Behind the Scenes: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Huston, 1948) with Humphrey Bogart

Ten years ago, I think we were talking to Ilya Kazan in New York about something. We'd shown one of his films and we were talking. And he just sat back afterwards and I think he had screened Wild River, a film of his, and he was criticizing and he says, but you know what? He said, it's just one of those things. Isn't it great? We're in the business that made The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Isn't that exciting? The Treasure of the Sierra Madre I thought was very good. And I told Bogart, you know, this might be a great picture. Bogart said, you're out of your mind. It's a good Western. John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is today regarded as a genuine classic, perpetually ranked on critics' best rosters, including the American Film Institute's revered 100 list. But his story really begins in Mexico shortly after the American Civil War. An elite group of American financiers and industrialists seize the untapped potential of Mexico's natural resources in oil and mining and develop the country's infrastructure to support their lucrative operations there. Foreigners of every stripe arrive in Mexico to escape their native countries for reasons legitimate and criminal, self-evident and enigmatic, to work for these wealthy corporations. One of these foreigners is a reclusive writer known as B. Traven. Treasure of the Sierra Madre was first published in Europe in the 1920s. Its author at first refused its publication in any capitalist societies. The novel is a brutal indictment of materialism and teams with anti-capitalist sentiment. He felt that if people didn't have possessions, didn't feel they had to dress up, that there would be no wars and their capitalism would be shot to hell, in effect. In addition, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre challenges the Spanish oppression of the Native Indians and is highly critical of the Church's role in this injustice. Its author's identity wasn't even known to his publisher, and over the years, various theories abounded as to his identity. Jack London, Ambrose Bierce, the illegitimate son of Kaiser Wilhelm II, a Chicagoan, a German. He may have been an anarchist and revolutionary who had to flee Europe. Listen, this story is very complicated. I am warning you right now. And I'm warning you right now, nobody will ever know the answer to who was B. Traven. Whatever the identity of the mysterious author, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was published in the United States in 1935, where it came to the attention of a young writer and sometime actor working in Hollywood, John Huston. Huston had written dialogue for his first film in 1930 and became a staff writer at Warner Brothers. But John wrote. He was a writer first. He grew up in a dramatic family. His mother crossed the Mississippi on horseback. I think his grandfather gambled and won at Western City and then lost it at the table. I don't know that there are any stories about John Huston that are exaggerated. He really was a world class character and his own man. Maybe not the nicest man at all times. Maybe not the best husband or the best father. But when it came to writing and directing, he was damn good. I wrote the Hemingway story into a picture once, collaborator. And it was during the time I was in the army and I didn't want there to be any semblance of moonlighting, so my name didn't appear on the screen. And one time, Ernest Papa was saying that they'd never done any good pictures of his books, stories. He said only one that he liked, The Killers. And I didn't tell him that I'd written it. He found out later and called me a dirty name. I think Dad, in his heart of hearts, is a painter. And a very, very good painter. He would have been one of the painters of our century if he would have spent more time at it. And he certainly admired painting more than he did filmmaking. Filmmaking was a category below the painter, the artist. Filmmaking was more of a craft than necessarily an art form for Dad. And he thought he was a better filmmaker than a painter. And he might as well do what he thought he was best at. But there's an element of a sacrifice there. You have to sacrifice something. It's painting. I got married and started writing in order to support my wife. And painting at that time was unremunerative, to say the least. It was practically giving up one's life in order to paint. It was like going into a priesthood. And I wasn't prepared to do that, so I didn't paint. Already middle-aged, Humphrey Bogart was not yet a big star. Although he had been acting consistently since the age of 19. Bogart's such a big star, such an icon to us now, we forget that he spent so many years coming up through the ranks, playing small parts. Bogart started off in the theater just as a stage manager. So he learned a lot about his craft. What was interesting about him in his earlier time on Broadway is that he always played the male ingenue. He was the attractive guy. And one of the critics from Chicago said that he was as handsome as Valentino. But we also have to remember that there was nothing about him, particularly his physical look, that would conjure up the idea of a star at that era. Stars in those days were like Clark Gable and Tyrone Power and Robert Taylor. They looked like movie stars. And here, Bogart looked like this street guy. He had come out to Hollywood in the early 30s and had done a half dozen or more films without any success, went back, tried to resurrect his career. He was really saved by Robert Sherwood's Petrified Forest, where he plays the killer Duke Mantee. Just keep in mind that I and the boys is candidate for hanging. The first time anyone of you makes a wrong move, I'm going to kill a whole lot of you. From the first day that he's shooting Petrified Forest, he really electrifies the company. And rumor goes out around the studio that something really special is happening. What's the matter with you, Duke? Do something! Shut up! Shut up! Give me time to think! And when he finished, he was offered a contract for actually less than he had been making. It was guaranteed 26 weeks at $550 a week. And then he got a big break with High Sierra, which was scripted by John Huston. And it gave him more dimension and more shading playing this particular gangster character in it. I'm giving you a chance to blow. If you decide to stick, I'll shoot the first one. The success of High Sierra gave a career boost both to Bogart and Huston, who was rewarded with an almost unprecedented power to both write and direct his next film. It was The Maltese Falcon, which was a great success, and proved that he was what they hoped he would be, a natural. You ever given me any of your confidence, any of the truth? Haven't you tried to buy my loyalty with money and nothing else? What else is there I can buy you with? Dashiell Hammett's hard-boiled detective thriller had failed to win an appreciative audience in two previous screen adaptations. Huston's version, however, brought him acclaim and finally catapulted Bogart to stardom. Huston wanted The Treasure of the Sierra Madre as his follow-up to The Maltese Falcon and pressed his agent, Paul Kohner, to secure the rights. The novel actually had been brought to Warner's story department twice, but was rejected as too downbeat. One confounded story reader suggested that Warner Bros. turned Traven's gritty drama into a South American comedy melodrama. Kohner and Huston prevailed and convinced Jack Warner that The Treasure of the Sierra Madre would make a terrific movie. But, of course, negotiating with the mysterious Beat Traven and trying to work out the copyright details and find out from the publishers and so on and so forth, and, of course, World War II was getting underway, but then John Huston is called into the service. Huston spent the next several years creating a number of acclaimed documentaries for the Army Signal Corps. As the war waged on, Bogart's star continued to rise with a string of classics like Casablanca I was willing to shoot Captain Rhino and I'm willing to shoot you. to Have and Have Not What'd you do that for? Been wondering whether I'd like it. What's the decision? I don't know yet. then The Big Sleep I like that. I'd like more. After years of struggle, he was now Hollywood's biggest star and in late 1946, Bogart signed a lucrative contract with Warner. It was guaranteed at least one picture a year and $200,000 per picture and approval of writer and director from a short list that included John Huston. Within the closing pages of that contract, Treasurer of Sierra Madre was specified. Jack Warner signed Henry Blankey to produce Treasurer of the Sierra Madre. Henry Blankey was a real force at Warner Brothers. He was very valuable because he was an excellent producer, had great taste. While Huston was away in the service, other directors were attached to the project at one time or another. And other actors, including Edward G. Robinson, were announced to star. At least four writers wrote a variety of treatments and scripts based on the novel, all of varying fidelity to the book. One partial script was set in L.A. after World War II. At one point, director Vincent Sherman was ready to go into production, but the plug was pulled when it was alleged The Breen office objected that the script was derogatory to Mexico. There are many who maintain that all of these machinations were a ruse, Blankey's way of keeping Treasurer of Sierra Madre apparently active, while actually spinning the project's wheels as the producer waited for John Huston's return. And, of course, Huston started afresh with the screenplay and then had correspondence with the mysterious B. Traven. Huston completed his draft in less than two months, but with a number of interesting changes that make it more suitable to the screen. He softened the character of Curtin to make him more of a counterpoint to Dobbs, while making the bandito Goldhat into Dobbs' alter ego. To celebrate the completion of the script, Huston entered into a steeplechase and was almost killed, after which he left for New York to direct No Exit on Broadway. Huston returned to Burbank on December 16, 1946 to resume work on the film. Huston took a small crew with him to scout locations in Mexico and covered more than 8,000 miles before settling on Jungapayo in San Jose de Padua, in the state of Michoacán. In Mexico City, Huston was to meet the mysterious Traven, but the author never showed up. Huston claims to have awoken one day in his hotel to see a mysterious man standing over his bed. The world was becoming a little tougher, a little more cynical. This, of course, gave birth to film noir, which flourished in the years immediately following World War II. And that suited Bogart very well, because he wasn't a conventional leading man, nor did he want to be. For the role of Dobbs, Walter Huston had been considered, with Traven's approval, but he fortuitously wound up as the old prospector Howard. Well, Walter Huston had been an actor for, of course, ages and was John Huston's father. And Walter had started out in vaudeville and was highly regarded and had been in films for many years and had done some terrific pictures, such as Doddsworth, the Sinclair Lewis novel adapted for the stage. And one of the things that B. Traven was concerned about was that Walter Huston, gee, he's not old enough. He saw Louis Stone in the part, who was an MGM player, and that he'd be better as this Howard character. How about yourself? What plans have you of any? Oh, I figure I'm buying some land and growing fruit. Peaches, maybe. How'd you come to settle on peaches? One summer when I was a kid, I worked as a picker in a peach harvest in the San Joaquin Valley. Huston wanted to have a contrast between the Dobbs character, portrayed by Bogart, and the Curtin character, and he thought of a younger man and a more naive person. At one time, Ronald Reagan was considered. And finally, Tim Holt was decided upon. Tim Holt had one of the most interesting and unusual careers in all of Hollywood history. His father, Jack Holt, was a very popular, square-jawed leading man, and Tim grew up in and around the movies, made his debut as a young man in the 1930s, and did a lot of work in Westerns, often grade B Westerns. But at the same time, he was appearing in like Magnificent Ambersons for Orson Welles, and he'd show up in John Huston's Treasure of the Sierra Madre and these great prestigious films at the same time. And, of course, he was just right for the part, because he did project a certain naivete, and it was a good contrast to the Bogart character, and certainly a good contrast to the Walter Huston character. He's too old to take along with us, of course. We'd have to pack him on our backs. You can't tell about some of those old guys. It's surprising sometimes how tough they are. If you haven't found anything up there yet, I'll come along with you and put your nose in it. There's indications in this valley, lots of indications. By tracing the rocks, I find they come from that ridge up there, washed down by the tropical rain. You don't say so. Yes, I say so. So much for those bandits. Bruce Bennett was born Herman Bricks, B-R-I-X, and under that name, he competed in the 1932 Olympic game as a shot putter. And like so many good-looking athletes of that time, he went from Olympic fame to movies. John Huston didn't direct his actors a lot, but when actors needed help, he had a way of giving them just a phrase or a thought that would unlock the secret of playing that character. When I interviewed Bruce Bennett many years ago, he told me that he was having trouble getting a fix on his character in this key scene, and Huston said to him, you're smarter than these guys. He said, oh, that was all he needed. Where ground you say? Depends on what you're looking for. For game, yes. Mighty good ground for something else. Yeah? What might that be? Gold. Gold? Ha! One inspired piece of casting that Huston did was Alfonso Bedoya, who played Gold Hat. Alfonso Bedoya he found in Mexico, and apparently he was an actor down there. What was interesting about Alfonso Bedoya was his smile and his charm, and you knew, you knew he was a monster, you know? If you're the police, where are your badges? Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges! Local Mexican actors, stunt writers, townspeople, and possibly a real bandit were cast as extras and in other small parts. Of course, it's amusing to see young Bobby Blake in that pivotal role in the opening scenes of the film. The lottery, senor? Beat it. I ain't buying no lottery tickets. Go on, beat it. 4,000 pesos, the big price. Get away from me, you little beggar. Huston himself played the man in the white suit that Bogart accosts on a city street. I missed it. You stick a fellow American to a meal. Shooting began in Burbank on March 17, 1947 on a backlot set made to look remarkably like Tampico. Well, Huston wasn't above using some sleight of hand, so while the film was shot principally in Mexico, some of it was done on a soundstage in Burbank. The Tampico stuff was recreated to a large degree on the studio lot, and the early scenes in the flop house and the haircut and the what-have-yous were all done here before they decide to leave on the trek. One of the really significant changes in Hollywood filmmaking in the days following World War II was the fact that filmmakers suddenly were allowed to go out on real locations. The studios, with their resources and their standing sets and their backlots and their ranches, expected the filmmakers to make use of all of those facilities. Once work in Burbank was finished, Huston moved the production south. On April 6, 1947, the cast flew to Mexico, but their flight was a disaster, with many getting sick en route. It was hoped this wasn't an omen. Once cast and crew were assembled in Mexico, location shooting commenced. Home for the next two months would be a fashionable resort. And they did have a lot of cooperation because they have to go through the authorities, of course, and they had people who were helping them down there and so forth, but it was difficult. It was difficult to take an entire company down there. The shoot required difficult days in the sweltering sun. The adventuresome Huston loved every minute of it, the metropolitan Bogart not so much. Bruce Bennett arrived halfway through the shooting and found an easygoing set with Huston leading almost daily pranks and practical jokes. Evenings were spent in the resort, bowling and drinking. Mexican stunt riders were paid 40 pesos a day and told Huston they could certainly be shot at, but just arms and legs, no killing. If Huston couldn't find just the right location, he had it constructed, even out in the wilderness. Back home, Jack Warner was increasingly nervous when he saw the dailies and how grimy his big star looked. He kept seeing the footage coming in, and they were down there much longer than they anticipated being down there. So there was one point, apparently, where Jack L. Warner's watching the dailies and thinking, keeps looking for water, and he says, if that son of a... doesn't find water pretty soon, we're going to go broke. Waldo Huston once said to his son John, when you get to be a big-shot picture maker out there in Hollywood, I want you to write a script for me, something I can really get my teeth into. And so along came the treasurer of the Sierra Madre. John's one request of his father was, I want you to take out your teeth and play this with your gums. So he played it without his false teeth. Of course, the most memorable scene is when Walter Huston discovers that they have found the mother lode, so-called. To create this moment, Walter Huston drew from past experience. He was doing Shakespeare's Othello on the stage, and apparently it was a colossal misjudgment and a flop. As he read several brutal reviews of his performance, Huston began to laugh maniacally. So he imparted this laugh, this amazing laugh, as part of his characterization. And he also took something from a play he had once done. A Eugene O'Neill play, Desire Under the Elms, in which O'Neill apparently had taught him this little jig, this little dance. You're so dumb, you don't even see the riches you're treading on with your own feet. John Huston thought that his father's performance in Treasurer of Sierra Madre was his finest. They loved each other. It was a lovely relationship. The grueling location work went on. The food was terrible. But Lauren Bacall pitched in to cook familiar fare from home. Bacall's domesticity irked actress Evelyn Keyes, John Huston's wife. Huston took this as an opportunity to humiliate her in front of everyone, their young marriage already on the rocks. Keyes was relieved when she left to shoot a film in Hollywood, little realizing the surprise her husband would be bringing home. There was a young boy by the name of Pablo who was hanging around and watched them shooting and so forth. And Huston gave him little errands to do and things to keep him occupied. Then Pablo, he was like glue. Huston couldn't get rid of him. And he became very fond of this Pablo, who apparently did not have a mother and father anymore. When the picture wrapped up in Mexico, he had what he thought was a brilliant idea. He decided he wanted to adopt Pablo, but he didn't tell Evelyn Keyes, his wife. And Evelyn Keyes had already gone home a little early from the shoot. So he announces that he's bringing Pablo back and adopting him. I don't think John liked women very much. I don't think he had tremendous respect for them. I think he respected the mother of his children as the mother of his children. He respected me because I was Bogie's wife and I was the mother of Bogie's children. But I would hate to have been in love with him. Meanwhile, the location shooting continued. So time is going on and we're falling further and further behind down in Mexico and there was still stuff to be shot at the studio and on location up here. And Bogart was getting increasingly worried because he was a yachtsman and he had his yacht, the Santana. And there was this annual race from Catalina to Hawaii and they kept telling him, don't worry, we're going to be finished with this picture and plenty of time for you to go on your race. And as the weeks go by and it's clearly not going to be fine, Bogart becomes more and more insistent in asking him. And one night over dinner, he apparently is being fairly loud about this to Houston. And apparently John Houston twisted his nose and it hurt. And Lauren Bacall said, you're hurting him, John. And he stopped and Bogart never complained again. He missed the race because they definitely went over, way over schedule, but that was the end of that. So he missed the race. Houston was the director. Houston was the writer. And that sensibility always carried over into his relationships with people. He liked to make fun of his actors and punish them, even though he was an actor himself and certainly came from a long line of actors. That was pure Houston. That's how he dealt with his children. That's how he dealt with everybody. And here was Bogart who was, he just had enough of this questioning of, Daddy, are we there yet or am I going to get to go? And the answer was, if we finish, you will. And if we don't finish, you won't. And of course, they didn't. John is typical of the sort of person who has faced the ultimate challenge, which is death. And you always felt that about John. And what had happened was, is he lived lives unlike a lot of other people. He'd been through the dam and had come out the other side and he wasn't afraid. Most of us lead lives of being afraid we might go through the dam. And that's what made him different from other people. And still the location shooting went on. And Houston kept saying, but I still want to shoot this, the water hole sequence, for example, where the three bandits discover Bogart. The producer said, we can do that back here. Houston said, no. So they did that there and they finally wrapped and came to Los Angeles and the Warner Burbank studio, shot some stuff on the back lot and then went to Kernville, which is about 150 miles north of Los Angeles, where the terrain matches pretty much where the mining was being done and the campsite and so forth. But that's not to denigrate the industry behind that Mexican shooting because that was extraordinarily important and gave a great flavor. John Houston stayed behind to make arrangements for Pablo while the cast and crew finally departed for home. Pablo came home on the plane with him and he greeted him at the airport and looked at this little kid and said, who's that? And Houston said, that's our new son, Pablo. Hal Croves came to Burbank for the final weeks of filming, but his stipend was reduced to $150 a week on the studio's orders. After five and a half months in production and 29 days over schedule, filming was completed on the sound stages at Warner Brothers on July 22, 1947. Bogart and McCall planned a leisurely second honeymoon before beginning work on their next project, Houston's Key Largo. Bogart was still stinging from having missed the Honolulu Classic. After all was said and done and the picture was finished, Jack Warner, who cabled the big honcho in New York saying, this is the best picture we've ever made. It is remarkable. Of course, the reviews on Treasure of the Sierra Madre were marvelous. You couldn't ask for any better reviews. A few people carped about the Max Steiner score. It's a very powerful score and apparently the score was criticized for being melodramatic and heavy handed. At the time of the film's release, I beg to differ. Bogart's performance was considered by most to be his best to date. No, your mistake. I'm doing this to save my life, that you'd be taken from me the minute I wasn't looking at you. No man will catch up with you. Oh, he will, will he? Well, I got an answer for that one, too. You know what I'm going to tell him? I'm going to tell him he tied me to a tree in major getaway, taking all the goods, yours, mine and his. So he'd be looking for you and not me. Up! Well, Bogart's performance was different from anything he had done and his fan base was not particularly thrilled because they wanted to see him, you know, with the trench coat and doing Sam Spade and doing Marlow and more romantically involved, such as he was in Casablanca. But this was not the Bogart that they wanted because he was an unsavory character. Hal Croves wrote an angry letter to Life magazine, apparently feeling snubbed by his reduction in pay and angered at Houston for speculating in print that he was really Bee Traven. When the film came out, John Houston felt that in person he was a ridiculous little man, whereas the books by Traven were books by someone with a strong personality. And I think he was very offended by that. And he said he would never let John Houston make another film based on one of his books. The Warner Bros. marketing department was frankly confused with how to promote this unusual film. The marketing department even had Bogart endorse a line of men's clothes as a movie tie-in, but the clothes had nothing to do with the film. A great percentage of the audience loved it, but for the mass audience who were looking for entertainment, it was just too downbeat and the Bogart character was something that they could not identify with or want to identify with or have any empathy for. I'm not sure that people care very much about the spiritual processes of the defeated. Yes, Jack Warner would have liked a happy ending. He asked John Houston to think about making a happy ending. Houston refused, and then Warner backed him up. Even he recognized what a great movie it was, and he was proud of the movie. The icing on the cake for this movie, especially since it had not been a box office success, was getting the recognition it did from the Academy. In those days, it was done in a theater and pantages, and so I was sitting with my then-husband, John Houston, and his name's called, and you had to leave and walk up there and get the award, and then you'd come back down somehow. I mean, time passed, and he came and sat down again in his seat with his Oscar. So we're sitting there and watching the rest of them. Oh, and behold, again, for direction. And off he goes, and he said, And he plopped this golden Oscar in my lap. Here you have John Houston winning an Academy Award for his screenplay and also for his direction, and you have Walter Houston, his father, winning the Best Supporting Actor, and this was the first time, perhaps the only time, that a father and son, two family members, won awards for the same picture in the same year. It's one of the great disintegrations of a character in a way, the downfall of a character that Bogart portrays in this movie, one of the great ones, to chart that downfall, you know, and to see where he goes wrong and to also know what it is about human nature. That's really what the film's about. His performance in The African Queen won Bogart his Oscar. John Houston made and appeared in dozens more movies, some classic and some not, until his death in 1987. See, there was something about his movies that was both urbane and tough and rough. See, there was a brain behind it. You got the feeling he wasn't just a walking lens. Of course, he made a lot of failures, too, which is to his credit, isn't it? I mean, he wasn't a sure shot every time. He tended to dive in, end up with a lot of people around him, pick up a piece of paper and start changing that, and there was this kind of chaos around him, which he, of course, created and loved. He had great joy out of his life, but I do think that nagging him, not tragically, but it just was an occasional nag, was the idea that he was missing the great artistic achievement that comes with long thought, quiet preparation, and so forth. The Treasure of Sierra Madre was a triumph for Walter Houston. He made three more films before he passed away in 1950. Tim Holt was hoping that his role in The Treasure of Sierra Madre would lift him out of the B movies, but it didn't. He continued to work as an actor until the early 1970s and was a radio station manager in Oklahoma City when he died in 1973. After a dozen more films and several television appearances, Bruce Bennett retired from acting in 1972. Bogart made a half dozen more films before he died of throat cancer in 1957. I remember his last days when he was very, very ill indeed. He was too weak to come down the stairs. There was one hour a day when they received guests, and this was observed right up to the finish, and he was too weak to even be lifted down the stairs. There was a dumb waiter, and he used to crowd himself into this dumb waiter and come down to the first floor, where he was then put into a chair and wheeled into the drawing room and have drinks and talk, and that's the last picture I have of Bogie, and quite in keeping with the image that I have of him altogether his whole life. .