The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
John Huston · a film · 1948 · written by Huston from the novel by B. Traven · in English, with Spanish
Mode
Adventure picture turned moral tragedy; a treasure tale, a study of greed and a dark comedy in one expedition
Mythos
The oldest treasure story, three men who find gold and are killed by it by way of each other; the old man who reads the end at the beginning; the keeper devoured by his hoard
Phase
About a year, from begging in Tampico to the mine on the mountain and down again to Durango, poverty to gold to dust
Presentation
Feature film in black and white, Academy ratio, mono, in English with Spanish; three principals, one intruder, one band of outlaws; exteriors in large part shot in Mexico
Register
From a beggar’s peso and a cantina brawl to an old man’s jig on a hillside, a murder reasoned out by a fire, and a laugh at the loss of everything
Scale
Three men, a mountain and a road, with the state, the outlaws and a village seen from the trail
Governing Proposition
Three poor men find gold on a mountain and are undone by it, not because gold is evil but because each man’s safety now depends on guessing what the others will do with what he holds. The wager of the film is that a man without standing, given property, becomes its servant first and its thief second, and that the value which costs a year and lives is a fiction the wind can take back.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins in Tampico with a man who has nothing. Fred C. Dobbs, played by Humphrey Bogart, begs on the street from a man in a white suit, and then again, and a third time from the same man. He has a lottery ticket in his pocket. The film begins low, among the poorest Americans in a foreign port, and it never pretends that Dobbs is better than his circumstances: he is ashamed, and he is lucky, and the two will turn out to be one fault.
Dobbs and another drifter, Bob Curtin, played by Tim Holt, take work from a contractor, McCormick, played by Barton MacLane, at an oil camp. When the work is done McCormick will not pay. They find him in a cantina and beat the wages out of him in a long, ugly fight. The lesson is the first law of the film’s world: nobody pays what is owed unless he is made to, and a man must hold what is his against everyone.
In a flophouse they meet Howard, an old prospector played by Walter Huston, who talks without stopping about gold: where it is, how it is got, and what it does to the men who get it. Partners who were friends at the start turn on each other once there is something to keep. The whole plot is told in advance, by the one man who has seen it before. Dobbs’s lottery ticket pays, he puts in his share with Curtin’s, Howard puts in his, and the three set out with the prophecy already in hand.
Movement II
They go by train into the Sierra Madre, and bandits attack the train. Then the climb, with the land shown at its own scale, heat, rock and distance, and the men small against it.
On a hillside Howard stops, looks at the sand under his feet, and begins to dance. He jigs and laughs, mocking the two who walked over the gold without seeing it. It is the purest joy in the film, and it belongs to the one man who knows what comes after. The comedy is real, and it is also the first step of the tragedy.
They sink a mine, build a sluice and work for months. The film shows the labour plainly: digging, carrying water, washing sand, the gold coming slowly in small heaps. Then the shares. The gold is divided, and each man hides his own portion where the others cannot see it. From the moment there is something to keep, each man must guess what the others will do, and the partnership becomes a calculation.
Movement III
The calculation grows. Who will guard the goods at night is argued as a question of trust, and the trust fails a little each time it is tested. The camera, which has kept the three equal in the frame, begins to set Dobbs apart, watching the others across the fire.
A stranger arrives. Cody, played by Bruce Bennett, finds the camp and wants a part in it. The three vote to kill him, and before it can be done the bandits come back, led by Gold Hat, played by Alfonso Bedoya. Cody dies in the fight, and the federales arrive. Among his things is a letter from his wife in Texas, the only woman of weight in the film, present only on paper.
The three decide to go down. Before they leave Howard insists that they close up the mine and put the mountain back as they found it, an old man’s care for the wounded earth. They pack the gold into hides stitched as bags, load the burros, and start the descent. A treasure tale as old as the one Chaucer’s Pardoner tells is now in motion: three men, a hoard, and a road on which each is the others’ danger.
Movement IV
On the way down, villagers come for Howard. A boy has drowned, and Howard revives him, and the village keeps him as its guest and healer. He goes, and the other two go on with the gold. The village is played warmly and at length, and it does necessary work: it takes the one man who did not need the gold out of the company of the two who do.
Dobbs and Curtin go on alone. At night by the fire, Dobbs reasons. He talks to himself and to the fire about conscience, about what Curtin will do, about what he himself must do first. It is not madness but logic carried one step past decency, and the film lets the audience follow every step of it. He shoots Curtin and leaves him for dead, and goes on down with the burros and the gold.
Curtin survives. Dobbs, alone with the gold, comes to a waterhole near Durango in the heat, and Gold Hat and his men are waiting there. They want his boots and his burros. They do not know what is in the bags. A machete falls, and the film keeps Dobbs’s head out of frame. The biggest star at Warner Bros. dies in the dirt for his boots, without music to soften it, well before the end of the picture.
Movement V
The bandits slit the hides to sell them, and the gold, which to them is sand, spills out. In Durango the federales catch them and execute them, a coda before the coda. Howard and Curtin, together again, arrive too late for anything but what is left.
Out on the hillside a dust storm is blowing. The gold that cost a year of labour and three lives lifts off the ground and goes back toward the mountain. Howard and Curtin find the empty bags. Then Howard laughs, a great laugh at the joke the mountain has told, and Curtin catches it from him. It is neither bitter nor false. The loss of everything is met as the end of a comedy, and the comedy and the tragedy are seen to be one law.
The old man goes back to the village, where he is to be kept as its healer, the one of the three who gave something back. Curtin sets off for Texas, to Cody’s widow and her orchard. Nobody is rich. What has been shown is that value lives only between men who agree on it, and that a man who has nothing, once he holds something, is held by it in turn.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test mostly fails to find slack. Tampico looks leisurely, but each scene loads the machine: Dobbs begging three times from the same man in a white suit sets his shame and his luck; McCormick cheating the two men of their wages teaches them that nobody pays what is owed; Howard’s talk in the flophouse gives the whole plot in advance, so that the rest is the working out of a known law. The shares, the hiding places, the quarrel over who guards the goods, Cody’s arrival and the vote on him: each is a step in one curve. Two parts are less required. The Indian village is needed to separate Howard from the others but is played longer and warmer than the curve asks, and the execution of the bandits in Durango is a coda before the coda.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and holds: what destroys the partnership is not gold but the arithmetic of distrust it makes possible, and a man without standing, given property, becomes its servant first and its thief second. Dobbs is shown from inside. His reasoning by the fire is logic carried one step past decency, and the film lets the audience follow it. Beneath it lies a second truth, that value is a social fiction: the gold that cost a year is sand to the bandits, and the wind takes it back, shown in image and never in a speech. What holds the figure below the gate is that Howard announces the lesson in Tampico and the film then confirms it. It is a demonstration more than a discovery, and the truth, deeply held, is an old one.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Elevation comes chiefly as dreadful comedy and as the scale of land against men. Howard’s jig on the hillside when he finds the gold, mocking the two who walked over it, is a summit of joy. Dobbs alone at night, talking to the fire about conscience, is the darker summit. The waterhole near Durango, the bandits arriving in the heat and Dobbs killed by men who want his boots and his burros, is terror with no music to soften it. The close rises twice: the gold blowing off in a dust storm over the empty bags, and Howard’s laugh, which Curtin catches, a sublime of acceptance. Between these the film rides the pleasures of adventure at a lower pitch, and Steiner’s score often tells the audience what to feel before the image does. The elevation is frequent, not continuous.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The myth is built and bears the load. Its frame is the oldest treasure story, the one Chaucer’s Pardoner tells: three men set out, find gold, and the gold kills them by way of each other. The film’s structure is that tale’s, transposed, and the gold goes back to the earth. Around it two more figures are built. Howard is the elder who reads the end at the beginning, who has the mine closed up before they leave and is taken into a village as its healer. Dobbs is the man devoured by what he holds, a dragon on a hoard without the dragon’s strength. The particular stays particular: tins of beans, a lottery ticket, a letter from a wife in Texas, hides stitched into packs. The archetype is received rather than remade, and the figure rests at the gate.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The departure was real and it cost something. Warner Bros. took its biggest star and made him filthy, unshaven and craven, and had him killed without dignity, his head out of frame under a machete, with no romance and no reversal. The quest of the adventure film becomes a moral tragedy: the treasure is lost and nobody is rewarded but the old man, who wins nothing but a place to stay. The studio sent a crew to Mexico when the American feature lived on the back lot. What holds the figure well below the gate: the swerve is from the conventions of a genre more than from the grammar of film. Traven’s novel already held the plot and its irony, and the style, spare and hard as it is, is classical Hollywood, not a new language.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Change the form and what is lost? The expedition is the instrument: by confining three men with a hoard, the film turns the sociology of property into a chamber play, and the shape out and back, poverty to gold to dust, makes the end return to the beginning with nothing added but knowledge. The prophecy in Tampico is formal too, turning the suspense from whether into how. The camera, mostly unobtrusive and at eye level, keeps the men equal in the frame until Dobbs begins to watch the others across the fire, and the compositions pull apart with the partnership. Yet the form serves the knowledge rather than becoming it. The story could be told as a novel, as Traven told it, and keep most of what it knows, and the figure says so.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Seventy-eight years of return are the evidence. Dobbs’s fall rewards repeat viewing because its seeds are planted early: his generosity with the lottery money and his fury at McCormick come from the same wound. Howard yields more each time, a comic figure who is also the film’s conscience and its prophet, and whose last choice, to stay with the villagers, rereads the whole as the story of the one man who did not need the gold. Critics have read the film as a parable of capital, of postwar America, of the star system turned against itself, and the open question of who Traven was keeps a further layer in play. What limits the well is that the meaning is clear from the start, by design: on return one finds more detail, not a different film.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 1940s. Intrinsic force: the film made the adventure picture the vehicle of a moral study of greed, took the American star into contempt and death, and joined location realism to studio storytelling at full scale; it showed what the postwar American film could do outside the city of noir. It perfected a mode more than it reorganised what cinema could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the film made Huston’s standing and brought him the Academy Awards for direction and screenplay, with a third to Walter Huston; the line about “stinking badges” passed into common speech and parody; and the three men and their hoard became a pattern for later westerns and thrillers. The reach is wide and lasting, the force narrower.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across seventy-eight years. The form is whole: the film survives as released, and restorations are repair. Presence has been continuous and wide, in repertory, on television, on every home format and in teaching, and the line about badges is known to people who have never seen the picture. The surface fixed to its making takes little: Steiner’s score and some studio inserts and back projection now read as period, while the subject, men and money, has no date. A span of more than fifty-five years, with whole form and wide presence, takes the highest figure the desk allows a film, 8.8.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The making bears weight in the performances and the photography. Walter Huston’s Howard, garrulous and nimble, is one of the great supporting performances in sound film, and the laugh at the end is pure command. Bogart charts Dobbs’s descent by degrees and never plays the end before the middle. Tim Holt is plain and sound. Ted McCord’s photography makes dust, heat and the night fire tangible, Owen Marks’s cutting keeps a long picture moving without haste, and the script is lean and exact. The charges stand: Steiner’s score is heavy and often underlines what the image has already said; some studio night work and back projection show against the exteriors; the Indian village is played with a softness the rest avoids. Strong and load-bearing in places, not at the very top.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Howard’s jig on the mountain and Dobbs’s death at the waterhole. They obey the same law, the one Howard stated in the flophouse: the mountain gives and takes, and men’s conduct is ruled by what they hold. The comedy is not relief from the tragedy but its other face, and the end proves it, when the loss of everything produces a laugh that is neither bitter nor false. The bandits, the federales and the villagers belong to the same world, one in which possession is always provisional and violence is its ordinary price. The range is wide, from begging in Tampico to healing in the village. The figure is held by the pull of the score and of the village interlude toward a sweetness the law of the rest does not grant.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Several orders are held in one structure: consciousness, in Dobbs’s reasoning into murder, given from inside; labour, from the unpaid wages of the camp to the digging, the sluice and the year on the mountain; money and value, from a beggar’s peso to gold taken for sand; the state, in the federales and their summary justice; the outlaw band as a rival order; the village, with its own law of obligation and its claim on Howard; the family, present only as Cody’s widow and her orchard in Texas; and the natural order in the mountain itself, wounded and closed up again. They are joined, not listed. What keeps the axis lowest is the frame: three men, a mountain and a road, with the larger orders seen from the trail.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.8, then The Archetypal Deep and The Made at 8.6. A film that survives whole after seventy-eight years, with presence so wide that its one line about badges is known to people who have not seen it; the oldest treasure story built into its structure, with an elder who reads the end at the beginning and a man devoured by his hoard; and a making carried by Walter Huston’s Howard, Bogart’s descent by degrees and McCord’s dust and fire.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.8: consciousness, labour, value, the state, the outlaws, a village, the family and the mountain held together, but in the frame of three men and a road, with the larger orders seen from the trail. Above it five axes at 8.2: The Sublime, an elevation frequent but not continuous and pressed by the score; The Swerve, a turn from the conventions of a genre more than from the grammar of film; The Living Form, a form that serves the knowledge rather than becoming it; The Bottomless Well, a meaning clear from the start by design; and Pressure on Tradition, wide reach and narrower force.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.2, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on three of five: The Imperishable at 8.8 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4 falls a tenth short of it, and The Swerve at 8.2 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.2 fall three tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.2, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 99.9, an average of 8.325 that displays 8.3: the work is held below the summit by the Epochal Gate and by its aggregate, seven tenths short of the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre as released in 1948, from Dobbs begging in Tampico to Howard’s laugh on the hillside: written and directed by John Huston after the novel by B. Traven (1927), for Warner Bros., produced by Henry Blanke, photographed by Ted McCord, edited by Owen Marks, with music by Max Steiner; with Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston, Tim Holt, Bruce Bennett, Alfonso Bedoya and Barton MacLane. Black and white, Academy ratio, mono, in English with passages in Spanish. The unit is the film as released; restorations bear on The Imperishable only. Traven’s novel is the source, not the work, and the question of its author’s identity is weighed only as part of the film’s life. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain, and the line about badges is given only as the phrase that passed into common speech. Details that could not be verified are not given, among them the running time to the minute, the date and place of the premiere, whether any other cut was released, the shot order within sequences, the Mexican locations by name, the share of location work against studio work and back projection, how far the Spanish goes without subtitles, the year of the film’s selection to the National Film Registry, Walter Huston’s playing without his dentures, and the later films and the television series reported to draw on it.