There Will Be Blood & Sierra Madre
John Huston's Classic Inspires There Will Be Blood
Paul Thomas Anderson tips his dusty hat to John Huston's Treasure Of The Sierra Madre with There Will Be Blood, newly released on DVD
Blood - Madre
It's no secret that director Paul Thomas Anderson's Oscar near-miss, There Will Be Blood - out this month on DVD - was highly influenced by John Huston's 1947 classic, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
Let us count the ways.
Parallels
Both are desert-set morality tales on the all-consuming momentum of avarice. Both touching, too, on the evils of geographic invasion and the struggles of personal conscience.
But the parallels are hardly just thematic. There are scenes right out of the first film: the opening moments of man's struggle against rock, dust and depth, invoking Humphrey Bogart, Tim Holt and Walter Huston's exhaustive efforts to procure gold. There's the appearance of the main character's half-brother, echoing the apparition of the shadowy stranger, Bruce Bennett, looking to cash in on Bogart and company's good fortune. And, of course, the second act murder and its emotional weight on the protagonist's psyche - a veritable remake of Bogie's post-homicide hangover.
But the biggest ode to Huston is Anderson's spin on the film's protagonist: curmudgeonly cowboy-capitalist Daniel Plainview.
Plainview-Huston
Plainview purports to be the devil, at least American style. He is that, of course, but he is also the spirit of John Huston, both man and filmmaker. Note the robust, velvety voice, courtesy of Daniel Day-Lewis' near perfect impression. Observe the character's incorruptible obsession with a highly technical line of work, his public disinterest in his own children - trait many a Huston offspring has commented on. And his distant disdain for the opposite sex. Woman-as-trouble is one of Huston's most enduring motifs.
Wry Atheism
Other parts of the film suggest Huston as well. Blood retains much of the 1920's sideshow evangelism of Oil!, the novel upon which it is based. And its exposure of that phenomenon as an empty, ultimately comic gesture recalls Huston's wry atheism (remember Huston's Godless The Bible?)
Clmactic Confrontations
Where There Will Be Blood truly breaks with its inspiration, however, is in the climactic confrontations. The final battle between Plainview and the pathetic preacher represents the two mutually exclusive values that define America past and present: capitalism and Puritanism. Capiitalism wins naturally, with some help from club wielding Day-Lewis, though it pays an extremely heavy price.
Blood and Laughter
But it also represents a much older idea: the ultimate struggle between man and God. Are we left to our own lawless indulgences or is there an ultimate authority to which we should bow? Anderson answers that question with, as the title gives away, blood.
Huston, on the other hand, always answered inquiries on the nature of fate with ironic wit. In a John Huston film, affairs do not end in blood; they end in gold dust making its way back up from where it came, and the appreciative laughter of he who has lost.
