The Treasure of the Sierra Madre · reception & legacy
1948 · John Huston
How The Treasure of the Sierra Madre has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
Critics raved in 1948 and it won three Oscars, but audiences stayed away — Bogart playing a paranoid heel wasn't what they'd paid for, and it underperformed at the box office. Now it's bedrock canon, routinely called one of the greatest American films ever made.
What's debated
The evergreen fan grievance: Dobbs is arguably Bogart's best performance, and the Academy didn't even nominate him for it.
Its footprint
It gave the movies one of their most quoted (and misquoted) lines — 'We don't need no stinking badges!' — riffed on everywhere from Blazing Saddles to Breaking Bad, usually by people who've never seen the film.
Where it stands
A pillar of the 'greatest films' lists that still plays as a discovery on Letterboxd — the old-Hollywood picture people admit shocked them with how mean and modern it feels.