Excerpt from 8.19 Facebook post by Robert Chandler, a Brit:

“During a flight a couple of days ago, I watched John Huston‘s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre for the first time in my life.

“Now a hale and hearty 74 years old, this gold-mining allegory (greed, capitalism) is shockingly good and uncompromising. It is spare and essential, and full of excellent performances.

“I had no idea where the story was heading or how it played out for Humphrey Bogart‘s character, Fred C. Dobbs. There’s no vanity in Bogart’s performance, no weakness, no movie-star nod to the camera that says ‘hey, I’m a good guy, really.’

“Bogart’s performance is matched by his fellow drifter on the gold trail, played by Tim Holt, and then exceeded (perhaps) by the director’s father, Walter Huston, as a veteran prospector who talks with a frenzied excitement but has his greatest moment in a scene where he says very little as he saves the life of a drowned Mexican boy.

“There’s an incredible moment where Bogart, after a moment of betrayal, is shown being consigned to hell when he rolls nearer to the campfire and the flames rise up in the camera as it tracks in to reframe him.

“The Tampico kid who gets his face doused while selling lottery tickets is played by a young Robert Blake, who had a colorful and lengthy Hollywood career, including playing one of the killers in Richard Brooks‘ In Cold Blood (’67). But he’ll always be known — at least to my generation in the UK who frenzy-fed on cult movies at the Scala — as the pint-sized cop in Electra Glide In Blue (’73).

“Sierra Madre plays fresh and hard, and is exciting to watch. No scene is wasted. If anything, it’s a refreshing reminder of how film stories used to be told sparely and without compromise.”