In search of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

My quest for the true Treasure of the Sierra Madre began years ago, when I ordered a copy of the screenplay by John Huston from Hollywood's Script City. I was teaching a course in film-script analysis, and I wanted my students to study the film for which Huston had received two Academy Awards, for screenplay and direction (and for which his father, Walter Huston, won an Academy Award as best supporting actor). When the script arrived I was perplexed; the title page read: "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre/Screenplay by Robert Rossen/From the novel by B. Traven." At the bottom of the page were the words "First temporary white, January 1, 1947." On the last page of the photocopy was stamped: "Important. Return to Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc. Story Department." The screenplay appeared to be authentic, and it corresponded in most respects to the film I admired. But here was a puzzle. No one I knew in films doubted that Huston had written the Oscar-winning screenplay. Were we all wrong?

Produced in 1947 and released in January 1948, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre has earned an enduring place among classics of American cinema. Reviewing it for Time, James Agee wrote, "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Warner's) is one of the best things Hollywood has done since it learned to talk, and the movie can take its place without blushing among the best ever made." Agee's judgment has been echoed by similar appreciations over the years, and the picture was among the first twenty-five American film classics selected for preservation by a commission created by Congress. I knew that my students could profit from close study of the screenplay and the film based on B. Traven's celebrated novel of the same rifle, first published in Germany in the late 1920s, and published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf in 1935 (and still in print). But whose shooting script would we be analyzing? Why did the name of Robert Rossen--the well-regarded writer and director of such films as All the King's Men and The Hustler--appear on a screenplay bearing the same production date as the Warner Brothers film and the stamp of its story department?

To my query, Script City responded that the "shooting script" offered in their catalogue was the only version they had. Next, I compared this version credited to Rossen with that published by the University of Wisconsin Press: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, screenplay by John Huston, with an introduction and commentary by James Naramore. Professor Naramore refers to the "final revised shooting script," dated "January 10, 1947, with changed pages to June 9, 1943." I could find virtually no differences in dialogue, description, construction, or length--each is 143 pages--from the version sold to me and my students. In his introduction, Naramore notes that "according to some references, Robert Rossen wrote an early draft of the adaptation, but I have not been able to see any versions prior to Huston's entry on the scene."

Rossen's daughter, Carol, told me she knew nothing of the matter, but obligingly passed me on to her brother, Stephen. He too expressed surprise when asked about his father's connection with The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Robert Rossen had never mentioned it, nor had he left any evidence of his association with the film among the papers that Stephen had seen.

There is a trove of Warner Brothers films, scripts, and legal files in the University of Wisconsin's Center for Film and Theater Research; the studio's vast archives of "Historical Papers from the Beginning to 1967" were entrusted to the University of Southern California. I had barely begun excavating the USC papers when archivist Leith Adams tipped me off to the papers of John Huston in the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. There I began to reconstruct the development of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre as a film and to fathom its mysteries.

First among them is the identity of the novel's author, B. Traven. The author who signed his work with that name lived in Mexico and was represented by the agent Paul Kohner, who also represented John Huston. Letters from Traven to Kohner and to Huston are among Huston's papers.

When newspapers reported the death of a man who called himself Hal Croves in Mexico in 1969, many believed that he was Traven. Huston, who had come to know Croves well while directing The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, was never quite certain that Croves and Traven were one and the same. In his lifetime, Traven--who had won renown as the author of The Bridge in the Jungle and The Death Ship, as well as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre--was as elusive as Thomas Pynchon is today. A dispatch from Mexico in the New York Times of June 25, 1990, quoted Rosa Elena Lujan de Traven, Traven's widow, as "finally revealing that Traven was previously known as Ret Marut, a sometime actor and the editor of Der Ziegelbrenner, a journal of anti-war and anarchist persuasions ... published episodically in Germany between 1917 and 1920." This prompted a letter to the editor from Judy Stone, film critic of the San Francisco Chronicle and author of The Mystery of B. Traven, declaring that Traven's widow had "confirmed that identification" to her in 1966 and had stated, Stone claimed, that "her husband was the son of a very high German official, a Hohenzollern"--later affirming that she meant Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Among Huston's papers I found a letter from Traven to Paul Kohner, posted from Mexico on December 29, 1941, in which Traven asserts that there are only two lies about himself, concerning his nationality and his given name, that he has ever troubled to challenge: "I immediately came out correcting that false statement and declaring that I was American, born in the U.S. The other lie was that of being a Bruno. Scores of time I protested against that lie."

This letter followed by a month the ninety-day option agreement between Traven and Warners for rights to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Warners' lawyers insisted that only Traven's full and valid name on the contract would satisfy them. But it remained B. Traven when Kohner, with Traven's power of attorney, signed a contract calling for three option payments of $500 each and a final payment of $5,000 (issued on September 4, 1942).

The Huston papers include a revealing exchange between Huston and J. H. McCallum, then the publisher of Harcourt, Brace and Company. Having noticed an article in the New York Times of March 7, 1946, reporting that Huston was to write and direct The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, McCallum writes extolling Traven's work and drawing the …