silver nitrate notes

Sierra Madre and the Cinematography of Greed

21 dec 2018

John Huston made The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) the year after the war ended and seven years after The Maltese Falcon. The material was a 1927 novel by B. Traven, a pseudonymous German expatriate who lived in Mexico and never met anyone socially and whose real identity remains disputed. Huston, pushing for the project for a decade at Warner Bros., finally got the green light from Jack Warner on the condition that Bogart play the lead.

The cinematographer was Ted McCord (1900-1976), a Warner contract DP best known at that point for westerns. Huston took him to Mexico. The film was shot, almost entirely, on location in the state of Durango in the summer of 1947. This was, for Warner Bros., unusual. Location shooting was expensive. The standard Warner practice was to shoot exteriors in California scrubland standing in for wherever the script said.

Huston insisted. What McCord got in Mexico was light he could not have got in Burbank: a brighter, harder sun, deeper shadows, a more granular air. He rated the stock low and shot most of the exteriors with the aperture stopped down, which meant fast enough shutter speeds to freeze the dust that the actors' boots kicked up. The dust is important. The film is about three men prospecting for gold in a country where dust is always in the air, and McCord's photography keeps the dust visible in the frame without making it a decorative element.

The film is a morality play about greed. Dobbs (Bogart), Curtin (Tim Holt), and Howard (Walter Huston, John's father) find gold, carry it out, and what happens to the gold is more or less what happens to characters in a morality play about greed. Walter Huston won an Oscar. John Huston won two (director and screenplay). Bogart was not even nominated, possibly because the performance requires him to be genuinely unlikeable, which the 1948 Academy was not ready for.

Watch the scene where Dobbs accuses Howard and Curtin of conspiring against him. Huston photographs the confrontation in a circle of three chairs around the evening campfire, the camera low, the firelight up from below, the forest dark behind. McCord's fill light is a single tin can with holes punched in it, hanging just off camera, to break up the firelight into a flickering pattern on Bogart's face. The face becomes, over the course of the dialogue, genuinely paranoid. McCord gets no credit for what looks like no light at all, which is the problem with great location cinematography: when it works, no one notices.

[ « prev: The Wages of Fear · next: Sunset Boulevard » ]

» leave a comment in the guestbook

sources
[1] Huston, John. An Open Book. Knopf, 1980.
[2] Grobel, Lawrence. The Hustons. Scribner, 1989.
[3] Meyers, Jeffrey. John Huston: Courage and Art. Crown Archetype, 2011.
[4] McCord, Ted. Interview in American Cinematographer, May 1948.