The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

78. 1948 - The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre

The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre
Warner Bros.

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.

 
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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.