Towering above the mists of a distant childhood is one of my most vivid movie - and musical - memories: the first time I accompanied a trio of American expatriate prospectors up a barren Mexican hillside, their ambition and hope, alternate exhaustion and exultation memorably caught in a jaunty soundtrack tune which haunted me through my teens. The prospectors, I later learned, were really Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston and Tim Holt. The director was Walter Huston's son John. And the music which uncannily mirrored their weary resolution, and which was one of the main reasons I would watch Treasure of the Sierra Madre over and over again through the next four decades, was by Max Steiner.

It must have been a few years after that it dawned on me that the same Max Steiner had musically limned an even more famous trek through primitive settings (this time a giant ape through a primeval jungle), as well as several other equally unforgettable movie moments with which I was by now familiar: the Light Brigade's fatal charge and Custer's last stand; Casablanca's ultimate selfless gesture as well as Tara's sunsets. They, I knew now, were all made more indelible by Max Steiner's phenomenal ability to match a memorable musical idea to another's inspired imagery.

No one has written as many unforgettable movie tunes as Max. And I see no reason to exclude from that judgment Messieurs Gershwin, Berlin and Kern (for whom, by the way, Steiner toiled as music adaptor in his RKO days). Actually some of these tunes are no more than motifs, yet the impression they leave on the watcher's psyche is no less potent for their brevity. No less than five of those tunes/mottos were written for Sierra Madre: the aforementioned 'Trek' march, probably the single most remembered theme from the score; the mountain motto, in deference to which Steiner chose to omit his famous Warners logo; the Gold Hat bandit motif, given a wild workout later in the main title, and more fully in the train attack and Federales rescue; Texas memories, the most sunny of the film's themes, which accompanies Curtin(Holt)'s reminiscences of harvest time; and finally, the Gold motif, which perhaps more than any other idea Steiner ever created, illustrates his aptitude for underlining visual drama with ineradicable aural equivalence. Alchemy indeed. And in less than ten seconds!

Does Sierra Madre stand up without the fabulous Fred C. Dobbs of Bogart and the Academy Award-winning Pop Huston's wonderful turn as wily but humane old Howard? Absolutely. And not only because of Steiner's tunes. His dramatic development of the marvelous raw material is here inspired by the quality of the Huston script and direction, as it was by the quality of the material in GWTW, Casablanca and a few dozen others we might name. Steiner, like perhaps every other Hollywood composer except Korngold, was capable of work that, while always professional, was less inspired than soggy on occasion. And like a few of his Hollywood peers, he could really rise to the heights when sufficiently motivated. Sierra Madre was motivation indeed.

The very variety of moods is one important factor in the enjoyment of this score apart from the film. Many of Steiner's assignments - even GWTW and King Kong - can be quite taxing when heard, dramatic intensity unrelieved, in a single listening session. Not so Sierra Madre. In addition to the quality and variety of the thematic material, and the rich contrast of mood which Steiner exploited to the full in his development - there is an additional factor in the score's success on CD. Even Korngold can tire a listener after 60-70 minutes of dense, Wagnerian orchestration (some would say the same of Wagner). This was one of Aaron Copland's major criticism's of the Hollywood system of film scoring (and Steiner), and justly so. But the Mexican milieu of Sierra Madre gave Max excuse to utilize a great variety of timbral effects, including guitars, mandolins, accordion, saxophone and harmonica. The great Gold motto, for example, glitters so much more imperishably for its deployment of glockenspiel, triangle, suspended cymbals, gong, 2 harps, 2 pianos, 2 vibraphones, celesta (and more!). Yet the net effect, for all that, sounds sublimely simple.

It is fascinating to contemplate that Max Steiner's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre received, at the time of the film's release and in critical retrospectives since, more criticism than perhaps any other of the composer's scores. Pauline Kael, while calling the picture "one of the strongest of all American movies", found space to lance its "terrible score". Bosley Crowther, listing Treasure among his 50 Great Films, yet criticized Steiner for being "too obvious and insistent in some scenes". James Agee, the greatest of American film critics, while praising the film extravagantly in an extended review, singled out the score as one of its few negatives. "One thing I do furiously resent", wrote Agee, not even deigning to name the composer/perpetrator, "is the intrusion of background-music. There is relatively little of it, and some of it is better than average, but there shouldn't be any, and I only hope and assume that Huston fought the use of it." Well, I haven't verified Huston's position on the music's use, but Agee was wrong on the other two counts: Steiner's music is about the length of the average Hollywood score of that era (50 minutes+), and calling the music 'better than average' is a classic instance of damning with faint praise. Yet even Steiner's old friend and former orchestrator Hugo Friedhofer took a shot at Sierra Madre, decrying it as inauthentic - too Spanish, not Mexican enough. Touché, Hugo, yet one could wish that your 'Mexican' scores, say Seven Cities of Gold , as good as it is, were as chock full of memorable moments and gut-gripping ferocity. Ironically, while American critics were worshipping at the altar of Rossellini and De Sica's neo-realism (Treasure and Best Years of Our Lives are the only studio pics from the immediately postwar period among Crowther's 50 'Great Films'), Steiner's score won a special prize at the Venice Film Festival. God bless the Italians for neo-realism and recognizing a good tune.

Let us risk redundancy in again praising John Morgan and William Stromberg for this wonderful restoration. Not only is this the first (almost) complete recording, and in bracing, front row sound. Marco Polo has also thrown in some neat addenda: the original trailer score, an alternate (albeit much weaker) ending, and the optional main title with Steiner's Warner logo. In summary a classic done full justice.