Lust for Gold (US 1949)

This odd film offered Ida Lupino a lead role that paid the bills as she was preparing projects for her new production company now that her Warner Bros. contract work was completed. Her new husband Collier Young was a producer at Columbia and according to Lupino’s biographer William Donati she hoped that by choosing a Columbia script she would at least see Collier on a regular basis. However, Lust for Gold was a location shoot in Arizona for much of the time. Lust for Gold is a story about a real life mystery – a ‘lost gold mine’ on Superstition Mountain in Arizona – and the people who will go to any lengths to find it. In fact, this is arguably the most often quoted ‘lost treasure’ story in the Americas with many references in American popular culture and the development of what is now a mythical story based on ‘real’ events.

The script embraces the mythological/real basis of the ‘Lost Dutchman’s Mine’ by setting the story in the present and revealing the original events as a Western narrative via a prolonged flashback. In the present, ‘Barry Storm’ (the pen name of the writer of a 1945 book about the myth) travels to the mountain, claiming he is a descendant of the original ‘Dutchman’, the German migrant Jakob Walz. Storm is involved in a shooting on the mountain and encounters the local sheriff and his men. With what the sheriff tells him and further research in newspaper archives of the 1880s and talking to elderly locals he pieces together a possible scenario – which leads into the flashback with Glenn Ford, Columbia’s go-to leading man for this kind of film. He plays Walz who finds the original mine and then hits town where Ida Lupino is Julia Thomas, from a German family in Milwaukee and she runs a small bakery shop. Julia is married to the spineless Pete (Gig Young) but she sees an opportunity to seduce Jakob and find the gold for herself. It’s a risky business as the whole town knows about the find. What follows is a classic Western melodrama which ends in disaster and takes us back to the present where Barry Storm becomes involved in a typical Hollywood ‘resolution’ that maintains the integrity of the ‘lost gold’.

I need to admit that at times this is very serviceable entertainment. At other times it threatened to lose my interest. The film was originally intended to be directed by the highly experienced director George Marshall but when he was not available it was passed to S. Sylvan Simon who was arguably better known for comedies. It turned out to be Simon’s last film as director as he died suddenly aged just 41 a couple of years later. Ida Lupino gives a committed performance as usual and the other leads are fine. Glenn Ford with beard and unruly hair certainly looks different and his character is vicious, even by the standards of later Westerns. Several of the minor players are of interest, including Jay Silverheels as a sheriff’s deputy in the contemporary-set scenes. For children of my generation he was ‘Tonto’ in The Lone Ranger series on TV and, as the sheriff, Paul Ford is fondly remembered as the commanding officer trying to keep Sgt. Bilko in check in the Bilko/Phil Silvers TV series in the 1950s.

For Ida Lupino this was one of the films she worked on with Archie Stout as cinematographer. Stout, like other crew members was impressed by the way Ida stayed out on location in the blazing sun in order to see how the production functioned rather than heading back to town as soon as her scenes were completed. Stout would become one of her own loyal crew members happy to tell anyone who asked that Ida Lupino knew more about angles and lighting than most of the directors he worked with. Certainly, the experience on Lust for Gold must have been very useful when The Filmakers were shooting on location in similar terrain for The Hitch-Hiker in 1953.