The Treasure of the Sierra Madre



""Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges! I don't have to show you any stinkin' badges!""

- Gold Hat, saying it as how he, not Mel Brooks said it

"Howard: Aah, gold's a devilish sort of thing, anyway. You start out, you tell yourself you'll be satisfied with 25,000 handsome smackers worth of it. "So help me, Lord, and cross my heart." Fine resolution. After months of sweatin' yourself dizzy, and growin' short on provisions, and findin' nothin', you finally come down to 15,000, then ten. Finally, you say, "Lord, let me just find $5,000 worth and I'll never ask for anythin' more the rest of my life."

Flophouse Bum: $5,000 is a lot of money.

Howard: Yeah, here in this joint it seems like a lot. But I tell you, if you was to make a real strike, you couldn't be dragged away. Not even the threat of miserable death would keep you from trying to add 10,000 more. Ten, you'd want to get twenty-five; twenty-five you'd want to get fifty; fifty, a hundred. Like roulette. One more turn, you know. Always one more."

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is a 1948 film directed and written by John Huston, staring his father Walter and Humphrey Bogart, and adapted from a 1927 novel by B. Traven. Father and son both won Oscars for their achievements in the film, which was also nominated for Best Picture.

A trio of gringos in Mexico; Fred Dobbs, Bob Curtin and Howard the prospector, decide to search for gold in the eponymous mountain range. At first, the adventure seems simple enough; in fact, they even find their gold. What they didn't count on might just be the greatest obstacle of all: themselves.

This film features examples of:


 * All That Glitters
 * Bandito: The fake Federales who deliver the film's most famous line (the page quote).
 * Beam Me Up Scotty: "We don't need no stinkin' badges!" The quote at the top of this page is what he actually said.
 * Also, Bogey's panhandling line at the beginning of the film ("Say, mister, could you stake a fellow American to a meal?") is usually misremembered as the line from the Shout Out gag in the Bugs Bunny cartoon 8 Ball Bunny ("Pardon me, but could you help out a fellow American who's down on his luck?").
 * Bittersweet Ending:
 * Chekhov's Gun: The burros the group rent. Or rather, their branding marks.
 * Cool Old Guy: Howard.
 * Creator Cameo: That's John Huston as the white-suited man Dobbs keeps accosting for a handout in Tampico.
 * Death By Materialism:
 * Fedora of Asskicking: Dobbs wears one.
 * Gold Fever: A driving force. Provides the page quote.
 * Happy Dance: Courtesy of Howard.
 * Hat Damage: Dobbs fires a warning shot right into the bandito leader's hat.
 * Magnificent Moustaches of Mexico: The fake Federales exemplify this.
 * Nice Hat: Gold Hat insists on putting his hat back on before.
 * No Holds Barred Beatdown: Dobbs and Curtin give the foreman of their work crew one of these after he cheats them out of their pay.
 * Pet the Dog: Fixing the mountain when they leave,.
 * Playing Against Type: Humphrey Bogart as a straight-up villain.
 * Villainy was actually Bogart's hat before he really hit it big (though this was much later). See High Sierra and The Petrified Forest.
 * Prospector: All three main characters, but Howard in particular exemplifies the "old and grizzled" stereotype of the trope.
 * The character of Stinky Pete in Toy Story 2 is a direct parody of Howard.
 * Sanity Slippage: Dobbs. Howard.
 * Sound Only Death: A few: . Justified as it is an old film: they may've been missing special effects, or didn't want to get sensured.
 * Ungrateful Bastard: Even getting rescued from a mine collapse and then a Gila monster doesn't make Dobbs any less suspicious of his partners.
 * Villain Protagonist: It will surprise nobody who pays attention for the first ten minutes to know that Dobbs turns out this way.
 * Worthless Yellow Rocks:
 * Or given Dobbs and the others' descent into madness,, maybe the bandits were right.