So my wife and I watched the next one (in podcast order) on the AFI list tonight. This is another John Huston/Humphrey Bogart movie, the second on the list after The African Queen. There’s nfw that they should have two movies together on the list, but spoiler alert, they actually have three, as The Maltese Falcon will be coming up later from the same director, and with the same star.

The thing is, though, if they’re only going to have one, maybe this is the one it should be, because this movie is legit good. (I feel like it’s saying something about the AFI list that this is so surprising, but here we are.)

We start off with a down-on-his-luck Humphrey Bogart trying to scrape by in a town in Mexico. The movie spends some time here, following his different attempts to make some money, and chronicling his desperation. When he overhears a grizzled old prospector talking about gold mining, he decides that this is what he wants to do, and he gets together with his buddy and the prospector, and off they go.

They make their way to a gold deposit, and then go about building a mine and a system to separate out the gold ore and stuff. The amount of work they do to get this done seems implausibly large for three people, but at one point later on, the timeframe they were up there is pegged at ten months, so… idk, maybe.

Anyway, as you’d expect, the real trouble starts once they have the gold. There are outsiders trying to horn in; there are bandits; and most of all, there’s distrust between them.

The grizzled old prospector warned about this at the beginning — that once the gold is actually there, people start getting paranoid and distrustful — and so it turns out to go. This is where the interplay between the characters is great: you’ve got the old guy, resigned and knowing how this is going to go, but wanting no part of it; you’ve got the young guy, optimistic and trusting that everything will be fine; and then you’ve got Bogart, who gets increasingly paranoid and distrustful.

And what’s really a surprise is, Bogart ends up being the gollum of the piece, betraying the other two and trying to murder one of them. You’d think your big-name star would be the hero, but nope, not so much.

There are all sorts of twists and turns on the way to the ironic ending, with tension and humor and psychological drama. In many ways, it feels like a follow-on to von Stroheim’s 1924 revenge epic, Greed. In even more ways, it feels like a precursor of a Coen Brothers movie, something like Fargo. And I guess in one way, it’s a precursor to Blazing Saddles, since they lifted/mangled the “we don’t need no stinking badges” line from here.

It is, kindasorta, a Western from 1943, so it’s not super-great on its portrayals of Indians, but it’s ambient midcentury background racism, not the toxic vein that The Searchers mined. And there basically aren’t any female characters, so hey. (Actual true quote from the NYT 1948 review of the movie: “To the honor of Mr. Huston’s integrity, it should be finally remarked that women have small place in this picture, which is just one more reason why it is good.” !!!)