Monday, January 07, 2008

MMR #1

Max's Movie Review #1:
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,
#52 on the IMDB Top 250.


This was an interesting film to start my movie reviews with. I have never seen it, or any other Humphrey Bogart film, and had no idea what to expect.

The movie starts off simple enough; a down on his luck American (Fred C. Dobbs, played by Bogart) stuck begging for money from fellow Americans in a small town in Mexico. I'm sure the name of the town was mentioned in the movie, but I honestly never did catch it.

The plot really starts to form a few minutes in when Dobbs asks the same man for money for the third time in one day with his vintage line of "would you stake a fellow American in a meal?". The man does in fact give him money again, this time twice the amount he had the two previous times, but rips into him a little for having the audacity to ask him so often in one day.

Soon thereafter, Dobbs finds another American in the city who is offering up jobs with good pay. For a couple weeks he works on this job with his new found friend Curtain (played by some dude who looks a whole lot like someone I can't think of) until they ferry back to town and the their boss on the job tells them to meet him at the pub in an hour to get their pay, and gives them 10 pesos as down payment. Dude doesn't show, they use the down payment to get drunk, then get a couple of cots at a local flophouse.

Here's where the story starts to really form. In the flophouse they meet Howard, an old timer that claims to have struck it rich before panning for gold. Soon thereafter Curtain and Dobbs finally get their money, and they are off to the mountains in search of their fortune.


There are a few twists and turns along the way, and if you haven't seen this movie yet I would suggest you check it out. The second half of the movie had two genuine laugh out loud moments for me. The first involves banditos. I had no idea one of the lines I would hear from a random bandito would be something very famous. The other involves a blooper with the camera panning too far to the left in one scene and revealing part of the set that shouldn't have made it on camera.

Overall I think I'd rate this movie at 7.5 on a ten point scale. If you are into old movies, this could jump by as much as a point and a half, and if you are someone who seems allergic to black and white on a TV, it would probably drop by a point and a half.

In a couple days I'll review the #51 movie and hopefully have a better review up here a couple days later.

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