The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948, USA)

Believe it or not, but I had never seen The Treasure of the Sierra Madre prior to last Sunday night. I've never been big on Westerns until very recently, though I must admit that it was largely my admiration for There Will Be Blood that finally spurred me to see Treasure, since reading that Paul Thomas Anderson apparently watched it nearly every night before filming. The impact is obvious on both the style and content of Blood, which, like Treasure is also not really a Western when you get down to it. Both films focus on the venality of human nature and what happens when greed gets into the bloodstream. The only real difference is that in the latter film the object of desire is oil, not gold, and that John Houston provides multiple counterpoints for his main character in a way that Anderson does not. In Treasure, Humphrey Bogart plays Fred C. Dobbs, an American drifter down and out in Mexico. It's there that he meets up with Bob Curtain (Tim Holt) and Howard (Walter Houston), and the three hatch a plan to search for gold in the mountains outside of Durango. From there, the movie unfolds slowly, charting the change in each character, particularly Dobbs, as the trio strikes gold and decides what to do with it. Like Blood, Treasure focuses on the arid, brutal landscape of the Western side of the continent, places that reflect the brutality of the men who seek treasure under the surface of the land.