This movie is a powerful film in its exploration of greed and the human condition and is also another major step for Hollywood in its pivot to realism and using films to explore the true nature of man within commercial filmmaking. Shooting out in the wilderness, in a tough environment, added a lot of texture to the film that most studio films miss out on by shooting on stages. The result though is plainly visible in the sheer brutality of the desert and is definitely an argument for going on location to film moving forward. John Huston makes great use of the desert, it’s sparse, dying and isolated landscape in not just creating tension within the film but also in displaying that theme in stark visual terms.
The performance of Humphrey Bogart is tragically real. We can sympathize with a washed up guy looking for a break who meets his own demise at the hands of the same godliness that drove him to insanity to begin with.
“Badges, we don’t have to show you no stinkin badges.” One of the greatest lines in film history. This movie is legendary. And it should be noted as making a real change in terms of the types of dramatic realistic tragic stories about true characters that Hollywood can tell. It’s incredible what film can do.
John Huston is a masterful artist. He gets amazing performances from Humphrey Bogart, complemented with extremely tightly edited sequences of shootouts and also silence and tension in the waiting of these men as strangers come up on them in the desert. The film also does a great job of translating madness and a drive for power in how Bogart becomes more and more sweaty, disheveled, and physically worn down by the work to find the gold. Again this film is part of the shift of the monster going inside the self. Bogart is both villain and protagonist at once and you are forced to root for him as much as you loathe him.
The realistic shooting elements add to this path. It seems like the films of the 50’s will be very realistic with a lot more on-location work and even subtler acting.
I’m curios to see how the dramas change going forward.