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Wednesday, February 24,2010 2:00 PM
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Pop Culture 101: THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE
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In the Chuck Jones-directed animated short "8 Ball Bunny" (July 1950), Bugs Bunny is in the tropical town of Martinique, trying to get a top hat wearing penguin back home to the South Pole. In this Caribbean retreat, our good-hearted hero offers some change to a panhandler who looks and sounds suspiciously like Humphrey Bogart. In fact, the exchange between "Bogie" and Bugs, complete with the line, "Can you spare some change for a fellow American who's down on his luck?," spoofs the scenes in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre when Bogie approaches John Huston, playing the rich American, with the same sad-sack line. The short ends at the South Pole with Bugs and the penguin again being panhandled by the unshaven Bogart and Bugs getting the last laugh with his final remark.
Like Casablanca's (1942) "Play it Sam," The Treasure of the Sierra Madre has one of the most misquoted lines in film history. Whereas most people remember the immortal line delivered by Alfonso Bedoya as just "We don't need no steenkin' badges," the actual line is, "Badges? We ain't got no badges! We don't need no badges! I don't have to show you any steenkin' badges!" This line was lampooned, as were many others, in Mel Brooks' Western parody Blazing Saddles (1974).
As he had done for The Maltese Falcon (1941), John Huston adapted much of the source novel's dialogue for the screenplay of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Another Huston trademark was his continuing theme of a small group of people on a quest, usually for wealth. Starting with The Maltese Falcon (1941) and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Huston continued this examination in The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Beat the Devil (1953), The Kremlin Letter (1970), and The Man Who Would Be King (1975), the latter film a project Huston always wanted to do with Humphrey Bogart.
Director Stanley Kubrick might have had the ironic denouement of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in mind when he shot The Killing (1956). Sterling Hayden plays a thief whose huge suitcase of money is involuntarily dispensed on an airport tarmac, causing thousands of dollars to go swirling in the wind, much like the gold dust does in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. John Huston made a clever homage to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre himself in one of his later films. In the similarly themed The Man Who Would Be King, a group of lethal tribesmen loot a dead man's body of shiny boots in the same manner that the impoverished banditos covet Fred C. Dobbs' shoes at the end of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Many film buffs have also noted parallels with Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969). It too is about the evil that men do to feed their greed. Moreover, Peckinpah's film boasts a performance by Edmond O'Brien that is very similar to Walter Huston's. In Peckinpah's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), a film also similar in plot and theme to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, there is a character in the film named Fred C. Dobbs.
One actor in the film who ended up with as much bad luck as Fred C. Dobbs was child actor Robert Blake. He is currently facing possible murder charges in the death of his late wife, Bonnie Lee Bakley. Blake, 70, is accused of killing 44-year-old Bakley in 2001. She was shot to death in their car outside a restaurant where they had dined.
by Scott McGee
 
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31 Days of Oscar Highlights for Feb. 18
Don't miss The Crowd (1928), one of the first Oscar® nominees for Best Picture & Best Director (King Vidor), plus San Francisco (1936), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) and other honorees.
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