starring Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston
directed by John Huston
126 minutes
Fred C. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart), Bob Curtin (Tim Holt), and Howard (Walter Huston) pool their resources and go prospecting for gold in Mexico. They find what they are looking for but that isn’t all they find or that finds them. They are driven apart by forces within themselves and by people they meet on their journey.
I might have seen this movie before. Some of the scenes toward the end seemed familiar. I don’t have a clear recollection of watching it before.
I saw this movie as part of the AFI’s celebration of the 100th anniversary of Warner Bros.
This seems to be a movie about the journey that Fred, Bob and Howard undertake. It’s about more than prospecting for gold. I don’t think it makes its case very clearly. It is an odyssey of sorts.
The three men encounter three different groups of people on their journey. I want to believe that there is some significance to each of the groups. They encounter bandits (who want to rob them), James Cody (another American, who wants to join them), and villagers (who ask for their help).
They are ready to kill Cody just before they are attacked by the bandits. He gets killed during the encounter with the bandits. I can’t help but wonder if he is supposed to be a Christ figure or something else along those lines. His initials are JC.
This movie was nominated for 4 Academy Awards and won 3 of them. John Huston won for Best Director and Best Screenplay. Walter Huston won for Best Supporting Actor. Among the other nominees was Charles Bickford, who was nominated for Johnny Belinda (1948), which I watched earlier this week. The movie was also nominated for Best Picture but lost to Hamlet.
I think that there’s something here, although I wasn’t feeling it when the movie ended. It wasn’t until I sat down and mulled it over that I started to see things that didn’t occur to me while I was watching it. This movie is probably worth a watch but I thought it dragged a bit. I don’t think I would put it on a list of the best movies of all time. I think my biggest quibble is with the performances. The three main characters interact in ways that I didn’t find to be very compelling.
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