Queen of the Yukon

The plot to "Queen of the Yukon" is rather familiar stuff, though its location, in the Canadian Yukon* is unusual. In many ways, it's like a lot of B-westerns....and is pretty enjoyable despite being from tiny Monogram Pictures.

When the story begins, Sadie (Irene Rich) is the owner of a marvelous** riverboat plying its gambling trade up and down the rivers during the gold rush of the late 1890s. However, despite Sadie being good at her business and an astute business woman, she has a secret....a daughter who has been going to school back east. Unexpectedly, the daughter arrives around the same time a crooked outfit, the Yukon Mining Company offers to buy Sadie's business. Not wanting her daughter to grow up like her, she impulsively sells to the corrupt John Thorne....and soon she comes to regret it when the villainy of him and his mining company become obvious. Not surprisingly, this leads to a showdown between the miners and Thorne.

In many ways, Thorne is the stereotypical baddie who is trying to take folks' land...possibly the most common B-western theme. But placing the story in Canada did give it a bit of fresh air. Plus, the film is surprisingly big in scope for a Monogram film. Not exactly brilliant, but very enjoyable.

*The Yukon Territory is and has been part of Canada. Inexplicably, they refer to it as part of the United States in the story!

**The ship is like a tardis! It's the tiniest riverboat I've ever seen in a film....yet interior shots make the place look positively huge!

Someone must have remembered Sam Katzman in their will because somehow he scraped up enough money to go on location to Big Bear Lake to shoot Queen Of The Yukon. It is certainly an above average Monogram Pictures product and could have been a classic at a major studio. Possibly he felt a property that had its origins in a Jack London story was worth the expense.

The title role in Queen Of The Yukon is played by Irene Rich who owns a gambling boat in a backwater of the Yukon Territory. Her partner and best friend is Charles Bickford, toughest man in the territory. She'll need him because Melvin Lang who is the head of a big mining outfit is fixing to do a lot of claim jumping. He's got another boat which is the only way in and out of the region other than a rugged overland trip and he's hired some toughs headed by Tris Coffin to run the prospectors off.

Rich also has some domestic problems. Her daughter June Carlson has left finishing school and has come up to see her mother and she has no idea Mom is the Queen Of The Yukon. On the same boat is young Dave O'Brien who has hired on as a surveyor for Lang not knowing what a crook he is.

It's all straightened out in the end as O'Brien proves he has the right stuff for the Yukon.

For Monogram this film passes as an A product and it's not bad at all. Even Jack London purists will like this one.

If this movie had been made by 20th Century Fox, it probably would have been a classic. I don't know how it happened, but Monogram got the rights and did the picture. That meant everything was done on the cheap, including the direction, the writing and the acting. While there were some journeyman performances by Charles Bickford and Irene Rich, a lot of that was lost by the bad lines they had to deliver and the uninspired directing. Also, June Carlson was awful. The only ones who seemed to try to rise above it all were George Cleveland and Guy Usher as Grub and Stake. Even though it is now defunct I still hate Monogram Studios.

"Queen of the Yukon" is a good low-budget melodrama based on a story by Jack London. The story and setting are interesting and are for the most part nicely done, making up for somewhat routine characters and dialogue.

There are two different story-lines that come together pretty well in the middle of the movie. In the gold-mining region of the Yukon, Sadie Martin (Irene Rich) owns a riverboat that brings transportation and entertainment to the miners of the area. The deceitful Thorne has plans to take over Sadie's boat and also to cheat the miners out of their claims. Meanwhile, Sadie is trying to keep her daughter - whom she has sent away to school - from finding out about the less savory details of her life. But one day Helen arrives unexpectedly with her naive boyfriend Bob, who plans to work for Thorne. Sadie turns to her trusted friend Ace (Charles Bickford) for help.

The key scene is in the middle of the film when Thorne and Sadie square off in a high-stakes game of faro - all of the plot lines come together at once, and it sets off a rapid sequence of events in the last half of the movie, leading up to an ending that is very melodramatic but also satisfying. While the characters are routine, the story itself keeps your attention all the way through, and the Yukon setting is quite believable.

This film works rather well both as a Western and as an old-time melodrama.