Sutter's Gold

Largely fictionalized account of an ambitious immigrant's land purchase in America and the events leading to the California gold rush of 1849. Prior to that he has adventures with natives and slave trading in the Sandwich Islands before landing in Mexico.

A big budget production from Universal in which every penny shows on the screen, the film, after initially appearing promising, is defeated by a screenplay which tries to compress too much time with choppy narrative results. Edward Arnold, playing Sutter, gradually ages throughout the film with the usual greying of hair and facial wrinkles. He tries his best and with his booming voice could be a powerful actor. He has a few moments here but, ultimately, his character fails to draw sympathy, with the audience caring little about his fate.

The supporting cast includes Lee Tracy as Sutter's gabby sidekick who accompanies him everywhere, Binnie Barnes as a Russian countess who has eyes on Sutter when she thinks he's wealthy, Harry Carey as Kit Carson, and Montagu Love as a ruthless slave trader.

This expensive ponderous production, directed by James Cruze (The Covered Wagon), was a noteworthy flop at the time of its release, with studio founder Carl Laemmle and his son soon forced out of the studio. It would take the Deanna Durbin musicals to rescue Universal from its financial debts.

Before seeing this film and writing about it I did some research and saw that UFA cinema in Germany also made a film about Johan Sutter. They even did some location shooting in the USA. Imagine a Nazi western. Now that would have proved interesting.

Having seen Sutter's Gold the elephantine film that sank the Carl Laemmle regime at Universal Pictures I can now see the problem. Not that the film was anything like the real story of the California Gold Rush and how it destroyed Sutter's Empire, but the story is told in such a pedestrian and ponderous fashion you never really get involved in the character.

Sutter himself was not that sympathetic a figure either. He may have seen himself as the great patriarchal landowner, others saw him as a tyrant and something of a charlatan. I'm not sure Edward Arnold when playing Sutter knew what to make of him either. He did in fact die impoverished trying to get what he considered proper recompense for the land he cultivated.

Maybe someone will tell the story truer and better.

"Sutter's Gold" is a notorious film as it cost a fortune to make and lost nearly every penny of the investment. Considering that Universal Studios was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, the timing couldn't have been worse! So why did it cost so much and why was it such a poor film? As for the cost, I frankly don't know how it cost $2,000,000 to make (a HUGE sum for the time), as the actors were mostly second or third-tier and the director a relative unknown. The money sure didn't go for salaries! Perhaps it was the scope of the film--as it was supposedly set all over the world. But most, if not all of these locations appeared to have been filmed on the Universal back lot! I just don't understand where all the money went!

As to why it's such a poor film, that's pretty easy to determine. The script was syrupy, overly sentimental and boring. That it was boring is because so much of the film comes off as episodic and disconnected. But that it was dull is a surprise because Sutter's life was pretty interesting when I read up on the man. I can only assume that this is because the script rarely bears much semblance to his actual life...and the prologue actually admits that it's mostly fiction! Regardless, it's not a terrible film but one that seems to go on and on and on....and the main character is, for the most part, a lying blowhard.

This interminable biopic of the Californian pioneer John Sutter demonstrates just how important Preston Sturgess' screenplay was to the artistic success of 'Diamond Jim' Universal's similarly lavish biopic, also starring Edward Arnold, of the previous year. Where Sturgess made the most of that story's rough edges, the cavalcade of writers who worked on this (rarely a good sign) not only sand them off but substitute some very dull fiction in place of fact.

Production values are high - they could not help but be, given the film's massive budget - and under the direction of James Cruze, famous for his nation-building epics of the silent era, visuals are impressive. None of this can overcome a plodding, overlong and exposition-laden script, in which characters tell us exactly who they are and how they feel at every possible moment.

Edward Arnold gives a sincere performance in the title role and certainly looks the part, but Binnie Barnes sleepwalks through her role as his love interest. At the other end of the scale, Lee Tracy hams it up as Sutter's right hand man, particularly in the later scenes as his character ages.

The bare bones of the story are not uninteresting, but they're conveyed in such an uninspiring fashion that you never come to care for Sutter, his vast ambitions, or his downfall.

The financial failure of this film is often cited as having sealed the fate of Universal Pictures head Carl Laemmle and his son, Carl Jr. By the end of this, you might wish you were the one who signed the termination letter.