The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

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"The Treasure of the Sierra dadre" is a conscious, interialist account of the inture of poverty, labour, due and money in capitalist aciety; it is also a riveting dventure story about three Imericans' search for gold • Mexico.

To have made such a complete ad convincing synthesis of these wo things is the great achievement f B. Traven's novel on which aston's film is based.

Traven, born in Chicago in the 890s of Swedish immigrant arents, began writing in Germany Iter the first world war. Wanted • the police for his political itivities, he left Germany and tentually 'disappeared' to live as a cluse in rural Mexico, where most I his major novels were written.

MARXISM He was deeply influenced by tarxism, though politically he mained an anarchist regarding inself as close to the American indicalist movement, the ¡ternational Workers of the World e "Wobblies", about whom he rote the novel The Wobbly). ! Characteristic of Traven's titing was the sensitive portrayal I working class or peasant Jaracters, rooted in a real, and Bars of gold, capitalism's 'universal equivalent'.

sometimes uncannily detailed, understanding of their material situation. Good examples are his two novels about the brutal exploitation of workers in the Mexican mahogany forests in the years before the Mexican revolution (March to Caobaland and Rebellion of the Hanged) and the intricate accounts of the alienation of FILM SHOWN ON BBC2 ON SUNDAY 2 STARRING HUMPHREY BOGART and producers through the market in his short stories, Assembly Line and Burro Trading (published in The Night Visitor and Other Stories). . But it is in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre that the consciousness of the characters and their objective being are most perfectly integrated; where the structure and twists of the narrative itself, rather than MPs who will vote for massive rail (1947)

didactic commentaries, reveal the nature of reality.

It is the great virtue of Huston's tense and beautifully made film that (apart from the sentimentalism of the spurious introduction of an extra prospector who is killed, leaving behind a tear-jerking letter from his wife in Texas) little of the character of Traven's novel is lost.

DESTITUTE

In the first part of the film we see Dobbs and Curtin, the two destitute Americans in Mexico, attempting with little success to get money by all the means open to them as 'free' workers: begging, shining shoes, buying lottery tickets and construction work for an employer who is only prevented from cheating them of their wages by physical assault.

They decide to search for gold in spite of the warnings of Howard, the old-time prospector who agrees to go with them. It's not because it is innately valuable, that men work hard to find gold, Howard explains; on the contrary, it is valuable only because men have to work so hard to find it.

The value of gold is established by the labour time not only of those who strike it rich but also of those who never find it. And when they do find it, they begin to turn against and hate each other.

The rest of the film tensely and graphically shows how these words are borne out. The three find gold, work "like convicts' to extract it and finally lose it all. In the process their initial relations of comradeship based on poverty turn as they amass wealth to suspicion and violence.

They divide and hide their 'goods' from each other; Dobbs, who put up more than his third of the money to buy the tools, claims a share of the produce according to the size of the "capital' he advanced; crazed and paranoid he eventually tries to kill Curtin. Morality is dissolved by gold, the universal equivalent.

MONEY

Money, Marx said, "transforms fidelity into infidelity, love into hate ... intelligence into idiocy" Or, as Howard, in Traven's novel puts it, "Gold is the devil, It alters your character"

The film of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is shown fairly frequently because of the popularity of Humphrey Bogart (whose characterisitically abrasive and unsentimental performance as Dobbs is at least equalled by that of Walter Huston as Howard).

It is unfortunate that the other films of Traven's novels (especially The Rebellion of the Hanged, 1954, and The Death Ship, 1959) have vanished almost without trace. They should be rediscovered.