Gold on the Silver Screen

Gold and the movies were made for each other. The prospector seeking it, the robber stealing it, the beautiful woman wearing it (or hoping to). Charlie Chaplin paved the way in The Gold Rush in 1925 as the Lone Prospector threatened by blizzards and bandits in the Klondike gold rush of 1898 and surviving by eating an old boot and laces. The movie was ranked among the Top 100 films during the first centenary celebrations of the silver screen in 1995. So was the great John Huston picture, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, starring Humphrey Bogart searching for gold in the Mexican wilderness, along with Huston’s father, Walter Houston; they find gold, but lose it and their lives over the inevitable squabbling. Another fine band of actors, Gregory Peck, Omar Sharif, Eli Wallach, Edward G. Robinson and Lee J. Cobb got together in J. Lee Thompson’s 1968 MacKenna’s Gold; Peck was the sheriff with The Map of where the gold lay; everyone else was after him and it.

El Dorado, the legendary source of South America’s gold, that became an obsession with successive expeditions from the Spanish conquistadors of the 16th century onwards, provided natural movie inspiration. The best was Aguirre, Wrath of God, German director Werner Herzog’s 1972 film of the conquistadors ruthless search for an elusive goal. It was a beautifully photographed odyssey through mountain peaks and valleys shrouded in mist. While the Spanish Cinemascope epic El Dorado (director Carlos Saura, 1988), the most expensive Spanish film ever made was, according to one critic, “a fascinating attempt to get to the heart of myths, men and history”.

The pursuit of gold had its lighter moments. An ebullient Mae West sang “I’m an Occidental Woman in an Oriental Mood for Love” in the 1936 picture Klondike Annie, promoted with the slogan, “She made the Frozen North Red Hot”. The same froth came from a trio of Gold Diggers, musicals in the 1930s, one directed by Busby Berkeley, and featuring such stars as Ginger Rogers and Dick Powell, singing and dancing their way through numbers like “We’re in the Money”. In The Wizard of Oz in 1939, Judy Garland sang her way into fame along “The Yellow Brick Road”, en route to finding the Wizard. In the same vein, Bing Crosby and Bob Hope followed The Road to Utopia in 1945 as Dorothy Lamour sought to win from each the two halves of the map to her private gold mine. But for sheer fun, Crosby and Hope’s road movies may have been outdone by Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy in their 1937 Way Out West in which these sparkling comedians headed for Brushwood Gulch to deliver the deeds of a gold mine to the daughter of a dead prospector. Chaos ensued and some critics rated it Laurel and Hardy’s best movie.

For straight forward action, however, the gold standard was set by Goldfinger in 1964, one of the best James Bond movies made from the novels of Ian Fleming. Not only was Sean Connery in his prime as Bond, out to thwart Goldfinger’s raid on the gold of Fort Knox, but Honor Blackman is still remembered as Pussy Galore with her all-girls flying troupe and Shirley Eaton as Goldfinger’s assistant, who died after being covered entirely in gold paint for betraying him. The movie, made before the Bond films took on too many flights of fancy, had real insights into the black market in gold at the time, with Goldfinger getting recycled scrap gold out of England as panels of his Rolls Royce was based on actual tricks of the trade. As was Alec Guiness’ and Stanley Holloway’s strategy in The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) for slipping stolen bullion out of Britain to France by remelting it into souvenir replicas of the Eiffel Tower. This technique was widely used in the late 1940s for unofficial gold exports. The gold was officially allocated as for manufacture into ‘artistic’ objects which, once exported, were remelted into gold bars for smuggling to India.

Gold market manipulation was the motive behind Gold, a 1974 film starring Roger Moore, at a time when South Africa produced almost 80 per cent of the world’s gold and the price was rising. Moore outwitted a plot to flood a South African gold mine, thus causing a sudden rise in the price of gold in which the villains had already bought a large position.

The film industry, of course, makes its own acknowledgement to gold in its annual prizes. Le Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival is one of the most coveted for international movies, while the Golden Globe is one of Hollywood’s top trophies. In turn, the Berlin Film Festival awards the Golden Bear and the Venice Film Festival presents The Golden Lion.