The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (film) The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (film) The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is a 1948 American dramatic adventurous neo-western written and directed by John Huston. It is an adaptation of B. Traven's 1927 novel of the same name, set in the 1920s, in which, driven by their desperate economic plight, two young men, Fred C. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart) and Bob Curtin (Tim Holt), join old-timer Howard (Walter Huston, the director's father) in Mexico to prospect for gold. "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" was one of the first Hollywood productions to be shot on location outside the United States
John Huston to play the young Union soldier who deserts his company out of fear, but later returns to fight alongside them. MGM, however, saw the message of the movie as too antiwar. Without Huston's input, they cut down the running time of the film from eighty-eight minutes to sixty-nine, added narration, and deleted what Huston felt was a crucial scene. The movie did poorly at the box office. Huston suggests that it was possibly because it "brought war very close to home." Huston recalls that at the preview showing, before the film was halfway through, "damn near a third of the