Three Classic Movies about Greed

 There are those who treat the COVID virus as a threat and counsel caution to reduce its deadly toll, and those motivated by self-interest that see it an annoyance and would use our lives as chips to wager as they spin the Profits Wheel. That’s my hook for taking a look at three movies in which protagonists seek sudden riches. All three are considered classics.

The Gold Rush (1925)

Directed, written, produced, and starring Charlie Chaplin

United Artists, 95 (or 72) minutes, Unrated

Many have trudged into foreboding places in search of gold. In most cases, those who went to mine the miners—hoteliers, furnishing agents, con artists, gamblers—are the ones who made the money. The Gold Rush, a silent film classic considered one of Charlie Chaplin’s best, took its cues from Canada’s Klondike Gold Rush (1896-99), with a few nods to the infamous Donner Party incident (1846-47) in which snowbound settlers headed for California resorted to eating leather and each other.

Chaplin, one of the greatest physical comedians of all time, plays things for laughs, not history lessons. We open to a scene lifted from Eric Hegg’s famed photos of lines of prospectors making or failing to make their way through the Chilkoot Pass. Then we cut to Chaplin as the Lone Prospector improbably dressed in his threadbare Little Tramp costume.  He negotiates numerous hazards but is starving, freezing, and lost in a raging blizzard.

The Lone Prospector happens upon the cabin of notorious outlaw Black Larsen (Tom Murray). They are soon joined by Big Jim McKay (Mark Swain), who has found gold. Larsen’s attempt to evict both men fails, but they are out of food and Larsen draws the short straw and must go out to find some. The plot is thin, but involves a double cross, near-starvation, and stumbling into a town—likely modeled after Dawson City, Yukon—where Chaplin falls for a dance hall girl named Georgia (Georgia Hale) who, at first, uses the bedraggled and poverty-stricken Lone Prospector as amusement.  Big Jim’s reappearance changes the Lone Prospector’s fortunes (literally!). Toward the end of the film, Chaplin is on a boat with his new business partner and spies Georgia before she sees him. He changes back into his rags to see if she really cares. Happy ending.

The Gold Rush is listed as # 58 on the American Film Institute’s list of Greatest American Films. There are several heralded sequences, including Chaplin’s gourmet preparation of his right shoe, Larsen’s starved hallucination that Chaplin is a giant chicken, and a cabin about to be blown over a cliff. Pathos, revelation, and romance are staples of most Chaplin films. If you want to get technical about things, Georgia and her comely friends probably would have been prostitutes in the actual Klondike Gold Rush, but why go there? If you’ve never seen a silent film, this is a good place to start. The original 1925 film was 95 minutes long. It was re-released in 1942 and trimmed to 72 minutes. Not much was lost in the shorter version.

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

Directed by John Huston

Warner Brothers, 101 minutes, Unrated

Let’s move up to # 31 on AFI’s top 100 list. The Maltese Falcon has it all: Bogart as tough-guy P.I. Sam Spade, John Huston as director, a script adapted from Dashiell Hammett, a legend, and a beautiful woman (Mary Astor) who has a secret.

In the 16^th century, the Knights Templar, a Catholic military order, sent a statue of a jewel-encrusted golden falcon on its way to the King of Spain. Pirates boarded the ship, carried off the falcon, and it was lost to history. In Hammett’s story, several international treasure hunters are following leads that the falcon, now covered in lacquer and painted black, has resurfaced. Spade knows nothing about this when a woman calling herself Ruth Wonderly (Astor) hires him to find her sister, who has taken up with a reprobate. Spade isn’t convinced by her story, so he dispatches his partner Miles Archer (Jerome Cowan) to tail Wonderly. Archer is murdered that very night.

Thus begins a tale of ruthless intrigue whose plot thickens from the moment that Ruth “comes clean” and admits her name is actually Brigid O’Shaughnessy. The Maltese Falcon shines because Bogart was born to play a hardboiled character like Spade, because Astor is letter-prefect in her allure and treachery, and because the film is chockfull with other rogues, including Detective Tom Polhaus (Ward Bond), who wouldn’t mind sending Spade to the cooler; obsequious and androgynous fortune-seeker Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre); and “The Fat Man,” Kasper Gutman (Sidney Greenstreet), who has chased the Maltese falcon across the globe and will use any method—cajolery, blackmail, bargaining, murder—to lay hands on it. Greenstreet almost steals the movie from Bogie.

The film is a classic for many reasons, including its poignant ending. Or should I say endings plural? Many consider Dashiell Hammett the dean of detective novels. There are reasons aplenty for that as well. No cinema education is complete without at least one Maltese Falcon viewing.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)

Directed by John Huston

Warner Brothers, 126 minutes, Unrated.

Although The Treasure of the Sierra Madre doesn’t enjoy the same fame as The Maltese Falcon, it’s just as good. It won six Oscars—three for John Huston and one for his father Walter—and is also on AFI’s top 100 movies list. This time we get a sort of late Western. The year is (ironically) 1925, and two unemployed drifters, Fred C. Dobbs (Bogart) and Bob Curtin (Tim Holt) are footloose in Tampico, Mexico, bumming for meal money. Instead, they are offered jobs as “roughnecks” to build oil rigs for a contracting agent. But the lure of gold and a windfall for gear sends them into the hills to sluice for gold. They do well, thanks to Howard (Walter Huston), an old man who knows the ropes.

There are no secrets in the hills and they are soon joined by a fourth, Cody (Bruce Bennett), and the mountains are crawling with banditos and Federales. What begins as a partnership of three degenerates into four-way suspicion in which the only person on the level is the one no one trusts. Bogart didn’t win a Best Acting Oscar, but perhaps he should have. His is a chilling portrait of a man so poisoned by golden dreams that we watch him degenerate into a toothy simian-like beast.

One of the film’s morals is quit while you’re ahead. You never know when Gold Hat (Antonia Bedoya) and his banditos will come calling, nor do you know how others define “treasure.” Treasure of the Sierra Madre hurtles to a conclusion that is several parts tragedy and one big dollop of comedic hubris. To my mind, its final scene is an incredibly poignant moment that forces us to consider what matters and what doesn’t.

Rob Weir