10 Movies Where It Didn't Matter That The Hero Lost

10. A Great Old Joke - The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre

The saying goes that when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. Essentially, you take the bad that is thrown at you in life and you do your best to turn it into something positive. Sometimes a situation is only as good or as bad as you make it.

The ending to the 1948 John Huston movie, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, is a perfect example of this. The story follows three men who come together to go gold prospecting in Mexico, but the whole thing becomes an ordeal. The pull of the potential riches is too much for Fred Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart) as he tries to kill Bob Curtin (Tim Holt) and steal everything.

Ultimately it's Dobbs that is killed, and the gold dust that Curtin and Howard (Walter Huston) had found ends up blowing away in the wind. They went through everything just to be no better off than when they started their journey.

The other way to look at their situation, however, the way that Curtin chose, was instead that they were no worse off. When he considered that Dobbs had lost his life, the fact that he was down only about 100 dollars wasn't really too bad. It didn't matter to Curtin and Howard that they lost all the gold simply because they didn't let it matter to them. Instead they took it as a great joke played by God, and to do something different with their lives instead.