The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) is John Huston's adventure-western, free to watch online on iFILM. In the dusty Mexican port of Tampico, two broke Americans, Dobbs and Curtin, hear a grizzled old prospector talk about gold up in the mountains, and they decide to gamble everything on the climb.

The three of them head into the wild sierra. Striking gold turns out to be the easy part; hauling it back down past bandits, heat and a vanishing water supply is where the real trouble starts. Worse still is the suspicion that creeps in and poisons all three. Humphrey Bogart plays Dobbs not as a frontier hero but as a man being eaten alive by his own greed, one paranoid step at a time. Walter Huston, as the wily old-timer Howard, walks off with every scene he's in.

Huston shot on location in Mexico, a rare move for studio-era Hollywood. The picture handed him directing and screenplay Oscars, and his father Walter took the supporting prize that same night. It is a hard, unsentimental parable about how fast gold can rot a man's better judgment. If you like your classics gritty and free of easy comfort, start here. Stream The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) online on iFILM.