All the ageing Khans, Kumars and Kapoors of Bollywood can begin the new year on a fresh note of hope watching the yesteryear Hollywood superstar Humphry Bogart play Fred C Dobbs, an out and out negative character, in the John Huston masterpiece “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”
This acting triumph was monumental on two counts. One, Bogart was pitted against the great Walter Hutson (John Huston’s father) who played Howard, a kind-hearted miner with a weather beaten face, clearly the film’s soul, and two, he took on this film at a time when he was ageing and balding and stuck in the image of the bow-tied sleuth of pedestrian crime commotions, and tediously known for his hyponasal and lisped speech during the fag end of his career.
Thanks to Bogart’s dexterity and Huston’s filmmaking brilliance, his character arc doesn’t lose its charm in the predictable moral failings that take such characters to the usual abyss of an destruction beyond repair. Filmmaker after filmmaker has make this downfall a fortified cliché. Not Huston!
Bogart punctuates the progressive decline of his character with aplomb, how the yearning for a secure life makes way for avarice which, thanks to the growing distrust of and disdain for comrades, becomes lethal till it turns fatal. He even manages to derive some sympathy for the delusional disaster that Dobbs turns out, which is weird given the extreme wickedness of Dobbs that has disgusting layers to it. And yet you feel like feeling for him, which is thanks only to Bogart’s surreal performance. No wonder, Daniel Day Lewis found Fred C Dobbs very helpful for portraying the anti-hero Daniel Plainview of ‘There Will Be Blood’.
The base camp for the film is Tampico, Mexico where circumstances of abject poverty bring together three musketeers of different makes and takes to embark on a gold pursuit on the Sierra Madre mountain range: one, the wise one Howard is the unassuming light house of the squad, having been there done that, two, inherently toxic Dobbs that we have discussed above, and three, the congenial adventurer Bob Curtin (Tim Holt is simply superb) who is the proverbial glue of sorts, chugging along with his two mates, seeped in wishful thinking. The mission goes horribly wrong for Dobbs and the other two are the deserving beneficiaries of life’s remainder theorem. And yet the end, minus the needless frame of Howard winking at the camera, has rich nutrients best watched on any screen of the device near you.
Some Videshi film reviewer has described the tragedy of Sierra Madre as downmarket Shakespearean. Nothing can be more discourteous to the genius of original author who used the pen name B. Traven, as also to the virtuosity of Huston and team. The Yankees are known to revere the Great Bard for the wrong reasons, and without having the slightest idea of what he brings to the table and where he becomes babyishly predictable. They will do well to keep aside Spark Notes and study the wealth of Greek literature including the Iliad all over again, and maybe even attempt to grasp the essence of the Indian epic Mahabharata. They will feel the depth of this film’s tragedy and begin to appreciate why tragedy is not about markets, both up and down.
Meanwhile, our Khans, Kumars and Kapoors can surely find at least a handful of native filmmakers with untapped potential, if they flash their torchlights on the wastelands outside the cosy Bollywood confines of their pet studios and captive directors.
These lifeboats can become their Desi John Hustons to help them move up the value chain of film acting in mainstream cinema. They can venture out of the box and yet achieve box office success, and a fresh lease of life in their autumn years.
For now, they can watch (or rewatch) the film to appreciate how Huston uses the rich metaphor of Gold Digging to convey larger truths about the futility of step-up ambition (much like the fatality of step-up loans) and the frailty of the human condition.