In this 'quest for gold' picture, John Huston cast Humphery Bogart in one of the most noxious roles of the actor's career. As Fred C. Dobbs, Bogart is the epitome of paranoid venality who, despite having his life saved twice by his fellow treasure-hunters, spirals into greed-induced madness. Having developed a taste and facility for location shooting while making propaganda filmas during World War II, Huston convinced Warners to let him shoot for ten weeks in Mexico and the film's portrait of the slow-burn dissolution of the trio of adventurers gains much from the sun-bleached mountainside settings. This is an adventure film where the quest is not an end in itself but the alibi for a fatalistic character study in which the moral differences between an older, wiser man (Huston, the director's father, who won an Oscar for his performance) and the mistrustful, middle-aged Dobbs become starkly apparent, and between which Curtin, the younger man, must choose. Jack Warner, the film's producer, is reputed to have seen "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" and said 'It's one of the best films made since movies started talking'.