The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

78. 1948 - The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre

Honourable Mentions: Fort Apache, Red River, The Red Shoes

Bogart's most iconic screen roles cast him as hardboiled detectives or as steadfast, reluctant heroes, but he was at his best when taking on tragedy. Whether in Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place or William Wyler's Dead End, the rock-like resilience of Bogey's usual screen roles gave way to erraticism, paranoia, and occasional menace, with his turn in John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre taking these traits to Shakespearean levels of theatricality.

Huston's film, which centres around three different Americans down on their luck in Mexico during the Great Depression, is a devastating mix of western and noir, as the trio endeavour to strike it rich in the hills after years of being on the receiving end of unscrupulous capitalists. Greed and paranoia soon set in, with Bogart's Fred Dobbs succumbing to gold fever before embarking on a path that leads to his destruction - as well as the loss of a shared fortune.

To that end, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre cements itself as one of the great "New Dealer" films of the 1940s - as much a call for solidarity as it was a warning, perhaps, for the return of "rugged individualism" that accompanied the post-war boom. One weak strut is enough to bring the whole experiment crashing down, which Dobbs and his former partners, one of whom includes the legendary Walter Huston (directed here by his son), are reminded of to crushing effect.