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Seneca's adage about greed and Nature, worked out by John Huston under the Mexican sun. Down and out in Tampico, "some town to be broke in." The stooped American drifter (Humphrey Bogart) begs a coin, it gets him a shave and a haircut but not a señorita, payment for a job on the other hand must be collected with fists at the cantina. Rare lottery luck precipitates the fateful adventure, up the mountain with the aspiring young farmer (Tim Holt) and the vigorous old prospector (Walter Huston). No shortage of striking landscapes in the celebrated location filming, but the desert is mainly a mental state—stubbly figures packed into tight frames and then crumbled apart, desperation illuminated by yellow paydirt. "Well? How does it feel to be men of property?" Beauty of cooperation and burden of riches, a moral fable along with a remembrance of the war. (A skirmish with bandits turns the terrain into a combat zone, where charging federales curtail a foreglimpse of Throne of Blood's moving forest.) Bogart the caustic tough guy winnowed down to raw nerves, snarling and sweating and twisting, a spirit literally weighed down by bags of gold. "Conscience. What a thing," sometimes it's a collapsing mine and sometimes it's an infernal campfire. The Indio idyll of a tequila lick on a hammock awaits grizzled serenity, the shadow is a sombrero-haloed cutthroat (Alfonso Bedoya) who materializes to the antihero as an upside-down reflection in a puddle of dirty water. (The terrible build-up to the butchery is emulated by Boorman in Deliverance.) The Huston laughter, a rattle of sardonicism and pity, it sounds just like dust in the wind. "It's worth ten months of suffering and labor, this joke is." A favorite study for future filmmakers, Peckinpah and Altman and Leone absorb it wholly. Cinematography by Ted McCord. With Bruce Bennett, Barton MacLane, Arturo Soto Rangel, Manuel Dondé, José Torvay, and Robert Blake. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |