Tinne's Path: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

I just finished watching The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. This is an excellent film with complex character development. The acting is wonderful, especially Walter Huston. Three men work together to find gold in the mountains, enduring hardship and suffering. One theme of the movie was how gold changes a person. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart)is a generous, easy going guy in the beginning who doesn't believe gold will change him. Curtin (Tim Holt) doesn't have much personality in the beginning but gold has its effect on him as well. They are taught and guided by a wise old prospector, Howard (Walter Huston).

This film raised a number of questions in my mind. In the beginning of the story, Dobbs, Curtin and Howard didn't have much money. They took what little they did have and risked it to look for gold. They could have played it safe and used the money to pay for food and a place to sleep for a few months but they spent it for the chance of something more. In the story, you can see they are right because if they had spent it on room and board it would have run out and they would have been exactly where they started without even adventure to show for it. I wonder how often I have the opportunity to risk temporary comfort with for the chance of adventure? How often to I choose comfort?

I also wonder if gold or wealth would change me. I have never been wealthy. Would I be greedy for more like Dobbs was? I don't think so but he didn't think he would be either. You are never certain how you will react to a situation until you are faced with it.

At the end they lose the gold and Dobbs loses his life. Howard and Curtin can laugh in the face of their loss. Actually they both got what they really wanted, Howard, a place of comfort to live out his life and Curtin, a fruit farm. They didn't need the gold at all. The scene in which the two of them laugh and laugh as they realize the gold has been blown away in the wind reminds me of a few lines in one of my favorite poems, "If" by Rudyard Kipling.

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;

The entire poem is powerful, but for me, lately, these four lines are especially so. To me it speaks of being independent of the material world, about knowing you are more than your accomplishments, more than your belongings, more than other people's opinion of you. If you can do as the poem states, risk everything, lose it, and not be concerned enough to even mention it, then you have confidence in yourself and contentment with what you are, in absence of the outer world. Quite an achievement and worth more than 10 burros piled with bags of gold.