One of my favorite actors of all time is Humphrey Bogart. I've heard people say he was a real diva on set, but that doesn't change my mind about his acting prowess. So yeah, I don't like it when Bogie plays a bad guy. I've only even seen it in one other instance: "The Caine Mutiny."This week, though, I watched The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the other movie in which Bogie is mostly a bad guy.
Here's the story: Fred C. Dobbs (Bogart) and Bob Curtin, both down on their luck in Tampico, Mexico in 1925, meet up with a grizzled prospector named Howard (Walter Huston) and decide to join him in search of gold in the wilds of central Mexico. Through enormous difficulties, they eventually succeed in finding gold, but bandits, the elements, and especially greed threaten to turn their success into disaster.
I do not particularly enjoy westerns, but I actually liked this one. The depth that director John Huston gives to Bogart's greed and the danger of the entire situation puts viewers into a unique position of really understanding the gold rush madness.
Ultimately, I still strongly dislikes westerns as a genre. But Walter Huston was really funny, and Bogie's bringing me around to them, even though he's a bad guy.
No comments:
Post a Comment