The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

Bogart, Huston and Holt

By general consent a classic, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre also won three Oscars – best director and screenplay for John Huston and best supporting actor for Walter Huston (his father) – and is one of those films that also get film-makers dewy eyed. Stanley Kubrick named it one of his faves (in 1963 anyway). Robert Redford ditto. Sam Peckinpah was a big fan. Lucas and Spielberg borrowed the look of its star, Humphrey Bogart, as the template for Indiana Jones. The hat, stubble, jacket, pants and boots all probably look better on Harrison Ford, but neither Bogart nor Huston Jr was aiming for matinee appeal with their movie, and that’s the … Read more

The Magnificent Ambersons

Lucy and George

The film that never was, a magnificent mess, Orson Welles’s masterpiece, better even than Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons is all these things and more, or perhaps less, since no one apart from a handful of people in 1942 has ever seen the finished version. Instead there’s just the version we have, which is minus 50 minutes of material Welles had included in the rough cut he’d made with editor Robert Wise (later of The Sound of Music fame). After negative screenings, a general antipathy towards Welles at RKO and a change of public mood on account of Pearl Harbor having just propelled the USA into the Second World War, the studio ordered … Read more