The Treasure of Sierra Madre

It was over 20 years since I'd seen this film and when I was suddenly bed-ridden with flu, I decided to watch it. And what a great film it is!

The Treasure of Sierra Madre, as you know by now, is based on a novel by German-born Leftist novelist B. Traven and written and directed by John Huston. It stars Humphrey Bogart, Tim Holt and Walter "John's dad" Huston, and they work together marvellously. There's not a bad scene in the film. Huston's direction is very cinematic without being overtly so (look how he uses deep focus almost throughout the film, and the set-pieces are very nice, just like they are in The Maltese Falcon, where Huston has a very good eye for a composition), and the pacing is superb.

The greatest thing about the film, though, is its depiction of actual work. Not in many a Hollywood film working men look so dirty, worn out and ragged. The almost anti-Hollywood attitude shows also in how Huston (and Traven) show the men in their raw passion for gold and the pure hatred and paranoia that's spawn from that passion. Bogart especially makes that clear - and his portrayal of Fred C. Dobbs is one of the best I've seen from him, full of insanity and paranoia, all that talking to himself and weaving back and forth.  This is not merely a morality tale: it's a tale of what makes capitalism work, a tale of why gold is so expensive.

The only thing I'm sorry about the film is its casual racism towards Mexicans. They are simple, stupid, naive and superstitious, and if they're not, they're thieves. But then again it'd be pretty hard to avoid those clichés in 1948.

I haven't read Traven's novel in ages, either, but I'm not sure whether I have time for it right now. As I'm in flu, I'm getting seriously behind my deadlines...

Some great films seen lately and other ephemera

I've been really busy during the last two weeks, hence no posts. I'll try to get some done in the near future.

But, em, you know, I get a feeling that everyone thinks I see only bad movies, like the recent Silent Trigger. I've seen quite a many great films lately, but for some reason or another I haven't written about them here. They include John Huston's James Joyce film The Dead, which is simply marvellous, Georges Franju's great, but slightly obscure Les yeux sans visage (AKA The Horror Chamber of Doctor Faustus), and, just late last night, Terrence Malick's war epic The Thin Red Line.

There was also the Festival of Finnish Cinema, during which I managed to see only some movies, but they included Seppo Huunonen's Karvat, about which I've written before (see here; I'll add the link later, there's some trouble with this computer), and Visa Mäkinen's exploitation flick Yön saalistajat/Hunters of the Night from 1984. Visa Mäkinen is an independent movie maker from Pori, where I used to live, and this is his only action film, from a script by Kari Levola, a writer who's now living in Raisio near Turku, where I now live. I know him, and he's a very nice guy, and I can see what he tried to do with the script for this film, but for some reason the delivery fails at all accounts: the direction, the actors, the editing. But the film is more fun for it. I'd like to see this remade. Maybe I'll have to start producing films on my own...

Have I been reading anything? Yeah, I've read two novels by Tracy Chevalier, The Girl with a Pearl Earring and Falling Angels, which I recommend heartily; I read them, because we are doing a sequel to the reference book on historical novelists with Jukka Halme and Sari Polvinen. I'll start one of Robert Harris's novels on Rome any day now.

I've also been reading Spade & Archer by Joe Gores (the Finnish translation just came out as Sam Spaden etsivätoimisto), but I'm not really getting into it. Spade seems a bit too stale. Was he this boring in Hammett's books? I don't think so. But I'll write more about the book once I finish it.

As for the family matters... Sigh. I just heard my daughter and her mother will be spending three more years in the Central Europe. These will be hard years. And I don't know what Kauto will think of this - he hasn't been told yet.