The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

Film history is the story of films constantly building on one another. If one contemporary director knows this, it’s Paul Thomas Anderson, PTA for professional purposes. In PTA & HIS MASTERS we take a look at the unofficial filmic predecessors of Paul Thomas Anderson. We place the director – arguably one of the most important directors of his generation – next to the influences he unabashedly cites in his work. In PTA & HIS MASTERS we link THERE WILL BE BLOOD to John Huston’s THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE.

John Huston’s classic – somewhere between a western and a psychological thriller – is based on B. Traven’s novel of the same name from 1927 and departs from the idea of a treasure hunt.

In the Mexican city of Tampico, two poor American drifters meet an old an equally unfortunate gold prospector in a sleazy hotel. The old, talkative man passionately talks about how great it feels to unexpectedly discover a goldmine. And his stories contagious. The three men join forces and travel to the Sierra Madre mountains to dig for gold. Their promise to split their treasures three-way, is slowly but surely forgotten when they finally do struck gold. The paranoia and greed grows between the friends and one of them falls prey to the gold rush.

Huston maintains the entertaining touch we know from his other work, but paints over THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE with a dark coating. Hollywood star Humphrey Bogart plays a pathetic and egotistic man and does so fearlessly, even though he was known for playing the hero. “I play the worst shit you ever saw”, Bogart described his atypical part. Well, just you wait until you watch Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview in THERE WILL BE BLOOD. PTA actually asked main actor Day-Lewis to watch SIERRA MADRE and to mirror his performance to Humphrey Bogart’s. For his own direction he sought inspiration in the simple framing and the limited use of camera angles within each scene. “I was trying to find something that was 100 percent straightforward, old-fashioned storytelling,” and the director found this in SIERRA MADRE. “THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE is as direct as you can get—nothing clever, nothing structurally new or different—and I mean that as a high compliment. It’s harder than anything else to be completely straightforward.” According to PTA THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE answers all of life’s questions: “It’s about greed and ambition and paranoia and looking at the worst parts of yourself. When I was writing THERE WILL BE BLOOD I would put SIERRA MADRE on before I went to bed at night, just to fall asleep to it.”

THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE investigates the destructive power of greed and how greed fires on the worst in humanity. “Ah, as long as there’s no find, the noble brotherhood will last but when the piles of gold begin to grow… that’s when the trouble starts…”