The trouble with famous movies is that one so often has preconceived notions that get in the way of enjoying the film as it is. There are unexpected delights to be found in films that you have no expectations of, but on the reverse side of the coin, classics and movies recommended by other people are often laced with, if not disappointment, than at least confounded expectations. Perhaps this is just an apology, or maybe an explanation. You see, I thought The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was an adventure movie, which has skewed my interpretation of it.

And it’s not that it doesn’t have elements of the adventure story about it; there are fistfights and bandits and gun battles (one on a train!), and struggles across bleak landscapes and attempted murders and rock falls, but these are not the focus of the story, but rather they serve as props to the film’s message. Strange to think of an action or adventure movie with a message, isn’t it?

The film opens as ex-pat Fred Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart) is begging for cash from Americans in a rundown city in Mexico, too flat broke even to leave town. He meets another down-and-out American named Bob Curtain (Tim Holt), and in the similarity of their sufferings, they strike up a sort of friendship. After a series of interesting adventures, they end up with some cash and an idea to try prospecting for gold in the distant mountains, and to that end they enlist the help of an old prospector (played by the director’s father, Walter Huston). The prospector warns them (and anyone who will listen to him, really) that gold changes a man, that possession of wealth above a certain amount will make a man who was generous in his poverty into a suspicious, murderous creature. But swearing that they would be content with ten thousand dollars apiece, our heroes set out with the old man to what he thinks will be fertile ground.

It’s a wild and desolate place they end up in (even considering the film’s characterization of Mexico as wild and desolate, this spot is even more so), clear of animals and settlements and not all that near to water, either. But there are riches to be mined, if you know what you’re looking for, and our greenhorns don’t. They are ready to give up the idea as untenable, but the prospector jeers at them, and tells them they are idiots, because that’s the moment he’s found the gold. And he does a crowing dance that has inspired, I’m just guessing, every caricature of a prospector from then to now. The men don’t file a claim, however, because the prospector has put the idea to them that if they were to alert anyone to their find, some company would appear with a counterclaim that they could not fight. So, resorting to secrecy, they set to work. And although they are congenial enough to start with; as the gold piles up something begins to go wrong. Two closely spaced external threats seal the breach, but only temporarily, and on the way back to the town, the group disintegrates under the pressure of greed and madness.

Bogart is, of course, a master, as he plays for sympathy, frustrated by his situation, but never without some strained dignity, even when begging, in the first half and executes a flawless transformation in the second. Holt gives an admirable performance as the young man buffeted by the vagaries of circumstance and accepting of the burden of survival, but who is still given to daydreaming. Huston is iconic as the prospector, of course, but also as the wise old man and mentor to his two young partners. And it makes a fascinating psychological drama, interspersed with elements of adventure story.