#57 - The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)

My brother Mike is home for the weekend working on something for school (yay!) and my brother Matt has the day off work, so we decided to sit down, the three of us, and watch a movie for my blog.  I suggested that we watch something Oscar-y from our DVR (thank you 31 Days of Oscar) and Matt chose today's film: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. 

This is one of those old movies that I've known about, it being one of the AFI's Top 100, and having the cachet of being the first (only?) movie to earn an Oscar for a son (John Huston) directing his father (Walter Huston) to an Oscar, as well.  The movie also stars Humphrey Bogart as Rick Dobbs.

The movie takes awhile to get going (despite the extremely quick speech yielded by several of the characters-- Matt said that in this day and age, you'd expect the movie to last another hour just based on the dialogue), but once it does, it becomes very much a movie about paranoia.  Dobbs is clearly the least trusting (and trustworthy) character of the three prospectors, and seems to forget later on in the movie that one of the others, Curtin, saved his life when a mine collapsed on him, when the latter could have just left him there.

It's not a flawless movie: sometimes the acting is rollercoaster-y, the story isn't that interesting for the first 45 minutes or so, and the dialogue is forced and rushed and stilted at times.  But once it gets going, the film is really first-rate.

Score: 8/10