Fred C. Dobbs and Bob Curtin, both down on their luck in Tampico, Mexico in 1925, meet up with a grizzled prospector named Howard and decide to join with 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 most especially greed threaten to turn their success into disaster.
The characters here are probed and thoroughly penetrated, not through psychoanalysis but through a crucible of human conflict, action, gesture and expressive facial tones.
– Herb Schoenfeld,
Variety,
13 Feb 2001
fresh:
Greed, a despicable passion out of which other base ferments may spawn, is seldom treated in the movies with the frank and ironic contempt that is vividly manifested toward it in Treasure of Sierra Madre.
– Bosley Crowther,
New York Times,
20 May 2003
fresh:
The movie has never really been about gold but about character, and Bogart fearlessly makes Fred C. Dobbs into a pathetic, frightened, selfish man -- so sick we would be tempted to pity him, if he were not so undeserving of pity.
– Roger Ebert,
Chicago Sun-Times,
15 Jan 2004
fresh:
There's a quite enjoyable yarn buried under the hollow laughter.
– Stephen Garrett,
Time Out,
9 Feb 2006
fresh:
John Huston has rarely been in better form than in this 1948 study of gold fever and worse obsessions among an unlikely trio of prospectors...