Trivia / The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

• Beam Me Up, Scotty!:
  • The famous "stinking badges" line is frequency misquoted as "We don't need no stinkin' badges!" It helps that Blazing Saddles phrased it that way in its parody of the scene.
  • Dobbs's repeated panhandling line is "Stake a fellow American to a meal?" However, many nowadays are more familiar with the variation used by the Bogey caricature in the Bugs Bunny cartoon 8 Ball Bunny: "Say, pardon me, but could you help out a fellow American who's down on his luck?"
• Directed by Cast Member: John Huston's cameo was directed by Humphrey Bogart, who took malicious pleasure on his director by making him perform the scene over and over again.
• Playing Against Type: During the early and mid 40s Humphrey Bogart was usually portrayed as a smooth, but ultimately good-hearted lead character. Here he's playing a villainous and murderous hunter.
• Real-Life Relative:
  • John Huston cast his father Walter Huston as Howard.
  • The bum seated near Howard in the first scene in the Oso Negro flophouse is Tim Holt's father Jack.
• Troubled Production: Went over budget and took longer to film than expected. Reportedly, Bogart got so impatient with the delays (largely due to wanting to participate in a boat race) that he griped and complained on set about it, to the point where John Huston pulled his nose at dinner one night.
• What Could Have Been:
  • John Huston originally wanted to cast Ronald Reagan as Bob Curtin, but Jack L. Warner instead insisted on casting Reagan in The Voice of the Turtle.
  • Huston's original filmed depiction of Dobbs' death was more graphic - as it was in the book - than the one that eventually made it onto the screen. When Gold Hat strikes Dobbs with his machete, Dobbs is decapitated. Huston shot Dobbs' (fake) head rolling into the waterhole (there's a quick shot of Gold Hat's accomplices reacting to Dobbs' rolling head that remains in the film and in the very next shot you can see the water rippling where it rolled in). The 1948 censors would not have allowed that, so Huston camouflaged the cut shot with a repeat shot of Gold Hat striking Dobbs. Warner Bros' publicity department released a statement that Humphrey Bogart was "disappointed the scene couldn't be shown in all its graphic glory". Bogart's reaction: "What's wrong with showing a guy getting his head cut off?"
  • When Huston first started working on the project in 1941, the studio had George Raft, Edward G. Robinson and John Garfield in mind for the three main roles. Then World War II intervened.

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