the magnificent San Pietro.

Technical Adviser. During the scripting of Treasure, Huston was in constant correspondence with its author, the mysterious B. Traven (The Death Ship, The Bridge in the Jungle). Novelist Traven has an enormous following in Europe, but nothing is known of him except that he has lived invisibly, somewhere in Mexico, for many years. Many of Traven's suggestions for movie treatment were so intelligent and knowledgeable that Huston was fascinated, and wanted to meet him.

In Mexico City's Reforma Hotel, one day, a frail little man in faded khaki, his shirt held together with a cheap gold pin, presented to Huston a card: Hal Croves, Translator. Traven, Croves explained, couldn't come; but as Traven's old friend and translator, he, Croves, knew the author and his work better even than Traven himself did. Huston hired Croves at $150 a week as technical adviser. By the time Croves had done his job and disappeared, Huston was pretty certain that uneasy little Mr. Croves was Traven himself.

Huston has no truck with theories of esthetics or questions of style; his sharp directing is intuitive. He has a coldly intelligent knowledge of how much to leave free within the frame, and the born artist's passion for the possibilities of his medium. "In a given scene," he says, "I have an idea what should happen, but I don't tell the actors. Instead I tell them to go ahead and do it. Sometimes they do it better. Sometimes they do something accidentally which is effective and true. I jump on the accident."

Does he think Treasure is his best work to date? The question is virtually meaningless to him. He says, drily and without self-consciousness: "It is as a picturemaker would have it."

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