Haunted Gold

Early "B" John Wayne western with Duke playing a cowboy who comes to a ghost town where a bunch of bad hombres are looking for gold. There's a mysterious character named The Phantom trying to scare people away. Duke even rides a horse named Duke! He also has a black sidekick named Clarence that is the stereotypical "afraid of spooks" caricature of the time. So some viewers might take offense to that. It's a mix of genres and since Wayne never did any proper horror films, this is about as close as you're likely to get to seeing him in one. There are some attempts at horror/mystery atmosphere but it's pretty much a routine western of its type. Worth seeing for a baby-faced John Wayne and some good old school stunt work. Erville Alderson is a spooky plus. The original Maltese Falcon statuette from the 1931 film can be seen atop an organ in one scene. Pretty cool!

I viewed this film for only one reason. It may not have been worth it. I wanted to see a film that contained the "Black Bird" used in "The Maltese Falcon" (1941).

Spooky town, sliding panels, mysterious tunnels, spooky eyes, and a phantom all have to be dealt with in this film. More still unrealistic characters, stilted dialog, and a suggestion that the phantom had a watermelon accent.

The basic story is different owners and quasi owners of an abandoned gold mine were invited by cryptic letters promising it is worth the trip. One of the owners of the mine is a young John Wayne.

If you are wondering why Duke is a better actor than most of the other characters, that is because he had six moves in his acting career and dialog aside has the most visual cliffhanger action. One of the most memorable scenes in this film is when Clarence (Blue Washington) is in a phantom suite and Duke is ready to kill. Clarence asks, "Duke don't you recognize me," and Duke shakes his head no. Clarence takes off the phantom hood and asks Duke again. This time Duke shakes his head yes.

This has all the feel of a serial. And we are not sure it will wrap up.

This western reminds me of an "old house film".....a ghost town with a "real" ghost! Secret panels, shadows on the walls, eyes peering thru slits in the walls, etc.

It also gives Blue Washington the chance for some great "scared reaction" comedy (ala' Mantan Moreland or Willie Best).

I don't much care for westerns, but the "supernatural" elements in this film make it worth watching!

John Wayne made scores of B-Westerns in the thirties, and in some ways the few he did for Warner Bros. were among the more interesting, having somewhat better production values and execution. There are elements in "Haunted Gold" that would never have been covered by the budget of one of his Monogram programmers, but that's not saying much. It's pretty much the same old thing we'd see from Wayne for the next six or seven years -- good guy helps a sweet young thing outwit nefarious baddies out to cheat her or him out of something. Wayne has physical charm yet is still a callow actor at this time, though no one does much real acting in these. There's no George Hayes to lend true gravitas to the situation, and Erville Alderson, while always an interesting specimen to look at in the movies, is really terrible as a performer in the solid older man part. It's all not really much, until an exciting fight in a cable car between Wayne and an outlaw near the end. What is most notable (and most difficult) about the movie is the sidekick character, Clarence. "Haunted Gold" isn't the first nor would it be the last Hollywood movie to give a black actor bug-eyed terror and clichéd dialect for racial comic effect. But if there can be degrees of acceptability to such stereotyping, this movie seems to take it to a painful degree. For one thing, Blue Washington, who plays Clarence, is a strong, masculine figure of a man -- tall, muscled, intelligent of mien -- yet he scampers about whimpering about spooks and monsters like skinny little Willie Best. It seems immeasurably more degrading (though I'm not suggesting it wasn't degrading for other actors). Perhaps part of the difference is that Willie Best and Mantan Moreland, when they did their frightened "darkie" routine, were funny -- very funny. Watching Blue Washington do this stuff is like watching Sidney Poitier or James Earl Jones do it -- it's difficult not to focus on the humiliation of the actor. The script contains plenty of references to "darkies" and "Smoky" and "that watermelon accent," though Wayne's character treats Clarence more as an amusing comrade than a dimwit or a servant. But none of this makes "Haunted Gold" less uncomfortable an experience, at least if one has any empathy for Blue Washington, an actor who it seems had talent, even if it is sublimated beneath insensitive clichés here.

An early John Wayne western that only ran for an hour, this was surprisingly entertaining. Since he was a beginning actor and this was a Grade B-type of production, I didn't except it to be so entertaining, although now that I've watched a lot of early '30s films, I am not surprised. Movies in that era were pretty fast- moving ones.

What makes this fun is the combination of western action, a few spooky things and comedy. The latter is mostly supplied by Blue Washington who plays "Clarence Washington Brown," a Mantan Morleand-like character. Yeah, I know this kind of role is demeaning to blacks and it's almost embarrassing to watch nowadays, but Washington was funny. The "western" part of the story is just so-so.